A million years ago, back when I was a newly minted Ph.D., fresh out the doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin and in my first year of teaching at Biola, I went to one of the annual meetings of the American Philosophical Association to give a paper. If memory serves—and I freely admit it likely doesn’t in this case!—the meeting was in Chicago. Or was it only half a million years ago, at an APA meeting in which I was commenting on someone else’s paper, in San Francisco?
I suppose it doesn’t matter…
Because what I remember is a scene at the hotel bar. And it’s a scene I’ve seen more than once. (If you’re not a philosopher or even an academic, I bet you can locate an analogue of what I’m about to describe.)
At the center of the bar is Famous Philosopher, Dr. X. Dr. X teaches at Fancy University in Important City. He publishes in Definitely-the-Best Journals about Hot Topics of Clear Significance.
To be clear, I have no problem with Famous Philosopher Dr. X teaching at Fancy University in Important City and publishing in Definitely-the-Best Journals about Hot Topics of Clear Significance. I admire Dr. X’s work! I read papers on Hot Topics! I send students to Fancy University to earn a Ph.D.!
Anyway. There’s Dr. X, at the center of the bar. And in bands emanating from Dr. X are ever-increasingly sized rings.
These rings are composed not of rocks and dirt and other debris, but of Established Philosophers, Ordinary Philosophers, and finally Wannabe Philosophers (sometimes called “graduate students”). The precise boundaries between these categories needn’t detain us, but generally speaking, the composition of the bands became increasingly less Wannabe and more Established as I surveyed from the outermost to the band immediately around Dr. X. A couple Wannabes made it to an inner-ish band, but they were brought there by an Established, presumably to introduce them to other Establisheds, and perhaps even to Dr. X.
All of this makes a lot of sense, viewed from a certain angle. Academia is—as much as we’d like to pretend it’s not—predicated on relationships. So, for example, to become Ordinary, Wannabes need Establisheds to make the right introductions. Conferences, especially their informal aspects, are one of the places relationships begin and blossom. To move from Wannabe to Ordinary, or Ordinary to Established, you have to push your way inward.
For better or worse, movement through the philosophical community often begins at hotel bars. Again, in some ways this makes sense.
But making sense is compatible with being dangerous.
This is about the central danger: the allure of the Inner Ring.
Describing Inner Rings is a tricky business, as it’s among their features to operate in shadows. But we all know them, and the temptations they bring. Inner Rings aren’t specific to academia, though I know them best from that context. They are the informal associations with semi-permeable boundaries defined by loosely defined sets of unwritten expectations and understandings.
Sometimes Inner Rings arise organically. Organic Inner Rings exist for some purpose, often a good purpose, and it’s a commitment to or skill in achieving that purpose that marks the boundary between inside and out. This is the group of starters on a skillfully managed soccer team. There certainly are starters and substitutes—there must be!—but who starts is a function of the goals of the team, both in this particular game and in the season as a whole.
Sometimes, though, Inner Rings arise inorganically. Inorganic Inner Rings exist to serve the boundary between inside and out. They exist to exclude. This is true even in the way they include, as inclusion always comes with the threat of exclusion. This is the Plastics in Mean Girls.
Sometimes, Inner Rings arise organically but grow to be inorganic. This is the group of starters on a poorly managed soccer team. Long ago it became clear that Ol’ So-and-So has lost a step, and that New Kid would be better out on the left wing, but Coach Stodgy-Pants sticks with Ol’ So-and-So because of his “veteran locker room presence”.
Anyway, C. S. Lewis points to the profound, life-shaping draw of Inner Rings:
[I]n all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.
He goes on:
[T]his desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man.
Being “that kind of man” is, of course, something Lewis thinks we should avoid. Avoiding it is terrifyingly difficult because, as he points out:
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.
This is due to the fact that, as Lewis puts it,
the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”
This moment is no doubt familiar to us all.
For those of you who, like me, couldn’t turn off the slow-motion familial trainwreck so skillfully displayed by Netflix’s Ozark, Lewis’s point here reminds me of a scene in episode 8 of season 1. It’s a flashback. Marty and Wendy Byrde are in Mexico at the Navarro mansion. In a quiet room, they oh-so-innocently decide that Marty ought to agree Omar Navarro’s offer: Marty will do a wee mite of drug money laundering. Just a little! Their choice, given the way their conversation around the issue unfolds, almost, almost makes sense. It seemed such a small thing. They made a pro-con list! It was a fresh, exciting way to deploy Marty’s earnest, hard-won financial savvy. It would set them up financially. And the risk seemed so slight. Marty and Wendy weren’t choosing an Inner Ring, in this case, but their scoundrelism began “in no very dramatic colours”, despite the overarching set-up of Ozark. That’s one of the striking things about this scene. On its own, it feels like an ordinary but serious conversation between an ordinary husband and wife about a significant but commonplace career choice. But it’s set in the compound of a notorious Mexican drug cartel. And the audience knows where things go from there.
What seems ordinary is anything but. Ozark’s ending is not a happy one.
And that seems to be Lewis’s point. What can seem like a small thing might trap you in the escalating chaos of money laundering. Lewis is cautioning us to not forget that we just might be in a cartel compound when that harmless-seeming choice comes. Metaphorically.
Anyway, at the APA hotel bar, the temptation is so often for the Inner Ring. Philosophy is not a growth industry. Jobs are tough to come by. Tenure is hard to make. An academic career can feel like a pot of the gold at the end of the rainbow, and no matter how quickly one walks toward the location where the colors meet the ground, you don’t get any closer to the treasure. At the bar, in the crowd peppered with Establisheds, so close to Dr. X, inhibitions slightly lubricated, it’s easy to agree to that putative triviality sandwiched between two jokes.
And off one goes.
There is only one real solution: don’t do it. Don’t succumb to the allure. It’s not a complicated solution. That doesn’t make it easy. Being simple is compatible with being hard.1
Resisting the allure of the Inner Ring, like resisting any temptation, is made slightly easier when you can say yes to something else. And here we return to the Organic Inner Ring. At the hotel bar, the rings involve Organic and Inorganic elements. The mixture besets both individuals and the collective. What we must say yes to is the the thing that made us interested in the pursuit that gave rise to those mixed up, messy rings at the hotel bar. In my case, that thing is good philosophy, the pursuit of truth for the sake of wisdom. We must consciously and continuously, as Lewis says, pursue the Organic elements.
If we do, if we resist and say yes to something better, we can shatter the destructive power of the Inner Ring, even if Inner Rings remain. I can’t stop quoting Lewis, and I’m not ashamed. He brings the baton to the finish line more ably than I ever could:
The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.
And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.
Don’t be a Byrde. Be a craftsman. Don’t be a Plastic. Be a friend.
By the by, a confusion between complexity and difficulty is, it seems to me, a plague.
The message is as unforgettable as it was during the Talbot boot camp days.