Omelas Is Perfectly Misread
23Brendan Long
8mako yass
1Tobias H
0JBlack
11Hastings
3Tobias H
9Garrett Baker
2Nick_Tarleton
4Garrett Baker
5CallumMcDougall
5speck1447
5Dave Orr
3metachirality
3Nick_Tarleton
1Tobias H
3Garrett Baker
1Tobias H
2AnthonyC
2romeostevensit
1FlorianH
1FlorianH
1reallyeli
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Aren't you ignoring the end of the story (and the part the title references) though? It seems like the whole thing is buildup to the people who walk away from Omelas, who are implied to do so because this situation is terrible, despite the utilitarian calculus.
Seems to me like the intended meaning of that title was different when Le Guin started writing, and then things went in a different direction along the way, and Le Guin just accepted where it ended up.
My guess is was initially intended to refer to those who wont accept the possibility of utopia, those who cynically turn away before it's built, or those idealists who will swarm and rupture any near-perfect thing by picking and tearing at its smallest flaws, and as Tobias points out, much of it seems to have been written that way.
Then I think it might've gotten lost partway through, in the way a dream does, a contrivance is introduced to make a broader point, the contrivance grabs the attention of the dreamer to such an extent that the broader point gets forgotten, and "the ones who walk away from omelas" ended up doing so entirely in response to the contrivance.
So Le Guin faced a choice, she could have noticed that and trashed it and started over until she had something perfectly intentional, but successful authors generally don't do that ime. They publish in large quantity and they publish entertaining rides rather than coherent parables. If the contrivance was good enough to obscure the broader point, then a successful author lets the work become about the contrivance.
Thanks for pointing out that this is a big omission! I've added a bit about it.
I don't think 'you're not able to accept a pure utopia' is the only theme of the story, but it is a large and (to me) dominant one.
If I read the ending in isolation, it does feel like a critique of utilitarianism. But since the story introduces the suffering child, the 'utilitarian downside' of the calculus, as a clear farce, I find it not a plausible reading overall.
Taking the ending seriously is as bit as if you took the following argument against utilitarianism seriously: "Imagine there's a child drowning in a shallow pond. You're wearing a swimsuit and could easily save them. Don't believe me? Okay, let me make it more believable: imagine there's also a cute puppy guarding the pond that you'd have to kill to reach the child. Would you do it?"
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.
She mentions that they know where they are going, but she doesn't mention why they are going. It could be because they'd personally be unhappy in such a place. It could be because they think there's an even better possible place. It could be because they reject the utilitarian calculus. I'm genuinely confused what the end is about.
"Imagine there's a child drowning in a shallow pond. You're wearing a swimsuit and could easily save them. Don't believe me? Okay, let me make it more believable: imagine there's also a cute puppy guarding the pond that you'd have to kill to reach the child. Would you do it?"
This seems very incoherent.
It starts with "Imagine" and then two sentences later asks "Don't believe me?"
Believe what? Believe that I was asked to imagine something? I look back up a bit on the page, and I can have rather high credence that I was asked to imagine something.
Believe that I have imagined the scenario? I can have pretty high credence of imagining something that matches the description so that doesn't fit either.
Believe that the imaginary scenario is real? Agreed, I definitely don't believe that and there's a lot of evidence that it's false, but what relevance does it have? The text didn't ask me to believe that.
Maybe believe that I could one day be in such a situation? Well, that's definitely more believable but still very unlikely. I'm very much not in a habit of wearing swimsuits near ponds, though if it had been a swimming pool that would be more believable (while still being very unbelievable). So yes I don't believe it.
Then the text goes on to posit a wildly more improbable scenario, prefaced with "let me make it more believable". What? No, that just made it massively more unbelievable, so the writer of this story probably has terrible epistemics, or at best is authoring an unreliable narrator character that does. Pretty much any further detail would make it less believable by conjunction.
What's worse, that particular conjunction is pretty ridiculous. I can still imagine it happening in some amazingly contrived scenario, but brings up so many other questions like "how" that make even suspension of disbelief for a fictional situation difficult. In what manner would I have to kill it to rescue the child? Is it basically a full-grown dog (but still cute) that would threaten my own life if I approach, and I happen to have a gun with my swimsuit? Maybe there's a supernatural barrier that's tied to its life? In what way is any of this more believable even for a very unreliable narrator?
I agree with you about the meaning of the exhortations to the reader, up to the point in the last paragraph where some people walk away. The behavior of those who walk away doesn't fit neatly into the "critique of utilitarianism/capitalism" reading, since they aren't helping, but it doesn't fit neatly into my "commentary on inability to imagine utopia" reading- and they are the ones the story is named after, so they're probably important.
I guess the glibest reading is that they are walking to a city that is nice without a suffering child, and that's why we can't see or imagine the place they are walking to. However, that doesn't explain the emphasized detail that they walk alone, and it feels too riddle-like for le Guin.
I agree that the ending doesn't fit either. I've mentioned something similar here. I'm genuinely confused what the ending is about, and have mainly settled on 'the story would be really bleak and unenjoyable without it'.
(note the following is me explaining my interpretation, not explaining my beliefs)
I think its a criticism of utilitarianism via a criticism of our inability to take just good things seriously. The whole point of (at least certain kinds of) utilitarianism is that we are in triage every second of every day. The Ones Who Walk Away is a denial of actions and worlds that are just good, the assertion that every decision is a trolley problem, and every good you do comes at the expense of bad you neglected to avert.
Omelas seems more likely given a tortured child at its heart for the same reason we find the assertion that an action which has a horrible consequence is nevertheless good. This is the same implicit logic used to defend actions taken for "the greater good", and an implicit claim about the psychology of people taking bad actions "for the greater good". That people find it more likely they can have a positive impact if there's an obvious negative consequence to their action, the bias which has caused the most horrible atrocities we know of.
Those who walk away therefore are those who try not to fall for this bias. Both metaphorically, the reader who says "no, I don't think you need to torture a kid to get a perfect world", and literally, those who live in Omelas and say "no, I don't think we ought to live in a society which tortures a kid".
2I like this interpretation, but 'criticism of [something like zero-sum] bias rationalized as utilitarianism' ≠ 'criticism of utilitarianism'.[1]
- ^
This feels really important to me, in a way that's much less like 'the good name of utilitarianism must be defended' than like 'zero-sum bias is a sneaky evil bastard, don't ever let it get away with hiding behind other names'.
I agree, but also, like, I think its good to notice the skulls here. This bias isn't equivalent to utilitarianism, but often justifies itself on utilitarian grounds, and utilitarians... don't necessarily seem like they do all that much to try to stave off such biases when making their decisions or advocating for their moral frameworks. Indeed, it sometimes seems to me utilitiarians often revel in their ability to make hard moral tradeoffs rather than their ability to try to think of ways to get all of what they want without having to trade anything off (which is what the "steel utilitarian" would do).
1Try to find any article, paper, or blog post that lays out this reading. I haven’t found one (but there is sometimes someone in the comments who seems to get it).
Omelas: How We Talk About Utopia
Pretty much identical thesis, does this count?
I think it's worth noting that this is generally not how literary criticism is done? It is good and right to accept that authors are often mistaken about the meaning of their own work. If you can explain an idea simply then you do so simply - the reason to create art is to express ideas that lose something in the process of being simplified, and so artists expect (or should expect) that the meaning of their own work is not fully legible to them. That is to say, it is possible for this to be a completely correct reading without Le Guin herself having ever been aware of it.
I'm also reminded of the dispossessed, in which le guin describes two worlds, a capitalist society in which people are rich but have curtailed freedoms and some authoritarian aspects, and a kind of socialist anarchy where people are very poor, claim to be free, and are constrained by culture and custom rather than law.
I find that people who come into the book with a strong prior on capitalism being good or bad will also end up with a clear view on which "utopia" is better. The book itself is probably a critique of the idea that utopia is even possible and whether it's a coherent concept at all.
One of question I have about "the Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" is "walk away to where?" I'd argue most societies cause more misery for less benefit.
The people of Omelas also can't take their own happiness seriously without the suffering child:
Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.
The story emphasizes the avoidance of guilt:
One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. ... To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
My reading of this: The inhabitants need to avoid guilt, need to justify torturing the child to themselves and each other; and, while torturing the child doesn't materially do anything, to stop would be to admit that it was never necessary, which would invite guilt. It's a kind of terrible punishment-of-nonpunishers equilibrium.
The ones who walk away are the ones who recognize all of this and are no longer willing to participate in the collective illusion (hence, alone).
Importantly (though, I think, consistently with both this and the standard reading), The Wind's Twelve Quarters introduces "The Day Before the Revolution", a story about an anarchist revolutionary in the same world as The Dispossessed, with "This story is about one of the ones who walked away from Omelas."
The ones who walk away are the ones who recognize all of this and are no longer willing to participate in the collective illusion (hence, alone).
I like this reading, I hadn't thought about it before!
Despite my strong resonance with much of the take in OP, I partly also find "The (simple) meaning" of such a text as a concept a bit of a non-starter anyway. Independently of what all things the author exactly may have had in mind at whichever moment of the writing process, a text remains just that, a text, and then it's instead us who get some inspiration for whichever points/meaning we think we're now reminded or educated about. So in the most important sense, the meaning doesn't exist, it's only us who derive some meaning.
I'd wager many writers have exactly not strictly one very clear and narrowly defined specific point they wanted to convey, but more a fuzzy cloud of +- related thoughts, rather than a simple and clear 'meaning', and exactly in such situations beautiful, deeply feeling and moving texts may come about that we can then dream and ponder about at length, maybe without every finding full agreement. In that sense, Le Guin isn't wrong to agree if we see it as a critique of utilitarianism - if the text almost by definition is simply whatever we see in the text.
[Meta: I hope it's ok to split a comment in two as I think it's two entirely different points]
Partly love this. Biased as I once had a debate where sb claimed 'Omelas obviously critique of utilitarianism' and I disappointedly claimed 'No that's too narrow for that' but was a bit dumbfounded as hadn't quite organized what seems wrong in that simple take of that so deeply moving story. Thanks for providing some relevant points why the story clearly is broader.
One point for which I consider Omelas not at its core a critique of utilitarianism is: The utilitarian-half of me distinctly gets the feeling of Omelas offering an interesting basis for discourse about the theory rather than a clearly intended rebuttal. As follows: To the same degree as the non-utilitarian half of me tells my utilitarian "there you go, clearly you can't claim you like the situation", the utilitarian in me tells the other half "there you go, while you claim you don't like Omelas, but you and everyone else don't even want to blow up real Earth - on which there is obviously a ton of such equally unjustified and pointless, evil suffering plus much less happiness than in Omelas - you exactly proof to accept the very horrible tradeoffs that you claim only me cold terrible utilitarian could be willing to accept"[1] - or something.
- ^
I don't claim this imaginary statement to be very perfectly worded; the gist of it is the point.