have just discovered (courtesy of
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sophia_sol ) that i had never actually read "the ones who walk away from omelas". i had apparently read some sort of excerpted version that only included the final bit about the child in the hole. and, separately, had read the segment about "the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain" without realizing it was actually part of that story.
soph was complaining, correctly, that everyone teaches / talks about the story as if it's a story about how you react to the child and whether you will (heroically or selfishly) be one of the special titular ones who choose to walk away. in the abridged or excerpted version, of course, the child in the hole is the only thing to react to. i'm really wondering now how many other people have only read that part of the story.
if you read the whole story, the passage about the banality of evil takes on the central importance: it is a piece of writing that asks you to imagine a society without suffering, and accuses you of being complicit in the lazy habits of mind peddled by the "pedants and sophisticates" who don't want such a thing to be imaginable. the point of the child in the hole is simply that, if a utopian society only feels "real" if it has a failure point, that's a problem and you should question why.
and yet. for all that leguin explicitly disclaims rousseauian notions of societal innocence and asks you to imagine the society of omelas being complex and innovative, it feels to me very much of a piece with john lennon's "imagine", a song that i think encapsulates the worst of the flower child movement. the utopian omelas has "singularly few" laws, has temples but no religions, functions on a basis of equality without hierarchy. and i think that weakens the actual point of the story, perhaps fatally; it may be a large part of why readers fail to take away the message leguin explicitly states, that it is worthwhile to try to imagine a world free of suffering.
i live, of course, in the failure state of a utopia, which is aggressively failing further as i type. it was perhaps the first time a utopia had gotten as far as trying to enshrine human rights in the institutions of an active, functioning government. it had a pretty good run, and its documents have inspired most of the conversations that have been held about human rights declarations in the centuries since.
i have been thinking -- for many years, but more and more recently -- about the american utopia 2.0. about how to start from the things we say we believe in, equality and human rights and the consent of the governed, and look at the failure modes of the ways they've been tried and the flaws of the people doing the trying, and hammer out something that might be worth giving another few spins.
(nobody else seems to be interested in this. i left my own people when the early phases of fascism made them unwilling to include the concept of universal human rights in the draft they are now implementing. and when i try to look for the parallel groups on the left, for the people who want to build a theory of good government and give it a test drive, they don't exist. they just yell at me about old white men and thomas jefferson's hypocrisy until i stop trying to ask where they think they get the idea that people should have rights.)
anyway. my point. i keep wandering back, oddly enough, to the concept of original sin. not the basic literalist version with the snake and the apple and the evils of knowledge. but, like many religious concepts, it is a way of trying to articulate (clunky and fumbling though it may be) something about human nature that seems more and more accurate.
there's a line in robert louis stevenson's
kidnapped that has stuck with me. (okay, there are several of those. it was a fairly formative book for tiny jt.) there's a point where alan breck says "there's bad folk everywhere, and what's worse, weak ones." and that is what i think we are seeing now in the breakdown of usian society. there are a few bad people, but there are many, many, many, who are just yeeting themselves to wherever the overton window ends up. one can't necessarily tell the difference from outside between the long-term hateful and the opportunist conforming to hate.
so anyway the point i'm trying to get back to is, that i have personally been trying to imagine a society free of suffering, and i think omelas rings false, but not for the reasons leguin claims people might think it rings false. i don't think the suffering is necessary. but i don't think it can be prevented without *structure*. hard work, and even more important, laws and regulations, all in service of clearly stated and enforced definitions of sapient rights.
i got in a fight last fourth of july about the declaration of independence. i was told i was showing my old right-wing brainwashing by valuing an outdated, insincere document that can't be edited, and that i should value the constitution instead. and my argument, which i think is relevant here, is that those two documents do totally different things: the constitution says "this is how we govern", and it gets changed and updated as we get better ideas, but the declaration says "this is
why we govern", why we even claim to have the right to establish a government based on something besides the military conquest of a king's ancestor.
i think, if we want to imagine a society free from suffering, if we want to try to build one, it has to start from "this is not a natural state". it has to start from "people will not Just". it has to start with the acknowledgement that evil will always come back, that there will always be people who either want to cause harm or will go along with harm if someone seeking it gains power. it
has to start from looking at failure states, from instituting checks and balances to try to disrupt the abuses of power. it has to assume abuse of power is going to be sought.
i'm not the kind of writer who could write a response-to-omelas fic that would articulate these thoughts well and resonate with readers. nor would it get picked up if i tried. it's not what people want to see in their fixes for the failure states of government. iteration and nuance do not make political heroes.
the very end of the story, though, i can read in at least two or three ways, and i'm not sure which one leguin intended; it's very ambiguous for a story that tells you exactly what to think about the rest of it. it talks about the titular "ones who walk away from omelas". and the discussion around the story always seems to assume they are valorized for walking away, that it's positioned as the obvious morally correct choice. but the story doesn't say that at all. it says "The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."
and there's the way i would read that description based on my own current circumstances and what i see around me; the way i would read it based on the tone of the earlier parts of the story; and the way i would read it based on knowing that leguin was a damn skilled writer (her "steering the craft" is one of the two books on writing that have materially formed my own skills).
my initial reading is that the ones who walk away from omelas are the tumblr purity wonks who were advocating refusal to vote last year. "i refuse to participate in omelasian society because it's flawed but i also refuse to be responsible for its downfall by uplifting the child, or to put in any work to build a societal safety net to the point where we could eventually uplift the child without causing the downfall, or otherwise to do anything except walk in a straight line with clean hands until the perfect society rises before me with no foundation work".
if i didn't know that leguin is a very thoughtful writer (i haven't read most of her other work), i wouldn't argue too much with the default reading that the ones who walk away are making the obvious moral choice. i don't think the story is actually even asking what the moral choice is or what you would do, but it's the shape of story that from most classic sff writers
would be asking you that question and wanting you to acquiesce in the answer they posited as obvious. because the ones who walk away are the final contact the reader has with omelas and the titular characters of the story, one ends the reading aligned with them, which would often indicate that one is meant to stay aligned with that perspective on the story as a whole. but from what little i know of her, i think leguin is too clever-handed a writer to be that facile.
the third interpretation is that it's a sneaky appeal to the subconscious. they leave omelas for something better: for a city of happiness truly without suffering. we can't describe it, we can't picture it, but by laying out that blank space for it, we can get past the lazy habits of mind and the addiction to suffering, and slip an acceptance of that better city directly into the heart, past the mind.
i don't know if i'm being too over-engineered, but i feel like that third one might be what leguin was actually going for. but i really don't know.
(i'm sorry about your reading pages. i'm on my phone and have completely forgotten how to decide where to put a cut.)
