September 9, 2016 - 18:17
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is a story about fear- the fear of a society that if they show kindness to a suffering child their Utopia will crumble. One message of the story seems to be that a significant impediment to social change is a fear of sacrifice that leads us to falsely rationalize accepting the suffering in the world and our inability to confront it. She acknowledges that society feels pity and regrets the costs to individuals sacrificed for its overall prosperity, but depicts these feelings as too week to overcome the fear of abandoning a society that serves one for the sake of oppressed individuals. This message is directly opposed to one of the points of the story of my friendship with Linda, that because empathy can create real connections it is a legitimate bases for social change.
I write that "individual empathy is the bases for sincerely keeping the other’s interests in mind while pursuing a cause". I argue that empathy can create individual connections between people that allow for acts of kindness in daily life, but Le Guin specifically shows that people can weep when they see the child suffering and still do nothing for it. Le Guin would argue that empathy alone cannot be the bases for social change because we can too easily rationalize not acting on our feelings- it is only a willingness to "walk away" from a society that causes suffering to others that can ultimately create change.
Le Guin portrays the weakness of empathy that can be accompanied by acceptance of another's condition. She does this by a subtly sarcastic portrayal of the people who weep for the child yet passively rationalize and accept its presence. Le Guin is careful to make sure that the belief of the Omelans that the suffering of the child is the price of their happiness doesn't seem entirely without credit. As she points out by frequently commenting on the readers assumed disbelief in the city as a pure Utopia ( "I wish I could convince you." she writes "Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away" (2) ), it is hard of us to conceive of joy without some pain. Le Guin's general implication at first seems to be that joy would be too one dimensional to be real if we didn't know the compassion that comes from witnessing sorrow- and that the child's suffering is necessary so that the people of Omelas can have the understanding of life "...that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music..." (4). But with a few hints Le Guin reveals what she truly thinks of the idea that the happiness of Omelas is reliant on the suffering of the child. It is absurd. She writes of the city dwellers "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" (3). Perhaps architecture and friendships can be enhanced by another's suffering, but the weather and harvests? In this line Le Guin reveals the irrational fear that leads the Omelans to keep the child imprisoned.
It is rejection of fear, according to Le Guin, and not empathy, as I claim, that will ultimately allow us to risk "walking away" from a society that benefits us at the cost of another. Nor is it only in addition to consideration for others that we must take risks. The people of Omelas justify not letting the child out because " to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed" (4). The type of empathy that we may see as care for all of society (but is really only a weak kind of feeling that is easy to hold because it demands nothing from us) can actually make us more passive. Le Guin might recognize some of this feeling in my story about Linda. I write that "Those who seem against us may be simply walking a different path from a different starting point- their choices are not necessarily indicators of irreconcilably opposed natures", but I write this in the context of a story about a girl who, although ideologically opposed to me, in no way threatened me personally. I am ready to accept another person (regardless of how their beliefs may affect others besides myself), but I make no reference to connecting to individuals who I would have to make a sacrifice to help.
Works Cited
Le Guin, Ursula. The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. n.p, n.d.