The
New York Times
January
13, 2015
Maybe you're
familiar with Ursula Le Guin's short story, ''The Ones Who Walk Away from
Omelas.'' It's about a sweet and peaceful city with lovely parks and delightful
music.
The people in
the city are genuinely happy. They enjoy their handsome buildings and a
''magnificent'' farmers' market.
Le Guin
describes a festival day with delicious beer and horse races: ''An old woman,
small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young
men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the
edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute.''
It is an
idyllic, magical place.
But then Le
Guin describes one more feature of Omelas. In the basement of one of the
buildings, there is a small broom-closet-sized room with a locked door and no
windows. A small child is locked inside the room. It looks about 6, but,
actually, the child is nearly 10. ''It is feeble minded. Perhaps it was born
defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition and
neglect.''
Occasionally,
the door opens and people look in. The child used to cry out, ''Please let me
out. I will be good!'' But the people never answered and now the child just
whimpers. It is terribly thin, lives on a half-bowl of cornmeal a day and must
sit in its own excrement.
''They all
know it is there, all the people of Omelas,'' Le Guin writes. ''Some of them
have come to see it; others are content merely to know it is there. They all
know it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they
all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness
of their friendships, the health of their children ... depend wholly on this
child's abominable misery.''
That is the
social contract in Omelas. One child suffers horribly so that the rest can be
happy. If the child were let free or comforted, Omelas would be destroyed. Most
people feel horrible for the child, and some parents hold their kids tighter,
and then they return to their happiness.
But some go to
see the child in the room and then keep walking. They don't want to be part of
that social contract. ''They leave Omelas; they walk ahead into the darkness
and they do not come back.''
In one reading
this is a parable about exploitation. According to this reading, many of us
live in societies whose prosperity depends on some faraway child in the
basement. When we buy a cellphone or a piece of cheap clothing, there is some
exploited worker -- a child in the basement. We tolerate exploitation, telling
each other that their misery is necessary for overall affluence, though maybe
it's not.
In another
reading, the story is a challenge to the utilitarian mind-set so prevalent
today.
In theory,
most of us subscribe to a set of values based on the idea that a human being is
an end not a means. You can't justifiably use a human being as an object. It is
wrong to enslave a person, even if that slavery might produce a large good. It
is wrong to kill a person for his organs, even if many lives might be saved.
And yet we
don't actually live according to that moral imperative. Life is filled with
tragic trade-offs. In many different venues, the suffering of the few is
justified by those trying to deliver the greatest good for the greatest number.
Companies
succeed because they fire people, even if a whole family depends on them.
Schools become prestigious because they reject people -- even if they put a
lifetime of work into their application. Leaders fighting a war on terror
accidentally kill innocents. These are children in the basement of our survival
and happiness.
The story
compels readers to ask if they are willing to live according to those
contracts. Some are not. They walk away from prosperity, and they make some
radical commitment. They would rather work toward some inner purity.
The rest of us
live with the trade-offs. The story reminds us of the inner numbing this
creates. The people who stay in Omelas aren't bad; they just find it easier and
easier to live with the misery they depend upon. I've found that this story
rivets people because it confronts them with all the tragic compromises built
into modern life -- all the children in the basements -- and, at the same time,
it elicits some desire to struggle against bland acceptance of it all.
In another
reading, the whole city of Omelas is just different pieces of one person's
psychology, a person living in the busy modern world, and that person's
idealism and moral sensitivity is the shriveling child locked in the basement.
