Anyone have particulars to share in which they've either longed for or belonged to an Inner Ring? Observed the effects of it? Decided to leave? Decided to stay?
I've certainly been conscious of it for most of my life. I was moved around double-digit number of times when I was still single digits of age, so the outsider perspective is uncomfortably familiar, like a suit of armor into which I was riveted. Bryan Ferry covered "The In Crowd" particularly well: "I'm in with the In Crowd, I go where the In Crowd goes / I'm in with the In Crowd, I know what the In Crowd knows."
The song covers status, respect, sexual availability, and so on. As we are not barnacles, the proper environment of Man is Man. Forget the deserts and the prairies, the jungles or tundra. We live with others of our species first and foremost, and that in turn means hierarchy and its hangups, position and its privileges. The Inner Ring gets you companionship, a stronger support network, and a greater availability of opportunity (social, romantic, professional). Outside of it and you're left scrabbling for the same things.
I saw it in grade school and then high school. I went to college and I found an Inner Ring among the students who all decided to live in the A-Frames; their social graph was incredibly dense and, when I sleuth through Facebook years later, has yet to be fully teased apart. It has arisen anywhere I have worked where sufficient numbers of people existed. Once you pick up on it, it shows itself over and over.
Now, I disagree with Lewis largely over his attempts at consolation via some kind of nebulous and unspoken (even unconscious) runner-up respect for not having compromised ones values or some nonsense, a bit like a Promised Land to which the faithful will eventually be granted entry. It's the usual Christian refrain of "You will have wealth ... in your heart." At worst, it's a kind of "stay in your place" classism, designed to keep the credulous recipient of this "wisdom" passive. Generally, when you hear about some virtue and notice that possession of this virtue benefits others, and you hear about this virtue from others, add a little suspicion to the mix before you swallow it whole. Being staid and unstriving is certainly convenient for some people, other people.
Lewis was almost certainly of an Inner Ring himself, given what you read of his contemporaries, so in a more cynical sense, he is attempting to keep that Inner Ring small (one of the commandments of being in an Inner Ring is that one must not allow in riff-raff) by suggesting that desiring leads to some flavor of moral compromise and you've got the nice parallel that craving leads to suffering.
Quite a lot of people have a vested interest in keeping you where you are. Remember that when you hear someone pooh-poohing some social or financial upward mobility. We can't all be nobility, so let's have the suckers filter themselves out.
> one of the commandments of being in an Inner Ring is that one must not allow in riff-raff
But Lewis was a professor of English literature who invited in the riff-raff. People like him weren't supposed to like pulp science fiction and fantasy stories. That was seen as trash, and it's not exactly hard to understand why either. But Lewis insisted that there was something great and valuable there, something fairy tales (and old epics like Beowulf) had but modern literature had lost sight of.
Going from agnosticism and fashionable scientism of his day to Anglicanism was also a "debasement" of sorts. Like adoring pulp SF wouldn't win you the most friends in literature, adoring Jesus wouldn't win you the most friends with the rising stars in science and politics of his day. And then he in turn shocked a lot of his newfound Christian brethren by marrying a divorced woman. It's hard for me to see any place in Lewis' life where he tried to fit in to something exclusive.
C.S. Lewis didn't shun the existence of rings in the article - or act like he wasn't part of one - but describe the distinctions between healthy and unhealthy rings. He ended the article by writing about the upsides of being part of a healthy ring.
In my take on the article, he wasn't advocating some sort of pious refrain, but rather the sort of work it takes to build meaningful connections with other people, instead of shallow connections based on a status game or optimizing for a maximally thick network.
Of course, I'd imagine most social lives contain a bit of both, but a life which only has the latter is definitely a sad one. Not to even speak of a social life based on maximizing the latter.
I think this is an example of how the greatest enemy to virtue is cynicism.
It is hard to deny the old adage: in the land of the blind the one eyed is king. That suggests an unscrupulous ploy, to blind your adversaries so that you might be king. And if you think in this way then you may suspect your adversaries of trying to blind you because you believe they desire the kingship for themselves. And if your adversaries are trying to blind you then it is best that you blind them first before they can do it to you. This kind of thinking is insidious.
It reminds me of someone describing a culture where cheating was rampant. They said, only a fool wouldn't cheat when all of the competition is cheating. In their view it is better to be a cheater among cheaters than a solitary fool. Of course, a fool might say something foolish like: "we'd all be better off if we all stopped cheating each other". A cynic might reply: "that is exactly what a cheater would want, obviously, since then he would then have an even greater advantage! The only reason someone would say something so foolish is if he was the biggest cheater of all!"
Is it cynicism or realism? To quote Everything2, [my] "... radical ideas about religion as a mechanism of social control have already occurred to others." It's quite difficult to separate some system of sinner and saint, sanctity and atrocity, from what might be of utility to have some portion of the populace to believe.
Our parents lied to us about many things because it was convenient that we believe them, from Santa to that dog who went to live on a farm. Obey the food pyramid (which version?) Oil companies and pharmaceutical developers say "Trust the science!" even as they pay for the studies. And certainly there's a sense of ease in swallowing what is put in front of you, without question. How untroubling! I needn't worry my pretty head about what I am told. To paraphrase: An end to struggle, at last I believed my Big Brother.
So no, a much closer enemy to virtue is those who would make cynicism a viable position. Look to those if you're in search of a dagger heading for a spine. If cynicism weren't of utility, only the most perverse would adopt it. Paul Gerhardt said it, "When a man lies, he murders some part of the world." But I can hardly go through life pretending that liars do not exist and that there are whole industries, such as advertising, predicated on getting me to believe something which isn't quite true.
Perhaps in a better world, things would be different, but first find one where the liars are not making ruin of truth.
It depends on what you are referring to when you say "it". Your insinuation that Lewis was misleading people by claiming to support avoiding chasing after some inner-ring so that he and others like him could benefit is pretty much a description of cynicism. It does not follow any definition of "realism" that I would support.
You might argue that some people sometimes misrepresent their opinions and provide advice that goes against the interests of others for their own advantage. You might suggest that is "realism", but again it wouldn't match my own definition of that term even if I were to agree it is an accurate observation about our shared experience. It does not imply to me that everyone is always misrepresenting their opinions and always providing advice that goes against the interests of others for their own advantage. It also doesn't imply that Lewis was doing so in this essay.
As in my silly example, a fool may really and truly believe that a reduction in cheating would be of a general benefit. Cynicism is to assume the fool was misrepresenting their opinion in order to gain some advantage of you. It is making a mistake to apply a general observation that happens in some cases to a specific instance where it may not apply.
You might say "I'd rather make the assumption and be wrong and thereby avoid even the chance of being cheated", which is why I argue that cynicism is the enemy of virtue. An inability to trust in others makes it very hard indeed to act with virtue.
I will admit I have been mistrustful of Lewis since I was a small child. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was my first in memory experience of feeling like the author had attempted to put one over on me, with this Aslan business. I wanted to read a fantasy book, not a lecture in a RenFaire outfit. Indeed, much later I would read from Lewis that Aslan is not an allegory for Christ but something else. That kind of hair-splitting seemed like so much sophistry, but remember, it was for my supposed benefit.
Ever since, I haven't been able to read Lewis without a feeling of what he thinks it would be better for me to believe, even when I went into The Screwtape Letters with anticipation. But I feel the sin resides with the one who does the misrepresentation, not the one who recognizes it exists and acts reasonably once it is identified.
> If cynicism weren't of utility, only the most perverse would adopt it.
Cynicism and its mirror, naivete, aren't always wrong. It's just cynicism is prone to false positives of things to avoid, and naivete to false negatives of same.
It's very in line with the current zeitgeist to dismiss a thoughtful piece on the perils of compromising personal values and friendships for the sake of social climbing, as a mere defense of classism. Gone from public discussion are virtue, integrity, loyalty. There is only class struggle.
Did you get the impression he meant labour organizers or ambitious but honest entrepreneurs when he spoke of scoundrels? Or, given his emphasis on friendship, did he mean those who would sell-out their co-workers? Do you really mean to defend the "financial upward mobility" that comes from, say, withholding the health hazards of a product?
That last bit is a tremendous stretch and you're doing your shoulder joint no good in reaching that far.
No, there's more to it than that, but like I said, at worst, it has a kind of "stay in your lane" feel to it. Not in the snotty "know your role" sense, no, rather a more insidious method is substituted, in which, by not striving to enter the Inner Ring, you're rewarded with some kind of nebulous peer respect. Very a much a "meek will inherit" sort of thing, and often untrue.
Take the Tolstoy bit that was part of the piece. The general is ignored. But what if the general had something important to say, something of tactical or strategic value? Well, it's ignored. I'll counter with HST: "Politics is the art of controlling your environment." Wouldn't it be prudent for that general, should he recognize his situation, to strive for entry into the Inner Ring and then be heard? It would be. Lewis does not address this. Instead, one is to take consolation that one was at least correct, but unheard, as the Inner Ring steers the ship off course. You're even suppose to hope that other people, also outsiders, will recognize your track record and your value.
Personally, I haven't found much consolation in that outsider position at all. Instead I have watched the members of the Inner Ring sail off to ever-better positions, failing upward. Rather than attempting to change my position, I am to accept it and some reward will be dispensed unto me. I have yet to see it.
Throughout the piece he cautions against abandoning friends, principles, and of striving for the inner circle for its own sake, and for greed. It is a very uncharitable reading to then recast this caution and awareness as a general prohibition against entering the inner ring for any purpose. Nothing in the piece gave me the impression he is cautioning against, e.g., an upstart entrepreneur entering various inner rings to grow his sales, or a general vying for political power to help his country. It is the inverse he warns of - a general staying silent, or becoming a yes-man against his better judgement, to gain social standing at the expense of his troops.
You're right, he spends few words extolling the usefulness of the inner ring [1] - presumably he thought it obvious, especially to his audience at King's College. Probably seeing greed and sycophancy as bigger dangers than lack of ambition or too much sincerity, he naturally warned against the former. Like an old captain warning against storms instead of giving encouraging words about how many fish there are to catch. I wouldn't begrudge him that.
[1] Few, but not none: It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.
