The Grand Illusion
There is a story. It was written in 1973 by Ursula LeGuin, and it’s entitled “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In its essence, the story presents a utopian city whose successes and virtues all rest on the misery of a child confined in a basement room barely larger than a broom closet. The people of Omelas fall into two groups – those who accept the child’s misery as the cost of maintaining all the virtues of the city and those who walk away.
This is obviously an artificial dichotomy, and a fictional device to raise a question, and what that question might be has been the subject of discussions and arguments about the meaning of the story, its moral issues, and various take-offs for more than fifty years. Now, I certainly haven’t read all the philosophizing and stories/novels arising out of that story, but those I have read seem to tiptoe around one other aspect of the story, an aspect particularly pertinent to the present social/culture issues of today.
The United States is facing and not handling particularly well a number of social/political issues, all of which have negative impacts on someone or some group of individuals. No matter how one handles the issues around abortion and maternal health, in a great many instances someone is going to get hurt and die. In the case of gender issues, someone is going to be disadvantaged, hurt, or worse – no matter what law or policy is adopted. The same is true of immigration.
LeGuin’s story unrealistically simplifies the issue – one child versus the greater good of an entire city, and those who cannot accept that price must leave.
More than a half century ago, when I was in college, one of my professors defined the goal of government as “the greatest good for the greatest number.” It’s hard to argue against that generality, but what’s always bothered me about that definition is that it doesn’t address the fundamental and largely untouched of issue of how society should define the “greatest good.”
According to the Constitution, Congress is supposed to define that greater or greatest good through legislation, but right now, we have a President who is redefining the greater good by his standards, and a Congress unable to oppose him because the institution cannot agree on what’s best for the country… and, unhappily, that makes fictional Omelas look better by comparison.
I remember reading that short story in my youth. At the time, I considered it a philippic against the basic underlying principles of capitalism vs. socialism, but you raise some interesting points about its applicability today.
I’d argue we have a president redefining the greater good by his narcissism.
And what bothers me most is looking forward. Some 49.6% of the electorate might as well have sent a message to potential demagogues: “Please exploit me!” They’ve made clear that the politics of grievance will work for them. And that is a terrible long-term danger.
“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” stood out to me when I read it as a child, and holds up still.
Maybe part of its strength lies in the fact that it is an abstraction of a deep conundrum, and Le Guin doesn’t dictate how the reader reacts to it.
All government goals, policies and actions should have some limits. Even ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ needs to have some limits, red lines that cannot be crossed to increase the good for the majority, by harming a smaller number of people.
Same as your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose, some harms should never be allowed, whatever the justification, both for individuals and governments, and also for companies and other organisations.
But guarding against crossing those red lines requires the power of the government agreeing to be bound by those limits, setting good laws and then using its power to guard those limits, apprehending and punishing those who cross them anyway.
There are some red lines that are pretty universally acknowledged by almost all people, e.g. murder, indiscriminate killing, torture and rape are bad, child abuse is bad, and (almost as universally) so is slavery; and everyone deserves a chance at a moderately good life (at minimum, not being exploited without recourse, or born into slavery, or locked into re-education camps for having a different opinion with your government).
But that clarity has been eroded so far, in the name of greed, amassing power, pragmatism and partisan politics that I don’t see how societies that have lost sight of it can (re-)establish such a common baseline and make it work.
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