The Inner Ring
In fifth grade my friend George created a club of which he was president. He invited me to be his vice-president. I remember George with great fondness; he had the sweetest mother and what seemed to me to be an incredibly lengthy and elaborate Lionel train setup. I cannot remember, however, any activity undertaken by our club, except to invite other classmates to join as officers and members and, occasionally, to deny membership. There were periodic reshufflings of officer positions, which George and I took very seriously although I’m not sure anyone else did. Membership may have peaked at ten boys, or about half our small class
I believe George’s inspiration for our club came from some connection his family had to the politics of Greece, which in the early ‘70s was ruled by a military junta, known as the Regime of the Colonels. Perhaps George saw our club as a government in exile waiting to take over the school when the time was ripe. I can’t recall the club’s name, except that it was grandiose (“World” was in its title), appropriate to the fevered, brutal imagination of eleven year old boys. And although I don’t think any of us were consciously aware of it, in hindsight the only rationale for the club to exist was to decide who was in and who was out.
I thought about George’s club after reading a 1944 speech C. S. Lewis gave to university students. The speech’s title was “The Inner Ring,” and it characterized all formal and informal associations using the perspective of Outer and Inner Rings. Lewis starts with a vignette from Tolstoy’s War and Peace to illustrate that the demarcations of these rings are not always readily apparent.
Prince Andrei, a captain, is talking to an elderly general when Andrei’s friend Boris enters the room. Boris is a member of Andrei’s “set,” the general is not. So the lower ranked Andrei dismisses the general in favor of his friend Boris, overriding the military hierarchy in favor of the more important social one. The general is outside the ring, Boris inside.
The brunt of Lewis’s speech is a warning about the natural human desire to be inside any ring, the closer to the center the better. And how by definition the very existence of a ring presupposes those both inside and outside. Through his Tolstoy example, Lewis warns that it’s not so easy to identify various overlapping rings or to decipher which rings matter more or less. Finally, Lewis warns that our desire to be on the inside can overwhelm our ethics and lead us to rude and snobbish behavior at a minimum, and in the worst cases, to become “scoundrels.”
I also thought of Proust (I often do, perhaps to a fault ) in two contexts. My favorite Proust scenes are his party scenes where he picks apart all the subtle social gradations, thereby laying bare snobbery and the desperation to be inside the tightest social ring, generally defined in Proust’s world by noble rank. Charles Swann, Jewish son of a stockbroker, attends a music recital given by a minor aristocrat, when the beautiful Princess des Laumes, stops in to make an appearance. She is at the highest height and tightest inner circle of the aristocratic set. She’s delighted to find out that Charles Swann is there for he, like Boris was to Andrei in Tolstoy belongs to the Princess’s “set” despite his background, on the strength of his wit and charm.
The Princess sets out to find Swann but is accosted by her noble cousin, who is from a lesser wing of her family and, like Tolstoy’s general, a tiresome presence to be dismissed.
The devastating exchange below between the Princess and her cousin takes place, the cousin speaking first.
“…people do say about your M. Swann that he’s the sort of man one can’t have in the house; is that true?”
“Why, you of all people, ought to know that it’s true,” replied the Princesse des Laumes,” for you must have asked him a hundred times, and he’s never been to your house once.”
And leaving her cousin mortified afresh, she broke out again into a laugh…”
My other Proust memory was also at a party, but one I attended. There was a celebrity at the party, an accomplished actor and singer. He and I discovered a common love of Proust, leading us to form for a while a tight bond, a temporary inner ring forged by a common literary enthusiasm. In the middle of our Proust conversation, a real estate billionaire came up to our little ring, expecting to be acknowledged by the celebrity as the other “very important person ” at the party. But the currency of our ring was Proust, the billionaire had nothing to add, he was ignored, and, I later learned was offended at our lack of interest in his presence, a rare and unpleasant phenomenon for him.
Lewis’s way of seeing the world as rings, small and large, clear and subtle, static and shifting is perhaps nowhere more apt than in the world of politics. I think of Aaron Burr’s desperate lament in the play “Hamilton” yearning to be in the ”Room Where it Happens.” When Burr is left out in the cold, he’s desperate enough for power to fashion absurd plots to overthrow the government.
This desire to be close to the center of power crosses party lines, but it was recently most evident when Trump became president. Many Republican politicians who had said the most damning things about Trump’s character and whom in turn Trump mercilessly insulted decided that obeisance to the president was an ethical price they were willing to pay in order to have access to him. To be in the room or on the golf course where it happens.
What I find helpful about seeing the world through Lewis’s lens of rings is that, being human, I have periods of feeling left out in the cold. We all do. Understanding the cause of that particular form of unhappiness, analyzing it, remembering that all of us will at times find ourselves inside and outside various rings, helps put it in perspective,
And that perspective can also lead to greater empathy, which may help us avoid excluding people whenever possible.
Link to the C.S. Lewis speech:
https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/?ref=the-browser