Blog Remix: Gaiting Away from Omelas
With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the singing.
The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear.
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.
Too apt.
ReplyDelete"They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas."
Love the third pic.
One of my favorite short stories.
ReplyDeletePlease - send this to the AKC, and to all their fanciers who refuse to admit that AKC is using their entry fees to pay court to the puppy mill industry.
ReplyDeleteThat has long and long been a favorite story of mine.
ReplyDeleteI really would like to teach that story in one of my lit classes, but my school objects to the words "naked" and "genitals"...yet not to the content.
Hm.
Who to hate more, the AKC, who profits from puppy mills? Or the HSUS, who are willing to take money from Michael Vick and his agent in order to rehabilitate his image?
ReplyDeleteHaving thought about it some -- while realizing this is an allegory --
ReplyDelete1) Couldn't those who abandon Omelas just go and kidnap the boy? What's their moral culpability here? They recognize a bad situation but do nothing about it.
2) The moral point raised above seems to me to stem out of an obligation to enforce the moral law; each person owns himself, and no man has a right to enslave another. It's the same force that impels Huck Finn to free Nigger Jim despite knowing that he'll "GO to hell". And in LeGuin's rear-view-mirror-inspired story, there's a bright line; she never gives us any reason to think the child is anything beyond a scapegoat.
But in the case of the AKC, it's not clear to me how much of their operations budget stems from these sorts of shenanigans. Clearly the fact that they keep pressing this matter into increasingly obscure channels is not a good sign.
Ah Rob, Omelas has gotten under your skin now.
ReplyDeleteIt will never go away. You're doomed. You're trying to work your way out of it -- like kids presented with the Heinz dilemma. There is no way out, not even walking away.
It's been fifteen years or so since I first encountered this allegory, and it will never stop needling me. It's as present to me as John Rawls' Original Position -- with the Veil of Ignorance -- in the formulation of Justice as Fairness -- but far more emotionally intrusive.
As for the AKC -- and UKC -- it's impossible to say exactly how much of their revenue is puppy-mill proceeds. But it is safe to say that the glittery world of silver cups and handlers in monkey suits and sequins could not exist as it does without those revenues.
I think it's also likely that, unlike Omelas, the tortured and degraded scapegoats outnumber the beneficiaries.
Of course, the show dogs are not the beneficiaries of the sacrifice's suffering.
If there is an Omelas for dogs, with a Festival of Summer and all, I don't think it involves trotting in circles while strung up.
It will never go away. You're doomed. You're trying to work your way out of it -- like kids presented with the Heinz dilemma. There is no way out, not even walking away.
ReplyDeleteMebbe. My own options are
1) this is a childish fantasy (i.e. we take the notion that all the happiness above rests on the misery below, which is magical nonsense), in which case, fugoff, Ursula K. Le Guin.
2) the child is only in its miserable condition because of the superstitious beliefs of the Omelasans, in which case fug the lot of them.
I honestly don't see how this is an insuperable problem. (Besides, how hard would it be to take on a buncha nekked guys humpin' alla time?)
I have similar criticisms of the Heinz dilemma (which I had never heard of prior to your mentioning it, but that was an interesting conundrum, thankee very much).
You are an engineer, aren't you Rob?
ReplyDeleteAs for the AKC -- and UKC -- it's impossible to say exactly how much of their revenue is puppy-mill proceeds. But it is safe to say that the glittery world of silver cups and handlers in monkey suits and sequins could not exist as it does without those revenues.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of the AKC, recent reports have led many of us to believe that the large scale, commercial puppy trade is the PRIMARY source of their income.
This would mean that, rather than shows existing because of that income, it's more that they exist as a sort of gloss - a public relations face on what really fuels the AKC machine.
What is frustrating is that I know of a great many breeders who are deeply disturbed by this facet of the AKC, and the AKC's increasingly concerted efforts to increase their segment of the commercial mill dog sales. However, years and years of "don't buy a dog from a breeder who doesn't show" propaganda has left breeders feeling that they're stuck in a corner.
I don't particularly like showing, even here in Canada where the kennel club is vehemently ANTI commercial sales, but even I feel that I somehow 'have to', to be able to be considered a 'legitimate' (ie; non backyard, no puppy mill) breeder.
@Heather -- You are an engineer, aren't you Rob?
ReplyDeleteWow, somebody finally read my profile! Hah! :-)
@FrodDogz -- In the case of the AKC, recent reports have led many of us to believe that the large scale, commercial puppy trade is the PRIMARY source of their income.
Link?
Actually Rob, I checked your profile and got my answer after I asked the near-rhetorical question.
ReplyDeleteBecause of the nature of the economic base here, I have a fair number of engineers as dog-training clients. I've had to learn how engineers tend to think so we can communicate and I can help them with their dogs. This has been a real education for me.
One thing about engineers -- and this is not a good thing or bad thing, it just is what it is -- is that they expect problems to be soluble, and are stubborn about regarding a situation as a paradox, mystery, or dead-end.
I was educated as a political philosopher. It's an entirely different way of looking at problems and solutions. (That said, I may not have been a great fit in academia partly because of a manual/mechanical/practical streak that finds an outlet here on the farm.)
A political philospher is fascinated with Omelas or the Heinz dilemma or the Kobayashi Maru* for what the process of thinking and debating about it reveals of human nature and institutions.
An engineer gets pissed off and frustrated and looks for a way out of the dilemma, and ends up relegating LeGuin or Piaget to the nether world in frustration.
It is good that political philosophers aren't in charge of designing bridges or refineries. It's also good that engineers usually have limited means to try to make people and animals "make sense" -- because the fact is, much of the time, they just aren't going to. Systems for forcing them to do so are called totalitarian regimes, and invariably spiral into murder and madness.
*Yeah, I'm a geek. Wanna make something of it?
It is good that political philosophers aren't in charge of designing bridges or refineries. It's also good that engineers usually have limited means to try to make people and animals "make sense" -- because the fact is, much of the time, they just aren't going to. Systems for forcing them to do so are called totalitarian regimes, and invariably spiral into murder and madness.
ReplyDeleteMeh. My political philosophy is about letting people figure out on their own what works and what doesn't, i.e. people should be treated as grownups. Life is a discovery process, and trying to force things into preconceived notions rarely works, especially when (as one of my favorite econbloggers, Lynne Kiesling, puts it) what we're up against is a knowledge problem. The devil is in the details.
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ReplyDelete@Rob -- Link?
ReplyDeleteIt was in one of Patrick's blog postings (where else?)