Ursula Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

I assigned Ursula Le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” in my undergraduate Ethics and Fiction course this week. It was first published in 1973 in a science fiction anthology, but it is best known from Le Guin’s The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975), as well as the dozens of other books and textbooks in which it has been anthologized.

We’re in the section of the course where we’re thinking of one specific way fiction can help us in our task as moral philosophers: by illustrating philosophical ideas in a way that takes hold. I started teaching this story a decade ago, in a regular ethics course, and that’s exactly how I used it. To explain, I’ll say something about the story:

It’s short, even for a short story. The unnamed and undescribed narrator introduces Omelas (a word Le Guin says came to her as she saw a road sign for Salem, Oregon) in utopian terms:

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea.

Le Guin describes Omelas (and specifically its Festival of Summer) in a way that invokes a kind of innocent past. She describes a festival, a procession, music. But this is not exactly the Macy’s Day Parade. Music is not recorded, but gong, tambourine, flute. Children are not hunched over plastic or electronic toys, but “naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles.” Even the horses “wore no gear at all but a halter without bit.” Le Guin knows that Omelas sounds “like a city in a fairy tale”, but warns us not to assume the people, just because they don’t have lots of laws, a police force, or cars, are simple:

Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. There were not less complex than us.

Breaking from a breathless description of Omelas, Le Guin pauses to consider the way reader expectations might corrupt her attempt to describe it:

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.

After this admonition, Le Guin returns to her depiction of Omelas, but now invites the reader to co-create it with her:

Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.

For the next several paragraphs, Le Guin offers up some choices to the reader: does Omelas have technology? Ok to washing machines, but no to helicopters. Orgies? Sure, if you want. But no nude priests and priestesses. Drugs? Fine, as long as they are not addictive, oh, and as long as the people of Omelas don’t take them. She invites the reader to envision Omelas, yet places limits at the same time.

Le Guin returns to the Festival of Summer, describing the end of the procession and the start of the horse race. and then:

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is.

The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come.

Le Guin has referred to this story as a “psychomyth”, and specifically the myth of the scapegoat (although “Pharmakos” might have more significance for philosophers). She credits William James’ The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life (a speech he gave at Yale in 1891), specifically the following quote, with inspiring the story:

Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

Many philosophers (but not me) interpret James’s essay as an outline of a kind of utilitarian moral philosophy, and many philosophers teach Omelas as a fable warning of the dangers of a moral philosophy based on the satisfaction of preferences. Indeed, philosopher of art Noel Carroll has written (in “The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature, and Moral Knowledge”):

There can be little doubt that [Omelas] is a thought experiment designed to challenge utilitarianism.

I’m doubtful that Le Guin is in the business of writing “thought experiments” for philosophers to use in the classroom, but I can see how the story can be used that way, mainly because, a decade ago, that’s exactly what I did*. Ironically, based on textbooks I have seen, some philosophers think Le Guin is advocating for a kind of Kantian deontology. But it’s clear in James, at least, that the revulsion such a situation arouses in us is innate, and moral emotions are not exactly a Kantian idea. Anyway, the real problem with using this story to illustrate the point that utilitarianism is inadequate as a moral philosophy, is that doing so requires missing out on one of the clear intentions of Le Guin herself, indicated by her statement that, “The dilemma of the American conscience can hardly be better stated.”

Le Guin tells us that all of the citizens of Omelas visit the child, to own up to the “hideous bargain” on which the entire happiness of Omelas is based. And here is how the story ends:

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman.

Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow- lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. 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.

The narrator says a few times in the story that the existence of the child makes Omelas and its people “more credible.” That claim is key to her statement that “The dilemma of the American conscience can hardly be better stated”. After all, on the face of it, the idea of a bargain in which the happiness of an entire people is based on the suffering of one is the most difficult thing to believe in the whole story. Sure, she gives us bare sketches of the people of Omelas, but, as the narrator notes, we can fill those out however we like. But how the heck are we supposed to fill in the blanks of this bargain? Who has the bargain been made with? How does it work, exactly?

Once we think of Omelas as the US, or the West, and the child as “the developing word” we can see immediately how such a “bargain” is struck. And further, that as hideous as the people of Omelas seem, we are much worse for never “facing up” to the oppression and degradation on which our financial prosperity depends. All along, Le Guin has been inviting the reader’s complicity in building Omelas. This has the effect of making the discovery of the pharmakos at the same time the discovery of our own moral error. Earlier in the narrative, the US reader may have derided the rationalizations the people of Omelas use to not free the child (essentially, that it won’t do the child any good, because it doesn’t know any better and can;t handle its own freedom). But by the end it is clear we use the same rationalizations to not help, or further exploit, peoples in developing nations (Have you ever heard someone say they don’t donate because the money “gets stolen by warlords” and used to further oppress the people?).

This kind of reading is better and more sophisticated than reading it as a “utilitarianism lesson”, but in my classroom, I wouldn’t let it stand without comment. I would want to ask, if this is true, then how is Le Guin representing people of the developing world? As passive? As pure victims with no agency? I would ask about models of development in the 1970s versus today (there have been major changes). I might use it to explore an angle not made explicit in the text, namely, the way the child and the people of Omelas create each other through their interactions. My point is, there’s a lot of work still to do with the pharmakon interpretation.

But, we can go still further with the story. If the child is a scapegoat, the main figure in the kind of suffering-servant myth familiar from the Christ story, then what of the “ones who walk away”. Do they die? Are they reborn? If the latter, does their resurrection conflict to some extent with Le Guin’s apparent rejection of the suffering servant narrative? After all, the suffering of Christ *is* causally related to His resurrection.

And even further … perhaps we are not supposed to cheer for the ones who leave. Perhaps a theological view of the story demands that we ask, within the supernatural possibilities of Omelas, what options are open to the ones who stay to change their beliefs system and change their morality at the same time.

I don’t have answers, of course, although I have ideas. My point is that teaching this essay as a didactic lesson about the dangers of utilitarianism, while fine as far as it goes, will result in a failure to explore so much about the story. Worse, it fails to treat it as literature. If we do that, then we won’t question why the narrator is unreliable at times and assured at others, why the narrator works to make us complicit i the world-buildin, why Le Guin envisions a mythic prehistory at the same time as a savvy awareness of 70s free love culture (orgies and drooz), how the points about the unfashionability of happiness fit in with the supposed “moral lesson”. We won’t care about the words she chose or why, because we’ll see them as window dressing for the “most important thing”, that is, the philosophical ideas. At that point, why not just stick the James quote on slide and show it to the class? Why bother with all those extra words?

*And it’s not just philososphers. This bioethics piece by an oncology nurse is probably the most disappointing interpretation of Omelas I have seen.

Related posts:

1. There is Only One Story
2. Reviews A-Z
3. Orson Scott Card on the Problem of Evil in Fiction
4. Review: Bad Case of Loving You, by Laney Cairo