In ancient Greece, all worship began and ended by pouring a libation to Hestia, the goddess of the home. It was a wise and meaningful practice. The day begins and ends with leaving and returning home. A life bears a similar arc. We hope that at the beginning and end we are surrounded with loved ones. Home is not only a place but a deep sense of being in community with others.

In our lonely and often homeless world, Ian Marcus Corbin’s book To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World is a summons back to home and community and away from detachment and isolation. We are rootless individuals who have been captured by a false image of life, Corbin argues, and our attempt to live that way is destroying us. We neither begin nor end at home but wander somewhere in between. Corbin urges us to become rooted participants in home and community once again.

Corbin’s book is a recovery of a richer sense of the communality of the human person. We suffer from “a radical misalignment” between how we understand ourselves and how we actually are. “I am an inherently communal creature,” he writes, “who conceptualizes himself as an autonomous, self-created individual.” With this observation, Corbin takes up a tradition of communitarian critiques of modernity, trying to recover a sense of the human as both from somewhere and inextricably linked to others. Because Corbin’s book is written within this tradition, it is by design not a breakthrough text. He wants us “to arrive where we started / and know the place for the first time,” as his title, drawn from T.S. Eliot’s powerful line in Four Quartets, indicates. At the same time, he contributes a deep sense of how thoroughly communal humans are by placing them in the context of nature’s own deep communality. Nothing that exists is actually individualistic, from atoms to plants and animals to us humans; we are all social beings. In this, Corbin is willing to learn and teach from a wide variety of traditions—indigenous practices, classical thought, and Marxist critique—while exploring a kind of depth of community that is not just about social capital but the nature of reality itself.

Corbin begins his exploration by looking to recent scientific research showing the ways bacteria, plants, and animals are participants in a world, making their own kinds of homes and communities along the way. Humans are not the exception to this rule; we are the intensification of it. All living organisms are shaped by and shape the worlds around them, but humans are particularly in need of enculturation. As he writes, “The quantity and quality of instruction that humans receive from their genetic inheritance is remarkable thin.” We need the shared practices and instructions of our fellow humans to learn the manifold human activities needed for a flourishing life. Intersubjectivity is not incidental to human life. “We have never been autonomous,” Corbin writes. We have always been intertwined with others because it is a matter of both surviving and thriving. Without community humans are less happy and more prone to ill health and early death. Loneliness and isolation are soul-wearying and life-destroying.

Building on this account of our intersubjectivity, Corbin argues that our lonely way of life in modernity undermines our ability to perceive reality. Our economics, technology, and politics are increasingly driving us apart, leaving us “starved for other minds.” Perception itself, he notes, is deeply intersubjective: Babies look at our looking in order to learn how to perceive, and prisoners in solitary confinement lose their grip on reality. Without others we cannot understand ourselves or our world.

We are all facing increased confinement these days. There is almost no metric of social existence that has not declined in the past few decades, with one possible exception: We are all of us spending more time in algorithmically structured social media landscapes. In those worlds, we are alone by ourselves amid a proliferating number of social contacts that leave us not just lonely but even angry at people we do not know. We may find ourselves longing for this world soon enough, however, as more of us switch from social media with humans to social media with chatbots.

All this is to say, home and relationships are not mere wants added on to our more fundamental needs for water and food. We need these goods and languish without them. But as great psychologists of the soul from Augustine to Freud well knew, when our core human drives are unfulfilled, we tend to redirect them elsewhere. Having made his argument for the centrality of communion for humans, Corbin turns to this redirection, arguing that it, too, is deeply counterproductive to human flourishing. For Corbin, our need for home and relation gets transposed in modernity into our need to own and exclude. Lacking communities of participation, we direct our innate longing for them into owning things in such a way that we lose connection instead of gaining it. Rather than belonging to communities, we belong to possessions.

Corbin calls this being possessed by things “ownerism.” By this he doesn’t just mean the existence of private property. Ownerism, rather, “pictures ownership as identity-conferring, indexed to the individual, infinitely maximizable, and irresponsible.” What I am becomes what I have in such a way that it marks me off from others. Such a possession-oriented reality sees no limit to the assets I own and sees no intrinsic obligations that come with that ownership. My desire for communion is replaced by a desire for consumption in such a way that I erect barriers between what is mine and what is yours—or, in other words, between me and you. In a society marked by ownerism, there is no us.

The getting and owning of things takes the place of our drive for belonging because “ownership is now a primary way we seek to belong, to be at home in the world.” But that mode of relation is one of exclusion. I think of my possession as “truly mine . . . precisely to the degree that I can bar you from accessing it.” Our society’s transition to a culture of ownerism is exemplified in the transformation of home design: Spaces that used to be dedicated to social welcome in homes—porches, parlours, dining rooms—have become spaces to receive packages in the mail. Amazon’s smiling boxes of deliveries substitute for human relations, filling our homes with more stuff. Our relationship with the stranger is increasingly shaped by borders, walls, and exile. Finding ourselves alone, we give ourselves a sense of belonging by owning things, but in so doing we put up more barriers and find ourselves even more alone. Ownership—and the exclusion we have baked into it—is never quite enough.

Corbin rightly points to questions of social justice throughout his book. Wealth and stuff concentrate in a small stratum of society while others languish with too little. “As wealth pools to a truly obscene degree,” he writes, “wealthy institutions are working with increasing intentionality to shift risk from their own balance sheet onto vulnerable individuals.” One thinks of the (now trillionaire) Elon Musk eagerly dismantling the social safety net and foreign aid. Ownerism in the United States is no doubt why we have seen simultaneously endless attempts to lower or eliminate taxes and a decline in charitable giving from those who have too much. Why contribute to society or donate to the needy when the contributions and donations come from what is mine, especially since mine is so precious to me? Contributing to society and to the poorest among us is an enactment of a life beyond ownership, and it is participation in a life bigger than what is mine.

Moving toward the conclusion of his argument, Corbin proposes a rejuvenation of cultures of participation. He looks primarily to indigenous practices of communal living while noting that the West not too long ago lived these communal practices too. Modernity, in many ways, began with the privatization of common property, giving ownership to a small group of Europeans while producing powerless employees for factory owners. For Corbin, modernity substituted, often with force, an unnatural and enclosed way of life for a natural and communal one, leaving behind an atomized society.

What we need, he argues at the end of his book, is to re-enmesh ourselves within community and live lives shaped by transcendence, friendship, and contemplation. Looking to figures like Plato, Aristotle, and Dostoevsky, Corbin finds a love that moves us beyond passing pleasures and toward goodness that endures. We cannot find this outside deep friendship. It is with friends that we find not only delight but also shared growth in virtue and understanding of the world around us. What do friends do but delight in conversation about their world? Part of the power of Corbin’s presentation of contemplation is that it does not fall into a mere solitary form of (often) self-centred mindfulness. We contemplate together when we share a movement toward the good, the true, and indeed the beautiful.

To Arrive Where We Started is a book that has arrived at the right time. It combines what is often disparate in texts that critique the isolation of contemporary life. Some lean into a material critique of our economic or political structures, whereas others use a more spiritual diagnostic centred on the need for personal cultivation. Corbin weaves both together, giving an integrated critique from both a progressive and a conservative viewpoint. He does this while drawing on the resources of the Western tradition without either over-valorizing it or overly condemning it. Along the way, he pulls from social science and philosophy, indigenous wisdom and his own experiences.

And yet there are some notable lacunae. Corbin’s critique of ownerism—and his argument that our obsessive privatization of everything is draining our spiritual, intersubjective, and environmental worlds—is a strong contribution to understanding our plight today. And yet, in a book about how important home is, I was surprised that Corbin did not articulate some positive account of private property. As an example from my life, my wife and I bought our three-bedroom row house for our family of six two years ago. Doing so has allowed us to more richly commit to our West Philadelphia neighbourhood, especially at our parish of St. Francis de Sales. Without that home it would be harder for us to be participants in our community. Further, ownership, when rightly ordered, can be a rich source of newness and development. Our world needs more medieval and indigenous wisdom, but free enterprise has its place too.

But I have a deeper concern. For a book with a deep strain of Christianity running just below the surface, it forgets that we should be careful of over-identifying our home with this world. Corbin and I (and many readers of Comment) share a Christian faith. But he neglects the deeply nomadic nature of Christianity. We are pilgrims together, members, as Augustine put it, of a pilgrim city. Augustine has his own notable critique of ownerism, but his concern is with the idea of this world and this life as our home. As a pilgrim people, we are called instead to our true home, which is free of ownerism and wholly shaped as a participative community.

This does not mean we radically detach from the world. Our hoped-for membership in the heavenly city should shape our participation as pilgrims living in earthly cities. But as wayfarers in the wilderness, we become keepers of the trail tasked with tending to other wayfarers, especially to those on the trail who are in need. Corbin pushes Christians, especially Augustinians like me, to remember that we ought to love this place of wayfaring, but I fear he forgets that it is such a place.

We no longer offer libations to Hestia, but we do need to honour our homes and cultivate our communities. We cannot long for our true home, or even move toward it together in friendship, if we have no experience now of home or of friendship. This may be part of the reason why so many churchless people report having fewer community relations than those who attend religious services. Without roots in this home, they cannot be restless for their true home. Lacking desire for the heavenly city, they detach, too, from their earthly cities. In this our plight is quite dire. We lack belonging in this life and a longing for the next.

Corbin’s book is a true gift of friendship to all of us. He invites us, friendless and homeless, into a richer way of being together. He invites us to remember home first and last, to return to where we started and to find in the returning that we know it for the first time not alone but together in friendship.