"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"

In this 1973 short story Ursula Le Guin dramatizes the Utilitarian idea of the greatest happiness for the greatest number at the expense of a minority (see previous post).  Omelas is a town in which all but one are happy.  Their “utopia” is only made possible by the suffering of a child who is kept imprisoned in miserable conditions behind a locked door.

The residents of Omelas know the child is there:

 “…they all understand that  their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.” 

The situation is explained to the children of Omelas between the ages of eight and twelve.  They are taken to see the suffering child and told that such is the price of everyone else’s happiness.  Though they are “always shocked and sickened by the sight,” though they “feel disgust…anger, outrage, impotence,” though they “may brood over it for weeks and years,” most of them eventually come to accept the terms which guarantee the happiness of the majority.

There are a few though, adolescents and adults, who decide to walk away from Omelas:

“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 place of happiness.  I cannot describe it at all.  It is possible it does not exist.  But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas), Omelas is “Salem O” backwards, that is Salem, Oregon, which Le Guin saw on a highway sign from her rearview mirror.  Salem, of course, reminds us of Salem, Massachusetts, famous for the witch hunt that resulted in nineteen townspeople being hung and one man, who refused to enter a plea, being pressed to death by heavy stones on his chest.  In this classic example of scapegoating, the upstanding citizens of Salem projected their own guilt onto a few and sought to purge themselves by victimizing those few.

Is it possible to walk away from Omelas?  Or is it an unavoidable reality that the happiness of the many depends on the “necessary evil” of suffering by a few? 

Is Omelas a utopia or is it an image of the real world in which prosperous countries exploit the resources and labor of poor countries, in which the wealthy hoard their riches at the expense of the needy, in which the security of the majority depends on those who put their lives at risk in the military, in which the privileged enjoy their status by looking down on those with less, in which the fortunate give themselves the credit and blame the unfortunate for their adversity?

Is the true utopia one in which suffering does not exist, or is at least always relieved, or is at least equally shared?

Are the ones who walk away from Omelas “into the darkness” the ones who are unable to come to terms with evil in the world and live out their lives in despair?

Are they the idealists who live in a dream world refusing to accept the reality that full equality is impossible and that one person’s gain is always someone else’s loss?

Or are they the ones who work for economic and social justice instead of accepting the world as it is, the ones who “seem to know where they are going” as they seek amelioration of suffering and injustice, if not its absolute erasure.

Is Utilitarianism based on the inevitable reality of necessary evils or does it simply rationalize unnecessary evils for the benefit of the majority?

For that matter, is happiness the greatest good, especially if it is contingent on another’s misery?  What about virtue?  Is it better to be happy and unethical or unhappy and virtuous? Are the ones that walk away from Omelas seeking a higher good than happiness? (see next post)

"The Bishop and the Candlesticks" (and more on "Bartleby")

Whatever else it may be “Bartleby the Scrivener” (see previous post) raises the ethical question of our responsibility to our fellow human beings.  Are we our brother’s keeper?  And, if so, what does that mean? How far do we take it?

I suspect most contemporary readers would say that the lawyer goes way beyond the call of duty by allowing Bartleby to get away with refusing to work and taking up residence at his workplace.  At one point, the lawyer even offers to take him into his home, but Bartleby “prefers not to.”

Our culture puts a high value on self-reliance and individual responsibility.   If Bartleby refuses to work for a living and provide for himself, then he deserves the consequences.  Even a reader who believes in charity and humane treatment of the undeserving might lose all sympathy when Bartleby refuses the lawyer’s offer of taking him home.

At one point the lawyer recalls the scripture of John 13:34:  “A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another.”  If the story constitutes a test of how well the lawyer treats the “least of these” as if they were Christ himself, does it also suggest that such a high standard of brotherly love is completely unrealistic?  Are Christian ethics, taken literally, completely unrealistic in the human realm?  Just how far are we expected to take them?  Does that make the story a critique of Christianity as an impossibly ideal code that is doomed to failure?  Or is it a critique of society and its failure to organize itself in a way that is compatible with and supportive of such a high standard of behavior?  Or both?

Another story that raises these questions is “The Bishop and the Candlesticks,” found at the beginning of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. 

Jean Valjean has been released from prison (actually as a rower, chained to his seat in a sailing ship).  He had initially been sentenced to five years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, but his repeated attempts to escape had added 14 more years.  Imprisonment has hardened him, and, upon his release, he is treated cruelly by the local townspeople until one of them finally sends him to the door of the bishop.

Unlike Bartleby’s lawyer, the bishop immediately takes the homeless stranger into his home, gives him a hot meal, and prepares him a bed to sleep in.  In the middle of the night Jean Valjean awakes and, after some indecision, steals the bishop’s silver plates and disappears into the night.  The next day he is captured with the “goods” and brought to the bishop, who tells the gendarmes that he had freely given the man the silver.  When the gendarmes leave, the bishop gives Jean Valjean his two silver candlesticks stating, “It is your soul I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition and give it to God.”  As we know (Les Miserables having entered into popular culture), Jean Valjean goes on to use this gift to make a new start, live an honest life, care for a dying prostitute, raise her orphaned child as his own, save his adopted daughter's lover from death, and, having been redeemed by the kindly bishop, die a man of goodness and faith.

Is the bishop a type of Christ who saves Jean Valjean?  Is he a saint?  Or is he a foolish idealist who is fortunate Jean Valjean did not murder him in his sleep before stealing the silver?  (All this rather overlooks the bishop’s lie to the gendarmes.)

Read realistically, the bishop is a less than credible character who is almost laughably virtuous.  Is that to say that his ethics are too good for this world?  That in real life he would have been quickly exploited by evildoers and sent to his death?  That such goodness could not realistically survive?

Similarly, how realistic is it that a convict mistreated as badly as Jean Valjean would truly reform as a result of the bishop’s one act of compassion and faith?

When we say the story is unrealistic, are we saying that the Christian ethic, when taken literally, is an impossible ideal?  Or are we saying that reality inevitably fails to live up to such a high standard of virtue?

But, of course, neither story is meant to be read realistically.  Both make more sense read as Christian allegory, challenging its (Christian) readers to a higher, more virtuous life, however far that may end up being from the ideal.

In the case of “Bartleby,” however, I do think a valid case could be made, based on other works by Melville (the novel Pierre for example) that the story critiques Christianity for its impractical, if not impossible, expectations for human virtue.  At the same time, its focus on Wall Street and American capitalism suggests that it may be the hypocrisy of a so-called Christian nation that is Melville’s other, equally important, target.