You miss the altar for the corpse.
David Verburg, A Practical Guide to Evil
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a wonderful short story by Ursula K. Le Guin. Although it is usually read as a critique of utilitarianism, this interpretation is not well supported by the text. Instead, I believe the story is an exploration of the contradiction between the apparent necessity of suffering for things to be meaningful, and the human tendency to refuse any compromise with evil.
If you have not read “Omelas” recently, you may want to read it now, as it is rather short. Many people misremember the story to better fit the common interpretation, after hearing it called a critique of utilitarianism often enough.
Utilitarianism
The common interpretation of “Omelas” goes something like this. In a utilitarian ethical framework, the suffering of the child is more than justified by the great joy of the rest of Omelas. And yet, people still walk away from Omelas and the reader feels that that the suffering of the child is unjustified. In this interpretation, the reader and the ones who walk away are rejecting the utilitarian ethic which allows for the suffering of the child.
At first glance, this seems like a reasonable interpretation of the story. However, I believe it fails to explain two major parts of the story: the diegetic necessity of the child’s suffering, and the emphasis on the unbelievability of the perfect Omelas, before the introduction of the child.
Disbelief
Almost two thirds of the text is spent simply describing the city of Omelas without the child. The narrator gives more and more detail, insisting that there is no dark side to Omelas. The text implores the reader to believe in the perfect city, even inviting them to imagine their own version of utopia:
But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.
When you read the story, though, you are not convinced. Throughout the description of Omelas, you are always waiting for the darkness behind the utopia to be revealed. Without any evil, the story of Omelas is not believable, not interesting, not meaningful.
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.
The Child
After describing the inability of artists and intellectuals to celebrate joy, the narrator introduces the child:
Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.
Once the child is described, it is easy to accept the tale of Omelas. When we are told that Omelas is perfect, it feels shallow, unintellectual, and unreal. Despite pages of detail on the happy citizens of Omelas, we struggle to remember it. Instead, we latch on to the child. The pain of the child is what makes Omelas believable and interesting, and so the single paragraph of suffering is far more memorable than the six paragraphs of joy.
The shallowness of perfection is also the diegetic reason that Omelas cannot exist without the child. The child’s suffering is what gives the joy of Omelas’ inhabitants its meaning, and they know this:
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.
The child exists to make Omelas easier for the reader and its inhabitants to accept, not harder.
The Ones Who Walk Away
But what of the ones who walk away? Like many readers, they cannot accept Omelas even with the child. They cannot brook any evil, even as the price for utopia. But if they cannot accept a society without evil because it lacks compassion, and cannot accept a society with evil because it lacks justice, what can they accept? I certainly do not know, and neither does Le Guin:
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.
Although the ones who walk away “seem to know where they are going,” like those who reject the utilitarian ethic of Omelas, they do not offer a solution. Unfortunately, it is far easier to point out flaws in and reject an idea than it is to fix it. Perhaps there is a way to resolve this paradox, but I doubt it. Instead, humanity must find a way to cope with perfection on our journey to utopia.