But some knowledge is dangerous.
Um-Helat has been a worse place, after all, in its past. Not all of its peoples, so disparate in origin and custom and language, came together entirely by choice. The city had a different civilization once-one which might not have upset you so! (Poor thing. There, there.) Remnants of that time dot the land all around the city, ruined and enormous and half-broken. Here a bridge. There a great truck, on its back a rusting, curve-sided thing that ancient peoples referred to by the exotic term missile. In the distance: the skeletal remains of another city, once just as vast as Um-Helat, but never so lovely. Works such as these encumber all the land, no more and no less venerabe to the Um-Helatians than the rest of the landscape. Indeed, every young citizen must be reminded of these things upon coming of age, and told carefully curated stories of their nature and purpose. When the young citizens learn this, it is a shock almost incomprehensible, in that they literally lack the words to comprehend such things. The languages spoken in Um-Helat were once our languages, yes--for this world was once our world; it was not so much parallel as the same, back then.--N.K. Jemisin (2018) "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" in How Long the Black Future Month?, pp. 7-8. [HT David Duffy]
A few years ago, several readers recommended Jemisin to me after I had posted (yet again) on Le Guin. I am late to the party because her Broken Earth series (a trilogy) was, rightfully, a sensation when the individual volumes appeared wining every prize possible despite opposition from sexist, white supremacists.* The Ones Who Stay and Fight is a short story and a response, in complex ways, to Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. (It's possible that "Um-Helat" just is "Omelas" with a vowel shift and a few centuries drift.) There are many echoes of Le Guin's short story in in Jemisin's short shory.
There is, in fact, one kind of direct reference to Le Guin in Jemisin's story: among the population of Um-Helat, we are told, there are/is a "gethen" (7). Gethen is a planet in one of Le Guin's most famous novels, The Left Hand of Darkness (set in her Hainish universe). Gethen is populated by ambisexual people with no fixed sex. The implied narrator of "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" leaves it ambiguous whether this gethen is meant to be a descendant of the people of Gethen. If so, Jemisin's story is also part of the Hainish iniverse. I say 'also' because Le Guin had retrospecively inserted "The Ones who Walk Away" into the Hainish cycle with a dedication attached to another story (which I recently discussed), "The Day Before the Revolution." Or, the narrator is using 'gethen' as a means to refer to any kind of ambisexual (in the way that 'fridgerator' and 'xerox' function), and the implication is that Le Guin's writings are at least familiar to the narrator.
The previous paragraph is a kind of aside, but that there ambisexual people in Um-Helat is meant to be another illustration that in this city -- which (see also the quoted passage atop this post) is multi-lingual, multi-racial, multi-religious -- practically all human possibility is welcomed. As the narrator tells us on p. 1, "This is a city where numberless aspirations can be fulfilled." In reading about Um-Helat, I am often reminded of Plato's and, especially Al-Farabi's description of the democratic city. Recall Al-Farabi's take, "The democratic city is the city in which every one of its inhabitants is unrestrained and left to himself to do what he likes. Its inhabitants are equal to one another, and their traditional law is that no human being is superior to another in anything at all." Al-Farabi describes democracies as naturally, welcoming, cosmopolitan, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic societies ("the nations repair to it and dwell in it, so it becomes great beyond measure. People of every tribe are procreated in it by every sort of pairing off and sexual intercourse.") Democracy is presented in dazzling colors: it is "the marvelous and happy [polity]. On the surface, it is like an embroidered garment replete with colored figures and dyes. Everyone loves it and loves to dwell in it...." This dazzling feature is very present in Um-Helat, too, from the first page.
The first inkling we get of this in the story, is that in Um-Helat "anyone can earn auntiehood." (1) This suggest that it has an inclusive notion of family-hood. To be an 'auntie' in Um-helat, just means to care for a youngster. In fact, we later learn (and this is non-trivial point to the story, even a SPOILER--don't keep reading if you are not into that) that exclusive love to off-spring and parents at the expense of serving the common interest is highly problematic in Um-Helat. So, being a true 'auntie' in Um-Helat involves not favoring your own nephews and nieces.
However, unlike the democratic city, Um-Helat has social mechanisms and customs that are clearly designed to prevent any instability and the degeneration of democracy into tyranny. In particular, these mechanism are designed to prevent ideologies that promote human inequality from taking root. The 'gethen' mentioned above (again SPOILER alert), is one of the so-called 'social workers' whose job it is to root out those who secretly consume and circulate our inequality promoting (social) media. These social workers -- with a nod to 'paradox of freedom' [in the story something analogous is called the 'paradox of tolerance' (p.5)] -- literally police the spread of dangerous memes and their (human) carriers. (The viral/contagious metaphors run through the story.) Some other time, I'll return to the nature of these social workers, but in the remainder I focus on peculiar such mechanism designed to create resistance to dangerous ideas (that promote unequal respect/dignity).
For, not unlike Omelas (recall), Um-Helat has a peculiar and structurally not dissimilar coming of age ritual quoted above this post. What I am interested in here, is the content of the 'carefully curated stories.' For, not unlike the children in Omelas, they learn something about their city/polity that both is carefully kept from them (which implies an important social taboo), and simultaneously crucial to the political identity of the city and its citizens. In the case of Um-Helat it is connected to historical memory of a post-apocalyptic re-founding, and in which the archeological remnants of a bombed out civilization figures greatly.
In fact, there are plenty of hints throughout the story that Um-Helat understands itself as progressing, a work in progress, from a terrible nadir. Since the remains of the war are omnipresent and left highly visible, I was reflecting on what might be the content of the curated stories that so shock the kids.** I believe they are told that treating others as unequal, as worth dominating, inevitably leads to war, even civil war. Let's call this the bedrock principle of Um-Helat. And the reason they are shocked by the bedrock principle is that the very idea and the conceptualizations of treating others as unequal is banished from Um-Helat (remember the 'social workers' police this violently--they are like Platonic guardian-auxiliaries who guard city from internal and external enemies). It may well be very difficult to phrase in their language. (We are told they have plenty of vocabulary to mark difference, but not to express superiority in difference.)
We are told, that what "shocks the young citizens of Um-Helat is the realization that, once, those differences of opinion involved differences in respect. That once, value was ascribed to some people,
and not others. That once, humanity was acknowledged for some, and not others." (p. 9) It is pretty clearly part of the logic of the story that the carefully curated coming of age ritual is designed as a kind of social inoculation against of the spreading of inequality in respect.
Now, the passage just quoted (from p. 9) does not support my claim that what they are taught in the coming of age ritual is that treating others as unequal, as worth dominating, inevitably leads to war, even civil war. It's possible they are merely that treating others as unequal did lead to war/civil war.
But I think bedrock can explain another oddity. The social workers don't just police the spread of ideas of unequal treatment/respect, but they are especially on the lookout for people who consume our (social) media. Um-Helat is a branch that split of from us at some point in (a possible) past. (The metaphysics and epistemology of the branching worlds is worth its own post.) And the oddity of the coming of age ritual of Um-Helat is that they explicitly teach in (carefully curated fashion) the very knowledge that is considered dangerous even explicitly forbidden in Um-Helat!
Now, one might that what's central (and again there are shades of Plato) is that the reason our (social) media is forbidden in Um-Helat is that it packages especially dangerous ideas in ways that makes its spread more likely that facilitate uptake for evil. This is certainly part of the story. But as the narrator recognizes (and the folk of Um-Helat, too), by making it "forbidden" fruit, it becomes "so seductive." (p. 9) And since in order to become adult in Um-Helat is to be explicitly exposed to these dangerous ideas anyway, why make it more attractive -- to inquisitive and rebellious natures -- by forbidding becoming acquainted with the versions circulating on our (social) media?
I suspect that, in fact, the really dangerous idea -- and this is also what's so unsettling about the nature of Omelas -- is that it is not true that societies that are built on mutual disrespect, or on harming some and not others, fundamentally must lead to civil war.+ In fact, Omelas is explicitly a polity "without soldiers." To put this in the language of game theory, a fundamentally inegalitarian polity may be a suboptimal equilibrium, but an equilibrium nevertheless. And it is idea, which is key to bedrock, that is kind of the noble lie of Um-Helat. And if you don't believe that Um-Helat, which is lovely in many ways, can have any noble lies, you are in for a shock when you read the story for the first time and learn of the manner in which the social workers prevent the virus of inequality spreading. But I return to that before long....stay tuned.
*I am not a groupie, because I am not fond of her The City we Became.
**What follows is partially indebted to comments by one of my students, Oscar Hammarstedt.
+How this is possible is for another time.
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