The Inner Ring

"Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things...As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outside, an outsider you will remain."

Reading this essay reminded me of children in the schoolyard. We learn the skill and pleasure of exclusion at a painfully early age, maybe even before we realize the full effects of our snobbery and evil. But certainly we did know that what we were doing was wrong, even if we didn't realize that this was the sort of thing teens killed themselves and others over in middle and high school. Columbine would be another good example of someone that just couldn't take that kind of desire and torture anymore.

Before reading Lewis's essay, I would have said that this whole Inner Ring madness was just people being immature. After all, when I was younger I was teased and ridiculed for all sorts of things I couldn't help or didn't care to, and by high school I decided not to care instead of feeling awful every day. But now that I'm older, and my adult family members complain of that second heirarchy in their workplaces and Bible studies, I'm beginning to think that a lack of maturity may not explain away the issue. After all, Lewis says that Inner Rings are unavoidable in society, that there must be confidential conversations and the like.

Lewis's solution is to stop desiring to be inside the Inner Ring, because it will not only let you down once you are in, but break your heart whether you get in or not. Once you abandon your desire, you will find yourself eventually among friends. I don't know how much of this I agree with though. Using the Inner Ring theory to explain social relationships is far too simplistic and can't explain fully why or how friendships actually develop. However, I think it is good to be reminded not to fall into the temptation trap of Inner Rings, because they do shoot to kill, so to speak.

In terms of Christianity, where we as Christians are not exempt from desiring Inner Ring status nor excluding others from our own Inner Rings, this desire is dangerous. It's the exact opposite of the way we are called to act towards one another. I think the biggest temptation is to see people who are not Christians, or who are not as involved in the church as we are, or something else equally trivial, as less adequate than we are. Because after all, isn't this whole Inner Ring business about feelings of inadequacy? And instead of just letting go and having faith that God is the One who makes us adequate, who accepts us, loves us, wants to have a relationship with us more than anything, we pursue the lesser: we want instead for our peers to accept us, and this acceptance is never enough. I think Lewis forgot to mention that. Don Miller writes eloquently on this topic in his book Searching for God Knows What, and fills in the blanks that Lewis has left us with.