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Reprise: The Children of Omelas
Dec. 15th, 2010 08:30 pmOver and over, I find myself returning to the theme of Ursula K LeGuin's classic tale, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", of the beautiful society whose beauty depends on the utter degradation of an innocent child who is to be shown no mercy, no human kindness, no good of any kind.
It's an allegory, and like all allegories there's an element of Platonic perfection, of the exaggeration of the perfect form in it, but our own (Western, first world) society is clearly visible through the lens of the allegory. The latest reason this was brought home to me was watching the documentary narrated by Lucy Liu about child sexual slavery in Cambodia, Redlight. In this case, the allegory and reality have almost pure points of reference to one another. The children in the story are innocent, the little girls and boys sold into slavery by relatives and neighbors are innocent. Adults in the story are aware of the children, most adults in the first world are aware of the existance of sexual slavery. Frankly, there's hardly any breakdown of metaphor, and that's really, really rare in the translation to real life. There is only one point of significant dissonance between the story and the world... but it's a doozy. In the story, the awareness of the disparity between the abused child and the rest of society is what maintains the flow of happiness and beauty. In our world, what we consider to be real, it is the careful construction of unawareness, of denial, that maintains the flow.
Our happiness, our beauty, as middle class or wealthy people in first world nations, depends on either not knowing that our prosperity rests on inevitable inherent inequalities of opportunity and on deep, deliberate exploitations of less fortunate people, or, when knowing is unavoidable, forgetting instantly. An important part of that forgetting is forgetting our role in the deprivation of the less fortunate, the distortion of third world economies in order to extract resources to fuel our lust for them, the subsistance wages paid to children as young as six or seven in order to provide an unending supply of new fashions, the destruction of the environment of entire continents and sub continents in order to produce more "consumeables" for us.
We gasp in unfeigned horror at the plight of child prostitutes in Cambodia, at earthquake victims in Haiti, at victims of tsunamis, and refugees from unending wars, and starving children during droughts. We cut a check, we might even make a trip to go shake hands and nod wisely, and then we return to our comfortable, beautiful, privileged lives, and, in order to maintain that comfort, forget that the misery didn't stop when we turned our attention away.
Most important, perhaps, is to forget, to violently deny, to vehemently protest that any of the children of Omelas live in our neighborhoods. See, the nature of the child of Omelas is innocence. If a fourteen year old girl is sold into prostitution in a US city, or her older sister, then she is not an innocent, but a co-conspirator. If, in this "great nation" (mine is the US, but you can pick your nation of choice)-- If someone is unable to pull himself out of poverty against overwhelming odds, we insist he didn't try hard enough, he failed the test of moral agency, that of escaping that dank, dark dungeon of Omelas. Without innocence in our underclass, we have no responsibility, we feel, we think -- or try to.
One thing Ms. LeGuin had wrong. There is no way to walk away from Omelas. Omelas is the whole world, and the children are in every dark corner of it. Those that matter, those that make Omelas a better place, are those that defy the strictures, those that shine a light in the dark places, a steady, warm light, those who bring blankets, and wipe tears, and help wasted, beaten bodies heal and find new strengths. Those who shine a light are often those who were born in the darkness themselves, and remember, but that is not always the case. Some people born bathed in the light of beauty and grace find a way to see past the glare of the beauty and see to the heart of the darkness, and not look away, but share their light.
Those that defy Omelas are a serious threat to the status quo. They are reviled, sometimes threatened, often mocked and belittled, in direct proportion to the steadiness and warmth of the light they hold to the Children.
I hold one of those lights, not so warm nor steady as some, but warm and steady enough, and I am frightened. The rules of Omelas are changing. It seems that those who live in the warmth and beauty are requiring more and more Children to keep the pact. Not one, now, nor a dozen or a hundred, but thousands. And declaring the Childrens' implicit guilt for living in darkness has become an article of faith in Omelas. It used to be enough to ignore the Children, to allow the crime of Omelas to be one of neglect, of careful, well-built blindness. Now, it appears, it is necessary to abuse the Children, to keep the Light flaring. But those of us who know what steady and warm light looks like see the flickering of the Light and realize it's dying. And it's hard, bloody hard, to keep the fuel within burning strongly enough not just to give light to the Children, but to shine it back, now, on the society which was built on them. And harder still, the task of building, from the fires in our bellies, a sustainable new fuel for Omelas, a new Omelas in which darkness is a place of rest, not terror, and all citizens, equally, share the happiness and beauty of the light that is the right of all of us to share.
(edited a couple times to improve flow, correct typos, and for clarity)
It's an allegory, and like all allegories there's an element of Platonic perfection, of the exaggeration of the perfect form in it, but our own (Western, first world) society is clearly visible through the lens of the allegory. The latest reason this was brought home to me was watching the documentary narrated by Lucy Liu about child sexual slavery in Cambodia, Redlight. In this case, the allegory and reality have almost pure points of reference to one another. The children in the story are innocent, the little girls and boys sold into slavery by relatives and neighbors are innocent. Adults in the story are aware of the children, most adults in the first world are aware of the existance of sexual slavery. Frankly, there's hardly any breakdown of metaphor, and that's really, really rare in the translation to real life. There is only one point of significant dissonance between the story and the world... but it's a doozy. In the story, the awareness of the disparity between the abused child and the rest of society is what maintains the flow of happiness and beauty. In our world, what we consider to be real, it is the careful construction of unawareness, of denial, that maintains the flow.
Our happiness, our beauty, as middle class or wealthy people in first world nations, depends on either not knowing that our prosperity rests on inevitable inherent inequalities of opportunity and on deep, deliberate exploitations of less fortunate people, or, when knowing is unavoidable, forgetting instantly. An important part of that forgetting is forgetting our role in the deprivation of the less fortunate, the distortion of third world economies in order to extract resources to fuel our lust for them, the subsistance wages paid to children as young as six or seven in order to provide an unending supply of new fashions, the destruction of the environment of entire continents and sub continents in order to produce more "consumeables" for us.
We gasp in unfeigned horror at the plight of child prostitutes in Cambodia, at earthquake victims in Haiti, at victims of tsunamis, and refugees from unending wars, and starving children during droughts. We cut a check, we might even make a trip to go shake hands and nod wisely, and then we return to our comfortable, beautiful, privileged lives, and, in order to maintain that comfort, forget that the misery didn't stop when we turned our attention away.
Most important, perhaps, is to forget, to violently deny, to vehemently protest that any of the children of Omelas live in our neighborhoods. See, the nature of the child of Omelas is innocence. If a fourteen year old girl is sold into prostitution in a US city, or her older sister, then she is not an innocent, but a co-conspirator. If, in this "great nation" (mine is the US, but you can pick your nation of choice)-- If someone is unable to pull himself out of poverty against overwhelming odds, we insist he didn't try hard enough, he failed the test of moral agency, that of escaping that dank, dark dungeon of Omelas. Without innocence in our underclass, we have no responsibility, we feel, we think -- or try to.
One thing Ms. LeGuin had wrong. There is no way to walk away from Omelas. Omelas is the whole world, and the children are in every dark corner of it. Those that matter, those that make Omelas a better place, are those that defy the strictures, those that shine a light in the dark places, a steady, warm light, those who bring blankets, and wipe tears, and help wasted, beaten bodies heal and find new strengths. Those who shine a light are often those who were born in the darkness themselves, and remember, but that is not always the case. Some people born bathed in the light of beauty and grace find a way to see past the glare of the beauty and see to the heart of the darkness, and not look away, but share their light.
Those that defy Omelas are a serious threat to the status quo. They are reviled, sometimes threatened, often mocked and belittled, in direct proportion to the steadiness and warmth of the light they hold to the Children.
I hold one of those lights, not so warm nor steady as some, but warm and steady enough, and I am frightened. The rules of Omelas are changing. It seems that those who live in the warmth and beauty are requiring more and more Children to keep the pact. Not one, now, nor a dozen or a hundred, but thousands. And declaring the Childrens' implicit guilt for living in darkness has become an article of faith in Omelas. It used to be enough to ignore the Children, to allow the crime of Omelas to be one of neglect, of careful, well-built blindness. Now, it appears, it is necessary to abuse the Children, to keep the Light flaring. But those of us who know what steady and warm light looks like see the flickering of the Light and realize it's dying. And it's hard, bloody hard, to keep the fuel within burning strongly enough not just to give light to the Children, but to shine it back, now, on the society which was built on them. And harder still, the task of building, from the fires in our bellies, a sustainable new fuel for Omelas, a new Omelas in which darkness is a place of rest, not terror, and all citizens, equally, share the happiness and beauty of the light that is the right of all of us to share.
(edited a couple times to improve flow, correct typos, and for clarity)
