Omelas' Social Contract Reconsidered.

I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming in to Omelas during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers' Market. Ursula Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.

Unlike More's Utopia, or Bacon's Bensalem, Le Guine's Omelas is not (relatively) isolated from the rest of the world. In fact it is clearly welcoming of visitors. The train station is a very important building, after all. And while Omelas reject finance (they don't have a stock-market) they do trade (cf. the "magnificent Farmer's Market.").In many ways Omelas, which is a port-city, resembles a commercial trading republic; they explicitly do "without monarchy." 

I have noted before (recall) that the practices, which structure social life in Omelas, are ground in a social contract. I have analyzed the contract before (recall). I had claimed the contract has three clear terms:  (a) a miserable child; (b) no talking to the child; (c) "the happiness" of the citizens of Omelas.  I had claimed there were two ways to honor the contract: (i) stay in Omelas as a citizen; (ii) walk away of Omelas; by contrast, one way to break the contract (iii) would be to free the child and thereby destroy Omelas's perfected happiness. So far summary.

I want to add three key point: first, one becomes an accountable party of the social contract by learning about the terms. Children between the ages of "eight and twelve" learn the basic facts. And often these also come to see the imprisoned child. The ones that walk away from Omelas are sensitive souls who avoid getting their hands dirty, but leave the status quo as is. Third, the social contract of Omelas constitutes the "terrible justice of reality." Knowledge of the terms of the social contract transform the meaning, by a kind of philosophical chemistry (familiar from Hobbes and Hume), of very same facts what looks like manifest "injustice"" into justice.  This means that by Omelas' lights would-be-destroyers of the social contract are not just rebels, but (if unsuccessful) unjust.

So, it means that one can be governed by the contract without being full party to it. That's clear in the case of (iv) the miserable child (who is so dehumanized to be barely human). The other (v) children of Omelas benefit from the contract without being aware of who is paying the price for it. My students pointed out to me that these children are like (vi) the visitors to, and those that trade, with Omelas. That is to say, those that benefit from Omelas' social contract, and indirectly, perhaps, enhance it, may not all know the horrible social conditions that structure their reality. 

As an aside, I tend to assume that Omelas' social contract is somewhat Hobbesian in character--that it is a contract among all the adults who thereby constitute a certain social regime. But it is not impossible that (vii) a hidden God is the counter-party to the contract. So that the contract of Omelas is more akin to a Biblical covenant; say the one promised in Jeremiah 31-4. There is religion in Omelas, but not one with clergy. This is not entirely silly because the innocent child is piacular, that is, a kind of purifying sacrifice, who thereby gives meaning to the lives of the citizens of Omelas and "makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science."

Okay, with that in place, let me get to the main point. In discussion with my students I realized that, in fact, there is another party to the social contract of Omelas: (viii) the readers of the story. For, we are actively and repeatedly invited by the narrator to co-constitute Omelas: "it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids;" "As you like it;" "I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy" and or two more such suggestions. We are like the visitors to Omelas, but unlike them, we do know the terms of the contract. 

If we, the readers, benefit from Omelas, in full awareness of the terms of the contract, and we may be fairly said to have co-constituted elements of Omelas, then we are complicit in evil.* Now, some sympathetic readers may wish to put on the breaks here, and say, that the miserable child in Omelas is, after all, purely fictional, so no harm done. We may say then, that a certain species of philosophical realism urges on us the idea that one can turn one's back on Omelas without consequence.

But the miserable child is also an intentional object. We carry it with us after co-constituting the city that harms it. And in virtue of that, we cannot walk away from Omelas because wherever we go that suffering intentional object goes. And so while we are guiltless, we are stained, too. 

*This can't be accepted by the parties to the contract. 

Comments

[David Duffy]

cf N.K. Jemisin's _The Ones Who Stay and Fight_

[Eric Schliesser]

Thank you, David, I was unfamiliar with it!

[Kenny Pearce]

I was going to recommend that story too! I'll be very interested to see any thoughts you might have on it.

Jemisin is a kind of theorist of oppression, and has very interesting things to say. A few of her works are relatively transparent commentaries on real world social structures, but most (especially the Broken Earth trilogy, which is truly a masterpiece) imagine power structures with no obvious analogy to anything in our world in order to interrogate concepts of oppression and liberation. It's also just great fiction. :)