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Dear Friends,
You know that I am currently on a bit of a C.S. Lewis kick and that means you are going to bear the brunt of it for at least a little while. The man was chock full of insights and today I want to explore this one: how does a good man become a scoundrel? Or, better, how does a group of otherwise good men become scoundrels?
I am sure you’ve had the question pop up in your mind at some point. Some committee, some group of authorities, does some scandalous injustice of some kind, and you wonder: how do they sleep at night? How do they look at themselves in the mirror? How could THEY do THAT? Think, for example, of all the church scandals in recent years. How could that group of godly men cover for that egomaniacal pastor? How could they cover up those sexual abuse accusations? How could they gaslight the accusers? How could they not call the cops? How could they think they could “handle” it in-house? How could they be so … wicked? How does that happen? It doesn’t happen overnight; if you find one monumental case of injustice I guarantee that it was preceded by a thousand much smaller, almost invisible, compromises.
This passage from Lewis’s That Hideous Strength jumped out at me:
This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may have been a time in the world’s history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.
This is a literary version of a lecture Lewis gave in 1944 entitled, “The Inner Ring.” He was giving advice to young university students and he warned them of a temptation they would always face: the desire to be in the “in” group, the “cool kids,” the small cadre of people who are “in the know.” Lewis knows that inner rings are inevitable, of course; but the desire to be in the Inner Ring can be dangerous:
I must now make a distinction. I am not going to say that the existence of Inner Rings is an Evil. It is certainly unavoidable. There must be confidential discussions: and it is not only a bad thing, it is (in itself) a good thing, that personal friendship should grow up between those who work together. And it is perhaps impossible that the official hierarchy of any organisation should coincide with its actual workings. If the wisest and most energetic people held the highest spots, it might coincide; since they often do not, there must be people in high positions who are really deadweights and people in lower positions who are more important than their rank and seniority would lead you to suppose. It is necessary: and perhaps it is not a necessary evil. But the desire which draws us into Inner Rings is another matter. A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous.
And the danger is that the desire to attain and then to remain in the Inner Ring, to have ones colleagues like you and think highly of you, will, if you are not careful, steadily steer you into compromise. Who wants to be the fly in the ointment or the squeaky wheel? Peer pressure is common, but peer pressure within an Inner Ring is of another order altogether. The whole incentive structure, all the pressure points, move toward unanimity, going along with the group, and it is difficult to resist. Lewis gives a profound prophecy:
And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you 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.’
Compromise doesn’t look like a struggle, the turning of a corner, or crossing the Rubicon. It looks like a drink and a triviality sandwiched between jokes. Like Mark in That Hideous Strength, the moment of consent almost escapes one’s notice. The “Inner Ring” has a potent way of extracting subtle compromises, and Lewis finds in it the source of a great deal of “scoundrelism.”
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