7 ms·

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?

at_a_remove 3y ago
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.
- fifilura 3y ago
  Thank you for sharing and well written. Yeah I recognize this as something I believe we would call Lutheran work ethics in our society. Stay in place, work hard and wealth/luck/love/whatever will come to you. Maybe true maybe not, but it is one perspective out of many. Surely many people succeeded by, and for the reason of, not abiding to that.
- helloplanets 3y ago
  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.
- vintermann 3y ago
  > 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.
  - themadturk 3y ago
    He was a smoker and a drinker, too, in spite of which American Baptists often loved him.

at_a_remove 3y ago

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.

fifilura 3y ago
Thank you for sharing and well written. Yeah I recognize this as something I believe we would call Lutheran work ethics in our society. Stay in place, work hard and wealth/luck/love/whatever will come to you. Maybe true maybe not, but it is one perspective out of many. Surely many people succeeded by, and for the reason of, not abiding to that.
helloplanets 3y ago
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.
vintermann 3y ago
> 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.
- themadturk 3y ago
  He was a smoker and a drinker, too, in spite of which American Baptists often loved him.