Submitted by feanor_imc t3_1096m8m in books
thelandsman55 t1_j3zgdg4 wrote
Reply to comment by flyingjesuit in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Leguin affected me like few books have done by feanor_imc
I like your free will question and your undergrad thesis sounds super interesting, but I don't think your readings of the guilt line is supportable, as narratively that aside is before the narrator concedes that Omelas is a dystopia, and is mostly in the context of whether the summer festival would have orgies. People in Omelas are free and that freedom includes freedom from any system of morality or social mores that would feel oppressive or cause them to feel guilt.
I think you're onto something about Omelas and free will, but I would flip it around. We tend to think about free will in terms of the ability to fix things that are broken and break things that are perfect. If you can't do both, you aren't free. Ask us to picture a perfect world, and we can only imagine it as some sort of cage, but Omelas is just imperfect enough for people to not just like, murder each other to rattle the bars. Staying in Omelas is a constant, free, uncoerced choice of their comfort over their integrity. You get to live an almost perfect life in total certainty of your own free will.
I tend to think of intentionally breaking the social contract as revolt, which is why it's interesting that no one takes up arms against the injustice, or gets thrown out, or starts a fight over the child. The people who leave either leave immediately after learning about the child or go through a few days of deep contemplation and then just walk out. Just as importantly, they aren't just leaving, they are going somewhere. Probably they are disgusted by the suffering of the child, but there is something deeper than that that actually motivates them to leave.
flyingjesuit t1_j3zicro wrote
I think it’s a pretty clear use of juxtaposition of presence and absence(guilt being the absent thing) and possibility and certainty, so I think her intent is to draw our attention to a lack of guilt, even if it takes us reading it a second time to make the connection. It doesn’t matter when we’re told it’s a dystopia, we can and should look at the text as a whole.
When talking about free will I also like to discuss agency. How free/able are we to realistically enact our free will. Sure, women can ride the subway after midnight, but they don’t have the same agency to do it as a man because of a greater threat to them. Not sure I get your break things that are perfect line because freedom can be breaking things that just are. So, do the people of Omelas have full agency to go along with their free will? It’s like a lot of mythology, Pandora’s box, tree of knowledge. There’s a rule that can’t be broken or else. So long as you don’t break it, everything’s great, perfect even.
Some of my best students have suggested kidnapping the child, finding allies, and invading Omelas as opposed to simply leaving.
thelandsman55 t1_j3zm1ad wrote
My point about the guilt line occurring before the dystopia concession has to do with how I read the story as a meta-narrative. The first part of the story is about a utopia and a meditation on why writing utopias is hard. Everything in the first part is true of Omelas, but it should also be true of a different utopia, or maybe even of the place the people who leave Omelas go. This section ends a little after the part I quoted when the narrator decides to concede a dystopian flaw to the reader, who she believes hasn't been able to suspend disbelief or enjoy the story up to this point.
You can read the free of guilt line as a ban on guilt along the lines of guilt about what happens to the child, but I think its also worth noting that the surface reading is that the world LeGuin wants, the one without child torture, would also be free of guilt. Perhaps the people of Omelas should feel guilt and shame, but it matters that the people who leave should be rid of guilt and shame when they get to where they are going.
I do think people in Omelas have both perfect freedom and perfect agency, everyone that is, except the child. What's brilliant about the child is that freeing it is not something anyone would do for themselves, its something they think they should want to do for the child, but they don't because to do so would also be selfish in terms of exposing a much greater number of people to suffering.
If you violently invade Omelas to save the child and kill/punish those most complicit in the child's suffering (so they don't just put a new child in the dungeon), you just replace the salvation through one suffering soul narrative of the child with salvation through the much greater suffering of the people killed and maimed by your invasion. You can leave Omelas any time you want but there is no way to change Omelas that doesn't produce greater suffering.
flyingjesuit t1_j3zsczw wrote
It’s a question of what’s more fair, consolidating suffering to one person or spreading it out unevenly across many. The other thing with the guilt line for me is I’ve always kicked around this idea in my head that the cities of heaven are filled with those who live without regret. And so are the cities of hell. The first meaning that being able to move past your regrets and being forgiven is a heavenly reward and that when we’re not carrying it around we can be better to one another and if people are better to one another there’s less to forgive and forgiveness is also easier because we’re not resentful of not having received forgiveness. The second meaning is that there’s another kind of person who lives without regret and this is a punishment because while you can indulge in any pleasure or violence you want, so can everyone else and all the evil inclinations bad people have get amped up when they get sent to hell and they all punish one another. So with respect to the story, I see them as the kind who see themselves as having nothing to feel guilty about and nothing to regret, so that’s the moment we should know it’s a dystopia, not the invention of the child. It’s also an exception to your meta-narrative because everything prior is almost like a coloring book where we’re given a framework but can customize it, but then we’re told there can’t be guilt, she’s certain of it. That line kind of exists outside the commentary on writing a Utopia.
If they can’t free or help the child they don’t have perfect agency, that’s pretty straightforward imo.
thelandsman55 t1_j41hjuu wrote
I like the heaven and hell thing you've brought up, it reminds me of the parable of the long spoons, generally I feel like heaven and hell allegories are compelling when they hold a mirror up to the person in them and unsatisfying when they involve externally directed punishment or torture. The most narratively satisfying hells are the ones where you can leave at any time if you simply accept the goodness in the world and god's love, but some people are too broken to do so.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'they can't free or help the child' the child is not particularly guarded, the door to its cell is locked but that's about it, we aren't told who has the key but it seems like many people have access to the cell, hell the cell may only be locked from the inside for all the narrator tells us. No one is externally prevented from freeing the child. No one is even told not to free the child, they are simply told that their way of life cannot exist without the child's suffering.
Actions have consequences, that isn't a constraint on freedom, its simply a fact about the world. If I jump off a tall building, is it a constraint on my freedom that I will fall to my death rather than flying?
flyingjesuit t1_j41l893 wrote
We were talking about agency though, and so like with Pandora’s box or the Apple in Eden they are told not to do it. If I’m not allowed to scratch my nose because if I do a loved one of mine will die, then I’m only really free to scratch my nose in theory. I’m free, but my agency is severely limited.
thelandsman55 t1_j41wl2g wrote
I'm confused by the analogy to Eve eating the apple and pandora's box.
Pandora's story is pretty murky in a lot of retellings, but while someone may have told her not to open the box, it is pretty clear that she didn't know what the consequences of opening the box would be. Hell contemporary classicists aren't super clear on what the consequences of opening the box were supposed to be.
Eve is more cut and dry in that she's forbidden from eating the fruit and is deceived into doing so anyway, but again, while there is a fair amount of hubris in making the choice, the main way in which she lacks freedom in doing so is that she isn't clear on the consequences of making it.
I'm not really sure what you mean by 'agency' either. Traditionally there are two types of freedom, freedom from obstacles and freedom from need. Some scholars extend freedom from need to include 'self mastery' ie being able to control your needs and not have dependence on something others can do without.
It is pretty clear that the people from Omelas have both freedom from constraint and freedom from need, the aside about drooz also demonstrates that self-mastery is fairly ubiquitous in their society although perhaps not universal.
To use your analogy, I would say that if I have been told by some external actor that if I scratch my nose they will kill my loved one, that would impact my freedom from obstacles, a foreign actor is constraining my choices to their own ends, and framing it as forbidden or 'if you do x, y will happen' is just a semantic distinction.
If on the other hand, by some inherent quirk of my and a loved ones physiology, scratching my nose is intrinsically linked to stopping that loved ones heart, that is not a constraint on my freedom any more than not having wings is a constraint on my freedom.
The suffering of the child is foundational and intrinsic to everything that makes Omelas good. And no one is deceived about the nature of the choice to leave the child to suffer. I would say its a pretty freely made choice.
flyingjesuit t1_j43x48z wrote
Agency is your ability to enact your free will. I’d love to drop everything and go visit Europe, but I have to hold down a job to pay bills and feed myself. A billionaire could go visit Europe on a whim because they don’t have the concerns I do. In theory me and the billionaire have the same free will, but when you account for how realistically we can act on it, they have more agency than I do. Same with my example regarding women riding the subway in an earlier comment. So in a lot of mythology, maybe Pandora wasn’t a good example I thought she was told not to open it like Eve being told not to eat the apple, there’s a MacGuffin of sorts where they are free to enjoy paradise or a superhuman ability or whatever so long as they don’t do X. In Omelas they are told they can’t intercede on behalf off the child otherwise it all falls apart. So they have the free will to do it but not the agency. So agency could also be thought of as revealing the extent to which our free will is an illusion. If the people in Omelas were truly free they’d be able to save the child, but the world is structured in a way that ensures that they don’t. Almost akin to structural injustices in our own world which limit the agency of certain people despite them technically having free will.
thelandsman55 t1_j441e6o wrote
I think you are right that in the classic modern version of the story Pandora is told not to open the box although she is not told why, IIRC she's made to think its a present she has to wait to open.
I'm not sure quite how to square your concept of agency (coming from what sounds like a literary background) with my concept of freedom (coming from someone in political science grad school). Having to pay bills and feed yourself is arguably an infringement on your freedom from need. You are subordinated to others because you have to eat and have shelter and those needs create opportunities for exploitation that you aren't protected from. Not being able to go to Europe is arguably an infringement on your freedom from obstacles, but its sort of a gray area, since your ability to get to Europe is presumably contingent on exploitative relationships with others (pilots, airline employees, taxi drivers, etc).
I would also say that beyond freedom from need stuff, most of the greater agency a billionaire has is not per se personal freedom but the ability to compel the subordination of others to his or her will. That is, the additional freedom/agency/whatever you want to call it of a billionaire compared to you is mostly built on other people being less free then they otherwise would be.
And this is where I have a hard time with how your concept of agency relates to Omelas, for one person to have the agency to remove the child without causing social collapse would imply a level of agency that is only possible by subordinating others. You can't generalize that kind of agency since any increase in it for one person is inherently a reduction for someone else, so a society where someone can free the child cannot possibly be more free than Omelas.
hajenso t1_j4esb69 wrote
That last sentence was similar to my immediate thought after finishing the story just now: Never mind the ones who walk away from Omelas, why aren’t there ones who attempt Scapegoat-Child-Rescue Crimes in Omelas? This to me is a major practical problem with the conceit: There could never be a society 100% free of violence and oppression but for a single scapegoat whose suffering is known and accepted by all, because there would always be a few who would try to wreck the bargain by direct action, and now we have a conflict which motivates violence.
One could say "It's part of the premise that nobody decides to do that." But:
- The story already concedes that not everybody accepts the bargain; that's the entire point of having ones who walk away. What's stopping some of them from dealing with those same feelings by willfully violating the rules (child rescue attempt; attempt to remove the scary mops), instead of walking away? I see nothing except possibly authorial fiat.
- If the beings in this story include not even a tiny minority of individuals who attempt a rescue of any kind, then this story is about a different species, not ours.
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