Hey everyone,
Today’s post is not about the Meditations. That will come out on Wednesday and will be available for everyone. The short story for the break from our new schedule: I got caught up in working on my book proposal, which I hope will be finally resulting in a contract in the near future, and realized very late that I hadn’t revisited the Meditations in a few days. I don’t want to rush our discussion of Notebook 11, so I’d rather just take a day or two longer.
Instead, I’m publishing what was going to be a bonus post on Thursday.
All the best,
Jared
When I began this newsletter, it was called Thinker. I called it Thinker because I had the idea for it, couldn’t think of a name, and then chose a more general term for someone who likes philosophy. It was a throwaway.
A few months later, I changed the name. That was when I settled on Walking Away. In hindsight, it isn’t the best name, but I like it well enough that I’ll stick with it.
But I imagine some of you have wondered, even just a few seconds, why this newsletter is called Walking Away. So let me explain.
The name comes from a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin: ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.’ In that story, the citizens of Omelas live in blissful paradise (by at least some standards of paradise), but this comes at a profound cost. In a cellar somewhere, a child lives in misery. He or she – the sex doesn’t matter – is chosen, abandoned in this cellar, and is shown no care for the rest of its life. It subsists, but it can never know why it must live this way. The child’s misery is what allows for the city to thrive.
The point of the story – and you should really go read it if you have not done so – is that some citizens of Omelas choose to leave the city. While others are able to just let the idea of the child scapegoat dissolve in their minds, a few cannot do so. The city is built on suffering. So they leave.
It is a moving piece (available here in PDF form), and it is a great example of philosophical fiction. It is, to my mind, a direct refutation of utilitarian theories of morality and justice.
Where do the dissenters of Omelas go? Here is how Le Guin describes it:
They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
We don’t know where they go, but they seem to know.
Some of this may seem familiar. I’ve written about this story before, a little over a year ago.
Other writers have tried to take up the themes of Le Guin. The writer N.K. Jemisin wrote a story called ‘The Ones Who Stay and Fight.’ I think it is a very bad story. The paradise Jemisen describes is maintained, essentially, by a covert police state that executes those who have imbibed evil ideas. Everyone may be peaceful and good and kind — but that is because the ones who aren’t are murdered in secret.
That is not the kind of world I want to live in.
The reason I call this newsletter Walking Away is for the simple reason that walking away is, to twist the metaphor just a little bit, the first step toward trying to live in a better world. This is the sort of thinking I see in all of my favorite writers. St Benedict – my patron saint, for those curious – wrote an entire book on communal living that challenges the ordinary way of living in the world. Dostoevsky saw the challenges of the ordinary world and tried to reckon with how one could live a good life anyway. Others, like Epictetus or Frederick Douglass, had to find own way in a world not made for them.
In case you are curious, here are a few titles I considered but did not choose: Thinking Small, The Hermitage, Radio Free Omelas, and A Very Different Benedict (the first person to identify that last reference will not get a prize, but I will be impressed). I like them all to greater and lesser extents, but they just didn’t make the cut.
Last year, I taught Le Guin's story to my community college freshman comp students, and I think that was our best discussion all semester. Just last week, I finally got around to reading N.K. Jemisin's "The Ones Who Stay and Fight." Heavens, you're right: it's terrible!
It doesn't read as if Jemisin is appalled at what the "social workers" of her city Um-Helat do to suppress thoughtcrime, rather as if she thinks this is simply necessary for a revolution in social mores. For me, this was the story's most naive line: "This is the paradox of tolerance, the treason of free speech: We hesitate to admit that some people are just fucking evil and need to be stopped." The first bit suggests a reference to Karl Popper, but all the rest suggests Jemisin hasn't read his explanation of "the paradox of tolerance." And "some people are just fucking evil"? How simplistic! What unimaginative reduction of human motivations! Finally, Jemisin's story appears to make an ends-justify-the-means argument – the oppressed should fight by taking up the oppressors' weapons and tools – and it expends not a jot of thought on the possibility that this might turn the oppressed into just a new crop of oppressors.
In the story's latter half, the child whose father is murdered before her eyes for harboring evil ideas like bigotry – not acting on them – appears to be doubly victimized by being offered an only-two-options choice: die herself (because the story implies she's "infected" by those evil ideas) or become a "social worker" and perpetuate Um-Helat's murderous underground thought-policing. Yet Jemisin frames it as if the city is "caring" for the child! As if this is an improvement – imperfect but an improvement all the same – on what the Omelans do to their scapegoat! Finally, having failed to criticize her "solution" to Le Guin's thought experiment, Jemisin calls on the reader to join the fray! I finished the story thinking, "Is this supposed to be a dark satire and I just didn't pick up on it? Is Jemisin trying to say to readers, 'Get serious about fighting bigotry, or this kind of dystopia is what we may eventually resort to' – but she didn't pull it off? Or is she actually as obtuse as this story makes her look about Le Guin's point?"
I guess it's rather grumpy of me to zero in on just that part of your post, but it's just fresh in my mind how infuriating it was to read Jemisin's story and realize it was not-subtly-at-all staking out "moral high ground" over Le Guin's story yet failing to understand Le Guin's very premise.
My guess is that the other Benedict is actually 2 people: Mr and Mrs Legrand Benedict from whom we get eggs Benedict.
Sorry but I was hungry when I read this post.