In 2024, I had the privilege of spending a bit of time with the Batwa, a traditional hunter-gatherer community in southwest Uganda. They explained that until their forced expulsion from their ancestral forest, in the 1990’s, they lived deeply embedded within its ecosystem, moving in rhythm with its seasons, eating what it offered, and salving their wounds with its leaves and sap.
Like many other hunter gatherer groups the Batwa had no method of storing goods for the future, because they had no need to do so. If they went hungry one afternoon, they were confident that the forest would provide for them tomorrow. Reality, they understood, cared for them, and was fundamentally generous.
This confidence stands in stark contrast to the typical posture of a modern American. The philosopher Hans Jonas, a student of Martin Heidegger’s, was a great chronicler of the cruel novelty of the modern cosmic picture. Whereas our forebears, he explained, experienced nature as shot through with meaning and subjectivity – whether through God, world-spirit, cosmic mind, angels and demons, or someone else – our modern experience of the world is Newtonian at its core: the universe as an unthinking machine, cold and unloving.
Through most of human history, an adequate supply of life’s basic goods would have been assured exactly as it was in that Ugandan forest: via group membership and careful attention to the affordances of the local environment. It was a model built on trust, that assumed a basic at-homeness.
Even through the 18th century, a majority of American settlers lived in cooperative agrarian villages, inhabiting a cosmos animated by a combination of Christianity and folk paganism that emphasized mutual care and intimacy with nature’s provision. Ironically, these cultures shared significant common ground with the Native American communities they had sadly helped to displace.
As the 19th century wound on, however, America turned more and more from this collaborative but vulnerable economy based on sharing the products of one’s local earth, to a more efficient but ruthless economy based on market exchange, in pursuit of maximum profit. Young people were forced to depart village and farm for anonymous, mercenary cities, money became king, and contemporary observers complained about a rising tide of selfish individualism.
This shift horrified observant minds long before the internet age. In 1886, upon his first trip to New York City, the Lakota medicine man Black Elk confirmed the intensity and uniqueness of this defensive worldview, remarking with shock that the people he observed “would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving.” He contrasted this with life inside his own tribe, where the individual understood himself as an integral part of the group, responsible for its thriving, and protected by its care and cooperation.
When modern life shook us loose from the sometimes stifling, sometimes nurturing embrace of ancestral village, tradition, and religion, it demanded that each of us negotiate our place in reality for ourselves, surrounded by competitors, more than kin.
This structural shift completely altered how we view the universe. Too many of us, in our time and place, feel that only our individual property stands between us and utter ruination. Money matters so much to us that we will peddle products we know to be addictive, hoard more than we could ever use, or treat our employees like cogs, because money means something more than mere provision of our workaday material needs. It is our ultimate shield against a hostile cosmos.
This brings us to our present crisis. It has lately become a truism that the American social fabric is coming apart. We can see it clearly in reduced in-person socializing, high levels of self-reported loneliness, struggles to form romantic relationships, and alienated young men falling prey to online radicalization.
Various explanations for this epidemic of loneliness can be put forward, and regularly are: the algorithms are sorting us into echo chambers, delivery apps are acclimating us to friction-free dining, or toxic influencers are preying on widespread resentment. In reality, these problems are intractable because they are second-order reactions that exploit and exacerbate a deeper cultural problem: the fact that too few Americans feel at home in their worlds, in their communities, their natural environments, their own lives.
Personal hoarding and ruthless despoiling make sense in a cosmos where we believe no one has our back. In such an environment, it is no surprise that we have seen a rise in ham-fisted, exclusionary forms of tribalism like us-vs-them identity politics, ethnic nationalism, and political hyperpolarization. Humans are not made for loneliness, and will stop at almost nothing to escape it. Recovering our native human sense of belonging in this cosmos and among our fellow humans, will be the only way to truly arrest our descent into enmity and chaos.
Ian Marcus Corbin directs Harvard’s Public Culture Project, and serves as Senior Fellow at Capita. This essay was adapted from his book To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World.
