I

I see the child as either a living token, model, or representative symbol of beastly chaos and mentally disabled helplessness which is despised and avoided by the Omelasian population, or as a Khlystyian-like scapegoat mechanism with which the celebrants of the Summer Festival become ritually exonerated from a religiously mandatory, orgiastic sexually sinful mode of behaviour.

"The Khlysty seek after the bodily concrete in the assuming of Divine life. This leads them to the edge of the abyss. And eternally they break off into the abyss, and tumble down into the element of darkness."   [1] (Berdyaev. 1916.)

    But why did the belief emerge (become socially useful) that the ritualistic rite of passage of queuing to view a helpless child living in conditions little removed from that of a pig was a necessary experience for young Omelasians? Many beliefs appear strange to strangers (or even more thoughtful fellow countrymen) who do not share them. Unfamiliar behavioural antinomies often emerge when societal members attempt to distance themselves from (or rationalise) social acceptances (or lack of them) from their genuine human nature and natural environment. Members of the Russian Khlysty sect believed that only after sinning or sharing the banality of evil could a person be sincerely repentant and accepted within the cult and be pleasing to God - so in order to please God - they sinned - and how!

But what was the underlying reason in Omelas  for engendering such a  guilt by association acquired in observing an abused child and doing nothing to help?  Was the forming of a queue and the  ritual visit to gawp at such a piteous child  a social mechanism enabling the young Omelasians to gain a the acceptance-status of shared guilt  for an Omelasian moving from naive adolescence to complicit and culpable adulthood?

The import of all this seems to be:

"Walk past the child  without pity.   Don't walk away from Omelas.

You are just as guilty as the rest of us who live here."

 Of course my views are all very subjective - but this is the secret of the astounding success of this carefully contrived tale - for it relies almost completely upon the imagination of the reader and the way that he or she chooses to interpret the society depicted through the distorting mirror of their own opinions and individual philosophical, political and religious prejudicial outlooks and preoccupations.

     The essay comprises of three parts. The first short section provides an outline of scapegoatism, and concentrates on some modern manifestations of the phenomena.

     The central section is concerned with an overall view of the flawed utopian society which Le Guin skilfully depicts given the calculated paucity of background information and cleverly deliberate lack of character development, and the fact that the narrator admits to having no knowledge of the laws of the country of Omelas nor the details of the religion of its inhabitants.

A close reading of Henry James, who has been identified as 
a source for this idea, suggests that the author  Le Guin  is  bringing  this thought experiment to us didactically and pedagogically,
and calling upon us to pronounce a verdict upon the 'terms' which dictate such an arrangement as being distasteful and morally wrong.

The way the narrator describes the child's plight [based upon an idea by Henry James] in such a way which suggests that the author Le Guin is bringing this thought experiment to us didactically and pedagogically, and calling upon us to pronounce a verdict upon the 'terms' which dictate such an arrangement as being distasteful and morally wrong.

      I rise to this challenge and to the essay question upon which it is based in the conclusion and determine an account and provide reasons why I would choose not to walk away from Omelas, but stay and do all that I could to affect change to the underlying nature of a state which was obviously founded upon 'terms' of unspeakable evil, which put into place a perverted constitutional concordance that was based upon the wholesale, methodical, institutionalised re-enforcement of a malignant and pervasive lie.


                                                                     A CONSIDERATION OF SCAPEGOATISM.
     One of the most perplexing ceremonies in the Jewish Torah is the offering of a "scapegoat" to atone for the sins of the people. A scapegoat is the animal that is pushed over the cliff on the Day of Atonement and carries away all the sins of the Jewish people on its back.


                                                                     Maimonides tells us that the "scapegoat":

...[Has the capacity to] atone for all the sins in the Torah, whether they be light or grave, whether the transgression was committed unintentionally or with deliberation, whether the sin is known to the perpetrator or whether it is not ... ( [2] Maimonides)

   Why should the whole stability of the Omelasian state depend upon such an example as the human being as an Untermensch?

                                                         In the words of a well-known Satanist commentator:

'If stupidity is sin, can the mentally disabled ever be considered to have worth?  Not only that but what to do with all those people we deem inferior, the Untermensch? [3] Crabtree.2006.

     There are many economic, social, religious and political reasons to initiate scapegoatism. Envy; different modes of language, dress and physical appearance, antithetical religious beliefs and practices and social behaviour considered inimical to the majority. Physical and/or mental disability or slowness [or even nimbleness] of wit are often the reasons why certain members of a given society or group are picked on or left out and neglected by an uncaring majority. Demographic majorities often consciously or unconsciously subjugate and denigrate a demographic minority. Ruthless rulers or the leaders of extreme left wing, right wing and theocratic political parties often pick on a visible minority to deflect attention away from the inadequacies, cruelties and abuses of their tyrannical regimes.

                                                              AN ANALYSIS OF OMELASIAN SOCIETY.
The storyteller introduces us to Omelas as being a paradise – an idyllic utopia of the most incredible beauty in which the whole population live in the most perfect peace and happiness – everyone that is – except for a single child.

   The child, we are not told its sex, whose existence is introduced towards the end of the account of the virtual Shangri-La, is abused and maltreated so the other citizens of Omelas can continue to exist in a state of Socratic style eudaimonia and happiness.
   
     Locked in a closet with only one small, cobwebbed window, the child is dirty, naked, and malnourished. It receives only half a bowl of corn meal and grease a day and often sits in its own excrement. The author offers no hints as to whether the neglected child fits one of the stereotypical examples I have outlined above - of which only its physical and/or mental disability is obvious. Perhaps it was born mentally handicapped? Maybe it has become an imbecilic through fear, malnutrition? It could be autistic, a Down's Syndrome child, or a victim of AIDS acquired during foetal development - we are not told.

     There seem to be none of the usual economic, political or religious tensions that appear in most cultures. The sociocultural organisation is sketched in by Le Guin with very light brushstrokes - indeed she urges the reader to complete their own imaginary version and cherry-pick their own preferences as to the systemic particulars. She herself is satisfied to confine her societal vignette to a beautifully presented overview of a virtual paradise, which she suddenly, dramatically and unexpectedly exposes like a lancing the tissue of an apparently benign lump, which is suddenly revealed as a purulent abscess, which pours forth the revolting pus of an unbelievable societal pitilessness.

     Le Guin's character of the child appears not to fit any of the usual conventional or formulaic conceptions or images of someone punished for the perceived errors or inadequacies of itself or of others. He or she appears to act as a powerful symbolic representation of a taboo-laden unverbalised former savagery from which the Omelasians have at some time emerged.

     The poor white-faced, whimpering excreta-covered brute acts as a constant reminder or warning of chaos, so that any unthinkable societal or political changes or steps back from the paradise they have created must be avoided in case they be a structural mistake which results in a return to some hated former state of a bestial animality from which they themselves have struggled free and have no wish to return.

     The implication for the young residents of Omelas who were led to the room in which the child  (petrified at the sight of the mop and bucket)  lay as a bizarre instructional: 'rite of passage' might have been that the almost sub-human condition as evidenced by the child was to be avoided at all costs. In an absence of political or religious coercion the inference of the prophylactic device of the child-as-beast psychomyth was no doubt to frighten the future Omelasians into believing that the paradisaical utopia which they and their parents enjoyed could only continue if the protocols and mores of Omelas were acknowledged obeyed and maintained if the happiness and security of their utopia was to continue, otherwise they might well end up like the infrahuman creature in the cellar. The insinuation is:

‘Look upon this child and take heed! In the event of the collapse of our paradisaical utopia and social structure due to meddlesome and unnecessary political change – this could be you!’

As a young boy we children experienced a didactical warning lesson somewhat similar but much less harrowing to that of the young men and women of Omelas.

When I was a young boy, we children experienced a didactical warning lesson somewhat similar but much less harrowing to that of the young men and women of Omelas. In my case it was the bodies of dead children rather than living ones that provided the awful warning of a dreadful Victorian past to be avoided. Like the Omelasian youngsters in the story, we children were taken by the grown-ups, but it was not to some grim cellar that we were herded, but to a dimly-lit room of a 'museum' in a British seaside resort.  It smelt like a veterinary surgery with low wooden shelving deliberately positioned at child eye-level height upon which rested large biological specimen jars of grey liquid.

Inside the jars were the grotesque wrinkled bodies of hideously deformed infants, lolling lazily in their baths of formaldehyde as our feet rocked the uneven floorboards of their macabre last resting-place. Their misshapen noses, some of which were bereft of nostrils were flattened against the circular glass whilst unblinking whitened eyes stared sightlessly from their sunken orbitals. We saw hideous bodily malformations covered in malignant molluscum too grotesque to describe.

     The purpose? They were an adult society's warning against the dangers of syphilis - for all the victims were either the aborted offspring of syphilitic mothers, or children who had survived into early childhood before succumbing to a dreadful death. I was reminded very much of this unforgettable experience as I read through the story of Omelas and its people - a nightmare which I have tried to this day to bury in the deepest reaches of my psyche.

     My opinion is that this young victim was not a scapegoat in the biblical sense of the word at all - for the usual prerequisites and essential conditions of the shifting of sins onto another characteristic of scapegoatism were absent. The child played an important part in the political, social fabric of the society in that it provided a propaganda lesson which was internalised by most of the population - apart that is, from those who chose to walk away from Omelas, a city in which, from what we were led to believe [or imagine for ourselves] was free of sin anyway for judging from Le Guin's account there was no sin as we know it to be off-loaded or deflected, and the child was obviously not the focus of the usual discriminations and resentments which usually accompany such majority vindictive behaviour.

    To be more explicit, I do not believe that the child acted as a scapegoat upon which the population could offload or rid themselves of their sins, but rather acted as a dire warning of the sort of depravity and chaotic hopelessness to which those that visited and observed the child would descend if any changes were to be made to the entablature of 'terms' upon which the so-called utopia was originally founded. The child was in effect playing the role of a lone surviving Jew that the Nazis might have kept in some zoo-like environment, that people might view as a terrible warning of what the Untermenschen actually look like in the flesh.

     Up until the time that the child is introduced into the story we are carried along by the eloquence of the writer and the breathtaking attractiveness of the utopian paradise she describes. It is a place that we have all dreamed about and we are encouraged to dream further by the skilful author who invites us to fill out the details of this Shangri-la with default paradisaical elements nearer to our personal heart's' desire.

Occasionally after visiting the child and seeing the deplorable conditions under which it lives, a few people, leave Omelas forever.

     Before we experience the jolt to our sensibilities that the disclosure of the child's predicament delivers, we wonder how such a stress-free utilitarian society has come about. A market is mentioned but no hint is given as to whether it is a free-enterprise economy or that the market-holders might be employees of the state. Money is not mentioned, but no reference to a barter-system either. There are boats in the harbour suitably be-decked for the celebrations. Are they for pleasure or commercial fishing? We are left to guess. No mention is made of the outside world other than as to an unknown mysterious place to where those who walk away from Omelas walk towards when they can stand the awful anomaly of the child's incarceration no longer.

     Is Omelas self sufficient? Does it trade with nearby states? We are left to guess or to provide the answers for ourselves. Whatever the answers to these questions when the ten and twelve year old children have been taken on their obligatory visit to see the incarcerated child and have been told the story that 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 - they all understand that their happiness depends on the maintenance of the utopian status quo. Thus does a whole society assent to child-abuse.

    Quite frankly the message is an evil one and a terrible air of the sinister hangs over the so-called their utopia - I say their utopia for the word 'utopia' is an abstract one and whilst the elements of one social organisation may be a utopia for some, they may be significantly dystopian for others.

   One assumes that whoever it was that insisted that a child's happiness should be required as a forfeit in exchange for general public happiness was a god or a shaman of some sort, for sacrifice seems to be a requirement of most religions?

    One is willing to suspend one’s belief completely regarding the consequences of a societal breakdown if the terrible warning that is embodied in the existence of the brutalisation of the child was ignored, or if the child died and was not replaced by another cautionary victim. What is equivalent to the cultural entablature of code of behaviour or beliefs that "the terms" upon which foundation of happiness Omelas is founded.

     Who were the instigators and signatories of these ‘terms’ and who the co-beneficiaries? Whoever was to blame – there is no doubt that the ‘terms’ were ‘strict and absolute.’ Some readers no doubt would already have made an effort to come to terms with the horror of the arrangement, and rationalised it in utilitarian terms as being an agreement whereby the overall population would be the beneficiaries of such ‘terms’ and that the greatest good would be rendered to the overwhelming majority of the population.

     Some sympathetic [but appalled] readers might even be prepared to accept the suggestion of the possible damage and deterioration that would flow to the material fabric of their city, to a reduction in the standard of health and inter-personal mental stress and happiness of their children that such a change in the political constitution would engender, and reluctantly decide that all things considered, there is no logical alternative but to abide by the 'terms?'

    If such an agreement were broken and the terms were to be abrogated, society would founder without its salutary bugbear functioning as an object of dread or apprehension, and it would be quite understandable if the breakdown of society was accompanied by a decline in the quality of the products of their educational system, and that the quality and quantity of their harvests decline, for the threatened neglect and decline of agriculture would also be understandable if the state were to be rendered unstable and chaos stalked the land..

     Thus most people who read the account of Omelas would be willing to swallow the story of the threats to the stability of the state if the sacrificial exemplar of consequences of unconformable beastliness was ignored, or no longer remained in existence to frighten them into compliance with wishes of the unknown architect or draughtee of the  *terms* upon which the constitution of their state was founded with the compliance of the country's populace or elected representatives.

     The sticking point for me and I suspect for many more readers of the story must come when they confront the claim of the adult establishment that even the kindly weather of the skies above Omelas was dependent of the suffering of one child. For me this line is a fatal flaw in an otherwise perfectly crafted philosophical mind-game, for the tale then descends from that of an account of a society which could in certain circumstances come into being and be possible (and my tutor mentioned a society in the Pacific somewhere which had elements of a similar anthropological practices) to one of a pure almost religious fantasy which offends my particular taste in Science Fiction.

     My taste in the genre is for stories which, though they may be highly improbable, manage to correspond to conceivable occurrences, or conceivable societies which are scientifically feasible. I know that some would argue that fantasy is fantasy, and that one must be prepared to sacrifice all credulity if the full benefits of the science fiction's scenarios’ and concepts are to be allowed to stimulate the mind philosophically.

I can only answer that this story stimulated my mind tremendously in spite of what I [subjectively] identify as an unnecessary contextual glitch.

                                                                CONCLUSION – TO LEAVE OR TO STAY?
Le Guin's brilliant strategy of provides nuanced suggestions as to the nature of the Omelasian society which allows the reader's mind to grope with the many possibilities in the story. There are few hard facts, but instead opportunities for endless speculation and interpretation.

     Why is the child kept alone in the closet? I have provided my own main subjective explanation or guess but there are many other possible answers. I will now supply as second possible explanation. If there was a form of religion in Omelas as the narrator informs us, then there is a concept of sin. Sin is usually interpreted as an act that is regarded by theologians as a transgression of God's will.

  Who knows what the celebration of the Festival of Summer celebrates, or the nature of the rite. Were the observances secular games in the nature of the Ludi Saeculares of ancient Rome, or did they embody some unspoken spiritual or transcendent symbolisation beyond and above the ordinary range of human experience or understanding, that a visitor such as the narrator would miss and be unaware?

     Perhaps the child's incarceration has a religious origin and significance. The basis of the concept of sin depends upon the perceived transgression of some moral code that generates guilt. The narrator invites us to introduce the practice of orgies and public copulation, which suggests either the deliberate generation of sin - or a complete absence of the notion.

      The Russian Khlysty cult of the 19th and early 20-century, who renounced priesthood, holy books and the veneration of saints believed it was necessary - almost mandatory to commit sin - otherwise one could not experience the joy and grace of being relieved or cleansed of such a transgression of God's will . The Khlysty practised the attainment of divine grace through sin in ecstatic sexual rituals that turned into mass orgies. Because of the lack of a obvious sacerdotalism and religious symbols and structure, perhaps the visiting narrator would have been unaware of the religious nature of Omelasian culture. There is no concrete evidence to answer this question.

Was the morally outrageous treatment of the neglected child a symbolic public sin? 

     Whatever the reasoning behind the dreadful practice, and whether either of the two suggested explanations I offer might be true, I would have felt impelled to try to change the custom.

     I would not have simply walked away, but stayed and attempted to educate the citizens that the psychomyth that their happiness was based upon the retention of an ossified social structure.  I would have tried to point out that the child was acting as a Nazi model or exhibit of an abhorred past, or as a scapegoat used as a symbolic sin-mechanism to off-load their orgiastic wickedness.  I would shout out aloud that the incarceration of the child was a lie which stained them all and the country of Omelas.

     The narrator goes to great lengths to point out that the people of Omelas were intelligent in a similar way to us. I would take this as an encouragement to those who walk away, to hope that both they, and the people who elect to stay, would be receptive to an exposure of the mythos.

     Whilst it is true that intelligence alone is no guarantee of rationality, there is the expectation that their cleverness might help them to reformulate the 'terms' that dominate and mar the ethical standing of their city and rid it of the terrible secret that underlies its defective utopian nature, both in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world outside.

     Felicity and forgiveness is attainable without the need to rely on the suffering of another. There is no requirement for some unfortunate, barely existing, human curiosity to serve as an exemplary or cypher of a type of unthinkable ‘other,’ which once seen, acts as a lesson in prophylactic aversion.

Intelligent, imaginative, well-balanced human beings should not need one - if they do need one - then utopia itself is an unrealisable myth.

Notes:

[1] Berdyaev. N.A. 'Spiritual Christianity & Sectarianism in Russia.

http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1916_252a.html © 1999 by translator Fr. S. Janos (1916 - 252a - en) DUKHOBNOE KHRISTIANSTVO I SEKTANTSTVO V ROSSII. Russkaya Mysl’. nov. 1916. Reprinted in YMCA Press Paris in 1989 in Berdiaev Collection: “Tipy religioznoi mysli v Rossii”, (Tom III), ctr. 441-462.

[2] Maimonides.  'The  Torah. (Laws of  Repentance'1:2) Discussion of the scapegoat is found in Tract ate Yoma, chaps. 4, 5, 6. See the Soncino Hebrew-English edition of the Babylonian Talmud, vol. 10, Yoma, ed. lsidore Epstein (London: Soncino Press, 1974); and Moses Maimonides, The Code of Maimonides, Book Eight, The Book of Temple Service (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957),

[3] Crabtree. Vexen. http://www.dpjs.co.uk/untermensch.