How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

by Alan Jacobs

What triggers the formation of a “moral matrix” that becomes for a given person the narrative according to which everything and everyone else is judged? I think C. S. Lewis answered that question in December 1944, when he gave the Commemoration Oration at King’s College in London, a public lecture largely attended by students. Lewis called his audience’s attention to the presence, in schools and businesses and governments and armies and indeed in every other human institution, of a “second or unwritten system” that stands parallel to the formal organization—an Inner Ring.*2 The pastor is not always the most influential person in a church, nor the boss in the workplace. Sometimes groups of people with no formal titles or authority are the ones who determine how the organization works. They form its Inner Ring. Lewis does not think that any of his audience will be surprised to hear of this phenomenon; but he thinks that some may be surprised when he goes on to make this claim: “I believe that in 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.” And it is important for young people to know of the force of this desire because “of all 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.”