By Christopher Kanski
Chris Kanski, “a reluctant yuppie who dances often and writes sporadically”, encounters Omelas for the first time.
In amateur philosophy, thought experiments try to get to the core of questions, usually ethical ones, by stripping them of context; the trolley problem that’s taught in high schools has faceless victims and no perpetrator and you, the imagined agent at the lever, have no context for your being there. I think they’re useless. I think every thought experiment I’ve ever encountered makes an assumption that stripped context isn’t a context itself. What you would do in the imagined, ‘pure’ scenario is relegated to that scenario; whatever conclusions about ethical choices you come to become largely null and void when presented with the countless variables that real-life context provides.
None of us, ever, will find ourselves in a context where we make an ethical decision based purely on rational thought with a total lack of feeling. But when I was young and coddled by private school and a loving, secure home life, I didn’t have much use for deep feeling and, spurned at the time by both girls and boys, I felt my intelligence grew far beyond my years if I chased exactly that kind of unburdened rational thought. Which is why if I’d stumbled across Ursula K. Le Guin’s story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, as a young teen, I’d probably have trained my critical thinking skills a little, and if my musings about that trolley problem didn’t impress my peers I would’ve dropped the pretences and told them that I’d read a story that had sex and drugs in it, and that would be that.
That isn’t how I first experienced the story: I heard its synopsis over a breakfast table and then, weeks later as I was shopping with a friend and she asked me if I eat pork, I saw the Omelasian child in front of me, whimpering and bleeding and moaning – a feeling of guilt that I’ve been nurturing for years was given imagery. I knew then in the supermarket, even before reading the story, that I’d write about it and give expression to the pain of complicity that affects me daily, to tide me over until the pain boils up again and demands repeated expression with new words or through a new medium.
In “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, the city of Omelas is a utopia; throughout the story Le Guin breaks the fourth wall to explicitly point out the fiction of it and encourages us as readers to flex and bend certain aspects of the utopia to our own preferences. She tuned in to our base, perpetually unfulfillable desires of comradeship, sex, highs, and joys and it’s intoxicating, when reading, to be asked to participate in constructing Omelas with exactly the building blocks most of us strongly desire. It makes the twist that much sharper: our utopia which has made our hearts swell and sparked our carnal desires, Le Guin tells us, is only made possible because of a single child’s suffering. Le Guin isn’t the sole architect here either, the choice of where the child’s tiny cell is held in the city is the reader’s choice. What’s cemented is that for the utopia to exist, the child must exist with open sores untreated and exposed to its own shit forever. The sacrificial child is vividly, disgustingly described in its perpetual state of suffering and we’re horrified not only by its pain but by ourselves, as at this point in the story we’re invested in the fantasy of our utopia that we helped build, our heads are still fuzzy with ideas of art, sex, feasts, and dance; we’re already wondering soon after the first glance into the cell if we’d let the child suffer for our perpetual comfort, ecstasy, and happiness.
Continue reading “Leaving Omelas”
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