11 Omelas

The Eleventh Chapter,
in which you ask yourself
How do I get out?

Preparation

Required Reading: Calcutt, “Against Moral Sainthood”  (Aeon)

Optional Reading: Ratner-Rosenhagen, “The Lost Hope of Self-Help” (Aeon)

Writing:

1. Calcutt describes the “rational saint” and the “loving saint.” What are these two types of “saint”?  Answer with paraphrase, not quotation.
2. An argument is a thesis supported by one or more reasons. What is Calcutt’s thesis? What reason(s) does he provide in support of his thesis? Paraphrase or quote briefly.
3. What is your immediate reaction to Calcutt’s argument? Agreement, disagreement, or something else?
4. Respond to the following question by writing at least one paragraph: Who is someone in your life who somewhat fits into one of the two categories of “saint”? Describe them in some detail, and describe how you feel about them. 

Introduction

So we’re saying there really is real morality, and that you’d better figure out what it is, if you want to be real happy.

Ok.

But how do you do that? How do you “do philosophy”?

On the one hand that’s a weird question: isn’t philosophy just what you’ve been learning how to do in class? The Basic Move, and all that? Tackling dilemmas, examining assumptions, trying to hold on to that mental posture where you’re alert-but-also-relaxed?

Well, yes. So let’s rephrase the question: what do you need if you’re going to “do philosophy”?

Actually you already know the answer. You need what Pizan built for herself, for her readers. You need what Du Bois found in all his books. A city in speech. Breathing room. Some kind of distance between you and the normal world. Maybe it’s distance in your head, maybe it’s literal, maybe it’s both. But whatever it is, to get it, you might need to do something drastic. You might need to just walk away.

History, not just of philosophy but of politics, is full of people who “walked away.” Sometimes it was forever; sometimes it was a few years, a few months. Sometimes it wasn’t actually walking away; it was more like getting dragged away and sent to Siberia. But hey: it doesn’t get much more distant from the normal world than Siberia. Some people have made good from bad. And others have freely chosen the “bad” (does 40 days in the desert sound fun to you?) in order to break through the noise and discover the good.

But what if you had it all? I mean really had it all — what if you had not just “what you want,” but “what’s good for you,” and what was good for you was also what you wanted, just like Confucius in his old age? What if you had a world where there was justice, where there were no puppetmasters and no prisoners? What if you had happiness, and it wasn’t the shepherd’s fake happiness, it was real happiness? What would possibly make you want to walk away from that?

Discussion

What is Omelas? Simple. It’s the world outside the cave. It’s the city the philosopher built when she got out in the sun. It’s where the prisoner is trying to go. It’s the destination, the end of all this wandering. It’s the answer to all the questions, the big ones and the bigger ones. It’s the bottom of the rabbit hole. It’s where philosophy takes you, if you let it. It’s Zion. It’s home.

Does that seem wrong to you? Then look at the story again. What’s not in Omelas? First, there are no puppetmasters. There are no masters at all; the endless master-slave dialectic has finally ended. There are plenty of shepherds, but there are no kings lording it over them. There’s equality, real equality. The people don’t have to be forced by a government into treating each other as equals. They just like treating each other as equals. They prefer having friends to having inferiors. It’s what they want. And in Omelas, you get everything you want.

Second, there are no prisoners, because there are no shadows. The people are free from illusions. They are free from illusions about what is worth wanting: they know how to distinguish their needs and their wants, and they know how to distinguish their destructive desires from desires that do no harm. So they know how to practice philosophy, because that’s what philosophy does: it draws the right distinctions. It throws out the bathwater without throwing out the baby. Since they know real morality, they’re free from the limits placed on them by conventional morality, which doesn’t know how to draw the right limits, and ends up setting the limits in all the wrong places, and enforcing those limits with rewards and punishments, carrots and sticks, praise and shame. “One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt.”

What they have in Omelas is happiness. But — and this is the crucial thing — it is real happiness. It’s the happiness of a full, meaningful life, a fulfilled life, a complex life full of joy as well as sorrow. It’s not the prisoner’s happiness, the happiness of getting what you think you want. And it’s not the puppetmaster’s happiness, the shepherd’s happiness of getting what you really want, by using philosophy like a magic ring to manipulate the wants of others. It’s the philosopher’s happiness, the happiness you get when you finally learn what’s truly worth wanting, and how to truly enjoy it. It’s not the happiness you get inside the cave. It’s the happiness you find outside in the sun. The happiness that you get when you get rid of conventional morality, without falling into the trap of believing there’s no morality. It’s the happiness of true morality.

“But it’s built on a lie!” you say. Except, it’s not. That’s what makes Omelas so incredible: that’s what really puts it outside the cave. Not only do the people in Omelas have no illusions about what’s truly good; they also have no illusions about the price they pay to have what’s truly good. They’re not being lied to; there is no puppetmaster. And they’re not lying to themselves, either. Not only does this mean that they live in the truth; it also means that the happiness they have is that much richer, that much deeper. A full, meaningful life surely has to include feelings of compassion: compassion is part of what it means to be human. In a world where no one suffered, there would be no need for compassion. And life there would lose some of its meaning. A world without suffering offers only the cheap happiness the prisoners have in mind. Daydream happiness. “Ignorant bliss.” But Omelas offers real happiness: not perfection, not utopia, not ignorant bliss. Real bliss.

So now, face to face with the destination, the thing you’ve been looking for this whole time (and of course you’ve always been looking for it, even though you’ve tried to keep the right mental posture, to forget goals, to focus on the journey, to wander around the city for the sheer pleasure of asking questions without needing final answers); now you finally arrive, and what do find? Just another question. In fact it’s another damned trolley problem. You’re back to where you started.

Imagine: you reach that age where they take you down into the basement, and show you the truth about the city. They show you the little cave that the great city is built on. You see the single prisoner, the only one left behind in the cave, and you are faced with a choice.

On the one hand, you could save the prisoner, release the child from its nightmare and bring it up into the sun. You could not do this alone, probably: you would have to find allies. You might have to lead a revolution, take the building by force. People might have to die. And even if those who opposed your revolution surrendered peacefully, you will have changed everything already: you will have introduced power into the city. You, or someone, will have had to become the master, in order to force everyone else to let the slave go. But now the people you forced are your inferiors, and you are their superior. Omelas is over; you have destroyed it.

Suppose none of that is necessary. Suppose you simply unlock the door and take the child out. The story tells us that this in itself would be enough to destroy Omelas. No one wants the child to be there. The people are not sadists. They are truly moral people! The child simply has to be there. “Those are the rules.” This is a thought experiment, just like the trolly problem. It’s not supposed to be realistic. It’s supposed to show you what’s a stake and force you to choose. If you choose to let the child go, whether by leading the revolution or just by opening the door, you will destroy the happiness of the many. And more than this: you will not secure the happiness of the one, of the prisoner itself. The prisoner is beyond saving: that’s what the story tells us. The prisoner cannot be happy in the sun, because it’s been shut up in its cave for too long. You can’t do anything for it, and if you try, you’ll only hurt everyone else.

So your choice here is not “save the many or save the one.” It’s different from the original trolley problem. You can’t save the one, and if you try, the many will suffer. Now, you might think this makes the Omelas problem much easier than the trolley problem — you might think there is no dilemma, no real choice. But in fact there is. Because you can leave. The choice is whether to stay or go. If you stay, you accept the situation, and you keep the happiness, the kind of happiness you can only have if you do accept the situation. If you go, you give up the happiness, because you are not willing to accept reality if reality is so wrong.

You still accept that you can’t change reality, that you’re not free in that way. You’re not free to bend and break the rules like that. You’re not free from the limits. You’re not The One. That kind of freedom is a fantasy, and really it’s not a even a fantasy of freedom. It’s a fantasy of power. What you don’t accept, if you decide to walk way, is the idea that since the situation can’t be changed, the situation must be good. You don’t accept the that reality is morally acceptable. You’re free to insist that this is wrong, even if you have to admit you can’t fix it. And you’re free to give up the happiness that requires you to give in to the idea that whatever can’t be changed must be right.

Or, that’s what you find when you walk away and leave real happiness behind: you find real freedom. Not the fantasy of freedom from limits, not the freedom Neo has in the Matrix. You are still limited. You can’t fix this. You can’t break the rules that make Omelas what it is. You can’t just decide for yourself what will and won’t make you truly happy. If you’re going to be happy, you really do have to make those “just discriminations.” But you can give up on Omelas itself; you can give up on the dream of happiness, the dream of “enlightenment.” The dream of feeling at home in the world. And maybe that’s what real freedom is: choosing not to feel at home in a world that makes the happiness of some depend on the unhappiness of others. Choosing not to be happy with the way things have to be. (because that’s the message of the story: this really is the way things have to be). Choosing to strike out for some other way of being in the world, something that can’t be understood as “happiness,” not even real outside-the-cave happiness. Something even harder to describe than real happiness.

Harder to describe, but maybe not impossible. Here is one way think about where “the ones who walk away” might be going. It may seem strange, but consider: they might actually be going back. Back into the cave, back to the normal world, the everyday world that you yourself live in. After all, in the story of the cave, that’s what the philosopher does. He returns. And Plato doesn’t clearly explain why he returns. Why would he go back, now that he’s out? Maybe the story of Omelas points to an answer.

When the ones who walked away chose not to make themselves at home in Omelas, not to accept an unacceptable reality, perhaps they chose instead to accept the reality of the cave. Because the cave is real, too, even though it’s built on illusions. It’s the real world of common sense. It’s where flesh-and-blood people live, getting up in the morning, going to class, going to work, shopping for groceries. It’s the world that philosophy didn’t build, the imperfect world, full of boredom, violence, poverty, stupidity, arrogance. Maybe the ones who walk away sacrifice the real happiness of the city of philosophy for a different kind of real happiness. It’s not the daydream happiness of the prisoners who never left. Because the ones who walk away have been to Omelas; they’ve been outside. They can never unknow what they know. They can’t plug themselves back into the Matrix: no ignorant bliss for them. So when they go back in to live with the prisoners, they’ll give up their happiness: but they’ll keep their freedom from illusions. They’ll be “in” the cave, but not “of” the cave. Part of it, but apart from it. Engaged, but not assimilated. They’ll keep a place in their heads that stays aware, without needing to make the whole world look like that space in their heads, without needing to drag the prisoners into their utopia. They’ll go about their business, getting up in the morning, going to class, going to work, shopping for groceries. They’ll do all the same things everyone else does. They’ll follow the same stupid moral rules. But they’ll do the same things in a different way; they’ll follow the rules for different reasons. Their posture of mind will be different. Others might not even notice the difference. But the difference will make a difference.

It seems important that in the story, they walk away alone. And they might be alone for quite a while, before they find their way to wherever they’re going, whether that’s back to normal world or on to somewhere else.

Remember that the philosopher who built Omelas was once a prisoner, and that getting free of his cave meant withdrawing not only from its illusions, but also from his fellow prisoners and their common life. This is part of philosophy as a way of life. The philosophical way of life requires taking some kind of distance from society (even if it’s utopia!). Not necessarily forever: not everyone is cut out to be a hermit. But at important times in one’s life, or at regular intervals, maybe you need literal distance from people, from distractions and social pressures. Maybe solitude is necessary for freedom.

The next two readings explore these themes. The first, Simone Weil’s “Right Use of School Studies,” talks about what it might mean to be “in but not of” the normal world, to take up a philosophical frame of mind even while we are doing normal-world things, with normal people. The second, from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, shows us the freedom of perspective we might attain when we take ourselves away from normal people, out of the normal world altogether.

Reflection

1. Omelas is a situation. What is your reaction to the situation? You can use words, phrases, full sentences. Just feel and write, don’t think.
2. The situation raises an ethical question: should they stay, or walk away? What is your initial answer to this question? Your answer is part of your reaction.
3. List some features of the situation in Omelas that might have led you to react this way.
4. Is the situation in Omelas similar in any way to our general “situation” in life – just as the cave or the matrix is supposed to correspond to the human situation? Are their “children in the basement” of Normal World?
5. Read David Brooks, “The Child in the Basement” (New York Times).
6. Reflect on your reaction to the situation, and on your own answer to the question. Vary the situation by comparing it to the human situation (using your answer to #4 above). How does your real-world reaction to the human situation compare to your reaction to the story of Omelas? Explain by asking “what’s the difference”?