On Omelas as Utopia.

The “incredible” last two paragraphs of “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” (1973) are about those who walk away from Omelas. I have reproduced them to refresh your memory below.

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.

It’s quite natural to see in these lonely walkers beautiful souls who refuse to be complicit in great evil.

The problem with that line of thought is that by turning their backs on Omelas they also do nothing to end the great evil from which they benefitted previously. And while some were too young to be held morally accountable (i.e., “the adolescent girls or boys”), others clearly knew what they were benefitting from (since it’s woven into their coming of age ritual).

More subtly, their departure while physically rejecting the (contractual) ‘terms’ that govern the practices of Omelas, the manner in which they do so (exiting as isolated individuals) also secures these terms’ ongoing authority. Somewhat surprisingly then, when only a few quietly exit (to use Hirschmann’s phrase) or vote with one’s feet this can entrench status quo bias. Anyone who has thought about self-sorting mechanisms in organizations and polarizing regional patterns of settlement will recognize this.

So, those that exit alone indirectly honor the terms of the contract that shapes life in Omelas. In fact, they may well recognize this fact, and be tempted by more overt rebellion against the status quo, but come to the conclusion that they lack authority “to throw away the happiness of thousands.” This need not involve cowardice; all it requires is an unwillingness to legislate to others how to live (from, say, epistemic modesty or an egalitarian interest in mutual respect).

In virtue of their indirect entrenchment of the status quo, it’s, thus, by no means obvious that the ones who walk away from Omelas are — despite being the titular characters of the work — all that admirable. They are beautiful souls, to be sure, but their unwillingness to engage in collective action or rebellion against the terms makes them all too human.

Perhaps, but I feel less happy stating this, those who walk away recognize that no happy polity is possible without some (structural) oppression. This possibility is, in fact, part of the ruling ideology of Omelas: the many discern “the terrible justice of reality, and…accept it.” Is it still ideology if it’s true?

Le Guin (1929-2018) must have been made uneasy by the kind of thoughts I have gestured at in the previous two paragraphs. Because (recall) in "The Day Before The Revolution" she pulls back from these troubling implications, and offers us a fantasy of collective rebellion. I really dislike being critical of Le Guin, who is wise beyond anyone known to me. But on its own terms “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is at odds with “The Day Before the Revolution” not the least because there is no credible avenue from the former to the Odonians of the latter.

Now, obviously it’s perfectly legitimate for a later work to help re-frame the earlier one. We’re familiar with the practice from the New Testament which reframed even changed the meaning of the Old Testament, and then subsequently the Quran playing the same hermeneutic trick on Judaism and Christianity. Less exaltedly, we are familiar with the practice of retconning in popular culture. To each their own.

But from the perspective of “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” it’s worth asking why collective or even singular defiance and resistance seems impossible. We are told that in Omelas the following maxim is regulative even constitutive of happiness: “Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.”

There are two limitations to this maxim: first, depending on how one reads the terms it’s not exhaustive. It leaves out the option of happiness that involves something un-destructive that is necessary.

Second, and more important, the maxim itself presupposes a kind mutuality of interests (or anti-politics); what is destructive to one is ipse facto destructive to all. But in Omelas this is actually not true, the destruction of the (suffering) child in the cellar benefits the whole. In fact, by the terms of the contract this is taken to be necessary. That is to say, the maxim does not honor the separateness of persons or, to put it differently, has a scope ambiguity.

Now, if one is Freudian here, one may see the child as a kind of pre-political sacrifice that makes possible, constitutively, the wonderful and joyous order of Omelas. But this reading is not so easy to maintain because the child sacrifice continues as long as Omelas exists, and s/he is the child of citizens. What supports this Freudian reading is the absence of guilt in Omelas.

Even so, for my present purposes, it’s more important that from the two diagnosed limitations of the maxim it seems to follow that it (the maxim), while appearing to embrace the language of modality, expresses not a philosophical understanding of happiness but a political one. I put it like that because even more than the terms of the contract that governs the practices of Omelas, the maxim seems to make necessary distinctions about conflicting interests impossible to articulate. It generates the conditions by which even those with conscience can’t do better. That is, Omelas lacks philosophy, and (like many utopias) true politics.

That is, in some respects Omelas is very much like the healthy city in the Republic: despite the absence of philosophy, it has a natural religion without priests and soldiers and is quite clearly capable of true joy. It too has structural inequality, despite it being quite ‘flat.’ (Omelas, however, is much wealthier.)

I don’t mean to suggest that “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is unphilosophical. In fact, the explicit narrator is philosophical when s/he attacks the (what we may call modernist) aesthetic sensibility of contemporary artists, “This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” This sentence alludes as much to Arendt as it does to Benda. That is, the narrator’s interest in philosophy ought to alert us to its absence in Omelas.

Strikingly, the narrator is inclined to treat aesthetic failures as indicative of moral ones. This goes against the commitments not just of the modern artist, but also of those who live in Omelas, which seem to keep the beautiful and happiness distinct.

As regular readers know, I am no fan of arguments built on a perceived absence, so I won’t press this line of argument more fully. In fact, the narrator herself is inconsistent in her aesthetics. For, after complaining about the fact that modern sensibility requires that happiness and even beauty is never without accompanying pain of some sort or another, the narrator her/himself gives in to modern aesthetic expectation. Is it necessary that she does this?

So, where are we?

“The Day Before the Revolution” makes us feel that “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” calls us to the path of collective action and revolution. This makes these stories speak to our young today. But without it, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” shows how our commitments and ideas structure not just our perception of reality but also shape our actions, including the manner of our rebellion(s). It’s unclear whether Odo ever came to understand this.*

*I thank many generations of students for discussion.