It is worth it for anyone in a profession to read C. S. Lewis’ essay, “The Inner Ring”, about the desire to be an insider and its risks. “Unless you take measures to prevent it,” Lewis says, “this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life….” At the end, he offers an alternative:
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.
It is a nice view, and appealing to academics because academia has its share of inner circles and self-dealing, and on the other hand it also has people who are like a “musician’s musician”: not famous, but deeply respected by those in the field. But perhaps this point of view can become a bit smug. I am not sure there is such a clean distinction between the good and the bad inner circle, or between the motivations to be in each of them.
For a really good description of the dilemmas of research, there is Adorno’s. Adorno was so bracingly comfortless a thinker that he coined the phrase “es gibt kein richtiges Leben im Falschen”, there is no right living in the false. Here’s a passage from Minima Moralia:
From ancestor-worship, laziness and self-interest, philosophy is carried on in an ever-narrower academic framework, and even there, people are ever more concerned to replace it by organized tautology. Those who trust officially-certified profundity are forced, just as a hundred years ago, to be as silly as the colleagues on whom their career depends. But there is no less a danger for extra-academic thinking…. The philosopher who has to earn his living as a writer must, every moment, offer something delicate and refined — to fight the official monopoly by the monopoly of rarity…. The power of the progressive bureaucratization of thought is so great that it pushes those who want to avoid it to the vanity of ressentiment, to busy self-promotion, and the losers in the end to fraud. The Senior Lecturers posit the principle I am, therefore I think, and are degraded into the public scramble for positions, and bowing and scraping to the Nation. But their opponents, if they are not very careful, wander into the realms of graphology and callisthenics….
This passage coins the fabulous word Platzangst, literally “place-fear”, to describe the psychology of the scramble for academic positions. In the end, he comes out on the side of independence and blogging:
… the eye for the rare, the hatred of banality, the search for what hasn’t been grasped or expressed by the ordinary conceptual schemes, is the last chance for thinking.
Still, after World War II, he returned to Germany and became a professor in the Frankfurt Institute. This gave him the chance to be abused by the student revolutionaries of 1968. In the Busenattentat or Boob Attack, bare-breasted students sprinkled rose petals on him, while others recited “Wer nur den lieben Adorno lässt walten, der wird den Kapitalismus sein Leben lang behalten” (if dear Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease). He died of a heart attack the next year. Half a century later he gets blamed for “cultural Marxism” and Critical Race Theory. It is hard to tell which side in this argument he would have been ruder about.
… In other news, I am looking for a job. Requirements are the ability to do research, a maximum of interesting colleagues and a minimum of pointless bureaucracy and grovelling DEI statements. Drop me a line with any suggestions.
If you enjoyed this article, you might like my book Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present. It’s available from Amazon as a paperback/hardback/ebook, and you can read more about it here.
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Great post