"Lewis lectured rising British university students that 'from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care,' that they would be driven by the desire to be within the Inner Ring. It is, of course, a fallacy; there is no special knowledge that emanates from such bonfires. Lewis went on to describe the perilous dangers such an illusion carried, dangers to the soul if not necessarily someone’s career. 'It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school,' he argued. 'But you will be a scoundrel.' 'Of all the passions,' he added, '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.'"
From "Opinion: The sad self-importance of journalists" by Hugh Hewitt (WaPo).
The C.S. Lewis material is good, but Hewitt doesn't do enough with it, and it's hard not to laugh along with the top-rated comment: "Self-important 'journalist' writes about self-importance of journalists..."
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4 comments:
Bob Boyd quips:
"Democracy Dies of Deliciousness"
Ernest writes:
"Lewis explores this concept of “The Inner Ring” more extensively in the third novel of his space trilogy, That Hideous Strength. One of my favorite novels."
Owen writes:
"Anybody who cites C.S. Lewis as inspiration or authority can’t be all bad. His prose may seem quaintly inflected to our post-modern ears, but he was (and continues to be) a giant of moral philosophy and simple decency, who disguised himself as a writer of children’s books (!) and occasional essays."
Assistant Village Idiot writes:
I doubt may of the journalists Hewitt is warning would take much notice even had he written twice as well, though some of his general audience might. If one is a DC journalist, one is already in that world of rings within rings and has likely embraced it, denying all moral hazards. The Post is the house organ of the many federal agencies after all, leaking to journalists each for their own purposes rather than some grand plot.
CS Lewis was denied promotion for years at Oxford (which apologised long after his death in 1963), and he ended his career at Cambridge, which granted him a long-deserved chair. He practiced what he preached nonetheless. Though he is best known to the public for his Christian writings, fiction and non-, he produced top-shelf scholarship that is still assigned at both graduate and undergraduate level. An Experiment in Criticism, A Preface to Paradise Lost, and most especially the third volume of the Oxford History of English Literature English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, (excluding Drama)
Ernest is correct that That Hideous Strength is Lewis's expression in fiction of this essay (as well as The Abolition of Man), but I only partly share his enthusiasm for that novel. It is the most quotable and has some of his strongest and complex characters and best sections of writing, but the pieces do not quite hang together. Tolkien did not much like it, after greatly admiring the first books in that series.
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