Le Guin 4: The Ones Who Stay

When a Place Is Not a Place

 

Over the past three episodes I’ve told you a little bit about my teaching experience, my studio, other odds and ends. You may have been wondering why I’ve done it. Maybe you found it kind of interesting, maybe boring and so you skipped the intro (no way), maybe you saw the parallels I was making to that episode’s topic. How in my earlier teaching I had returned over and over to a high school culture that I had come soon to despise then somehow accept, even while vowing that I would not; that finally, as pandemic protocols began to ease, I left rather than return to the status quo normalized dysfunction; and that now I brought this podcast and other Waywords projects to you via a comfortable office of privilege.

I guess there are Omelas and otium privilege parallels there, huh? By staying in that school for fifteen years, trying dozens of different strategies for change and failing but still returning, how am I different from any of the Omelas citizens who carry different levels of shame and discomfort, but continue to take the pleasure and rewards like salary where they come? And by leaving, just when I knew that they were returning to the status quo, how was I different from the ones who walk away but leave the child behind? How am I not abandoning my accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More to them? And now? By living a life of comfortable semi-retired privilege, whose pain and suffering am I currently refusing to see, to acknowledge? How is this studio not a place that is, somewhere, built upon injustice?

I want to make clear that while Le Guin’s story is not an easy one for us to engage, I include myself in that “us,” of course. There’s an accusation in Le Guin (that also includes the author and narrator who co-authored it with us); she’s offering us a look at our own hidden selves. Our utopias are the ideal “us,” but most of us shook our heads at the perfect city as she described it (or even as we re-designed it ourselves), knowing that it is “just a fantasy,” that it is unbelievable. And she knew it; she knew that we would never believe a utopia, much less our own, could ever be achievable. 

So she added the Suffering Child. This is the part of the story that she knew would make the story believable to us. She asks after telling us about it: “Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible?” And she knows the answer is more than likely, yes, because it isn’t merely our cynicism of others we respond to in horror: it is a belief that we have inside ourselves: that there is no joy without suffering, no privilege without pain. Who are these people who leave Omelas in such quiet and solitary acts of rejection? Where do they think they are going that they can escape themselves? 

Le Guin/the narrator says:

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.

Oh. Maybe it’s not a place at all. If the concept of utopia comes from within us, is a reflection of our ideal world, and if the Suffering Child lives there, too, maybe it’s not a place they are traveling to, . . . . but a new consciousness.

 

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and today we choose how to look in that mirror.

 

From Complicity to Resolve

We’ve a lot to pull together here today, and I am frankly doubtful we can do it. After all, if I’ve been struggling with the meaning of my late staying and early retiring from the same school building for largely the same reasons, I’m hardly in a place to tie things up quickly. 

And, for what it’s worth, none of us should be eager for it. As we mentioned in earlier episodes, it is one of the initial gestures of uncomfortable readers to answer Omelas quickly and put this story past us as soon as possible. None of us can look into the mirror overlong without finding some flaw that others never notice. It isn’t the mirror that’s the problem, nor even really our reflection in it. It’s our behavior around that mirror and reflection. 

So let’s not rush to finish things up, today, though we’re going to cover some heavy ground. To begin, let’s review some of the big things we’ve settled on. Well, I assume you’re with me on them since I haven’t received any complaint emails or messages. In democracies, I am told, silence is consent.

• This story is given to us as a personal and difficult moral challenge, for all of us. I called it earlier a “moral gauntlet.” 
• I’ve challenged us to actively engage it for this reason. This is not a story to watch passively like the latest Netflix drama, with predictable twists and mind-numbing CGI. 
• But our active reading and engagement also makes us complicit in its construction; that is, along with the narrator, we build the utopia from our own preferences. 
• We’re at our most confederate when we are in the slower descriptions of the story, the prettified details, going hand-in-hand with our narrator to build a frictionless train or a robot servant or 1000 species of orchids. It is our quiet, unassuming work of casual thoughtlessness which draws us in. Slow and easy, we don’t challenge ourselves or our narrator.
• As the city is one of leisure, so too is our reading of it, a place of co-privilege with the narrator, the time to decide and build as imagination allows, a place of otium, and therefore privileged complicity. 
• If there is evil in the story, it happens here, in these casual moments of leisure and boredom. What a privilege to be bored! Evil, as our narrator tells us, is just this kind of banality. We need not scheme or plot wickedness, but only imagine the city.
• That we are in a place–as with all narratives–of uncertainty in our exploration of its ideas. We don’t know what we’ll uncover in the dark, and that is why we ask. 

In fact, when put in this way, it seems that the most evil thing any of us could do is not ask questions about our own hopes and ideals. Else how could we know the secrets of what powers our cultures? Our own beliefs?

I am reminded of the Dr. Seuss story I mentioned several episodes ago, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew. It’s a vicious little story, but it reminds us even as children that this perfect world we’re after probably doesn’t exist, and even if it did, we probably don’t want it, anyway. In the end our protagonist has a big bat to deal with the challenges we expect from life. He goes back to his old life with renewed confidence.

Dr. Seuss is not the only one who has wrestled with the question, and we’ve already heard from other literary characters who have their objections. Dostoevsky’s Ivan chooses Rebellion rather than compliance in God’s unjust universe, much as Satan himself does. And William James tells us that we would find ourselves in a “strenuous mood” of moral outrage when confronted with this level of cruelty, thus proving we suppose that arguments for pragmatism are a failure. While Le Guin’s response to James’s utilitarian view seems on point–we readers are often outraged–I think by now it’s clear that this is not the end of the argument. Our moral outrage is self-accusal.

How many others have taken up the question, have entered the dialogue on the Suffering Child as a moral dilemma—have posed the question: what is the absolute line that I would finally find intolerable? It’s a nonsense question at some level, Le Guin says, because we nearly all of us live some privileges which already run rampant over the freedoms of others. And, what is more, we expect to.

But to answer: literally millions by now. Millions have asked the question posed by the Suffering Child. Some of us have safely built garden walls around ourselves (or gated communities and HOAs or even expressways to, you know, pass quickly over the parts we’d rather not see), some have had portraits painted or tried to “live our best lives” on Instagram to keep the suffering “out of sight, out of mind.” But millions have asked. Some have answered disingenuously. 

And still others have joined Le Guin and answered far more directly. Because the only path to change is through resolve; the only way to absolve ourselves of complicity is to change our behavior around the mirror.

 

Counter-Narrative and Dialogics

Have we talked about my favorite philosopher and thinker, Mikhail Bakhtin? Tbh, every philosopher and thinker we ever talk about together will be my favorite at least as long as we’re talking about their ideas. But Bakhtin hits a soft spot with me, as you’ll see. But truly, I can’t believe I’ve done over 50 episodes of this podcast and not really talked about Bakhtin. I mean, really? Who am I?

Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian thinker and literary critic in the time of Lenin and Stalin, so there’s a big oops, right there, in terms of timing. The TLDR, we didn’t really start getting his books until the 1980s, and that–oddly enough, was superb timing.

Why? Because fundamental to Bakhtin’s thinking is this idea of interactivity, of a constant shifting and exchange, a movement, of ideas and meaning. Most of Bakhtin’s work was around this shifting perspective—it’s easy to see why totalitarian leaders might not have approved from even this much—and he described this theory as dialogism. Now, for this podcast and our discussion, I will use the word dialogics to describe it. My word is a little broader than Bakhtin’s in meaning (it’s also easier to pronounce), it’s more focused on the practice of meaning-making in this way, but the bottom line is that they are both based on the same concept that we can understand: dialogue. Meaning is formed through exchange. And just to underscore this a bit, the opposite of this might be monologics, where there is a single narrative or viewpoint, unquestioned, that authoritatively excludes every other perspective. Put that way, I guess, dialogics is a concept pretty easy for us to accept. It’s just the applications of this idea which might sometimes surprise us.

We have read the Omelas story together now, and you may or may not be on board with everything I’ve said about it. Cool. That means that either I’ve gone too far in some places or that your own mind went somewhere altogether different. Also cool. That’s what happens. It’s because stories, especially ones so open of invitation like Le Guin’s, are necessarily dialogic in nature. They invite our interaction, our participation, in the making of meaning. 

But even this podcast Literary Nomads does that. And I’m not talking about me inviting you to write or pose questions–but if you want to, you’ll find the link to our Mailbag in the Show Notes–I don’t really stand outside the email inbox every afternoon waiting for a message that never seems to arrive, really, get that image out of your head and quit thinking about white bears. No, the podcast is dialogic in nature because I offer a meaning and you, the listener, quite naturally engage that meaning with questions, skepticism, additions, revisions, agreements, doubts, or dismissals. Your own thinking is altered in some way by these words engaging with the ones in your mind. My voice and thoughts are different from yours; Le Guin’s are different from ours. We are—in nearly every cognitive way except explicitly speaking with our mouths at each other—interacting. 

More, these words I am speaking, the words on the page that Le Guin has written, themselves speak differently to readers. They mean more than one thing first, because they are from a different context. If you are a listener who remembers my reference to Tolstoy’s brother a couple of episodes back, you understood my quick joke about “white bears” a moment ago. If you had not ever heard of Tolstoy’s puzzle, you had to somehow make sense of the white bears comment and probably dismissed it as a random absurdity, because I sometimes do those, too. However, if you yourself had a different experience with white bears, perhaps you were an arctic explorer in a tight spot, then all I did was conjure some former trauma for you, and for that I apologize. Different reader contexts produce different meanings.

Good writers, too, put multiple voices inside a single story. Different characters interact; different images juxtaposed to one another, next to each other, create several meanings for us to work through. Ambiguities rise up in texts that engage each other and readers. 

The point is, we engage with words and reform them ourselves, we somehow in our minds allow multiple voices to exist simultaneously, and we do it all the time, even when they contradict each other. It’s healthy.

Now, there is a ton more to say about Bakhtin and a lot more that’s important about his work, but suffice to say for those who are aware of the guy, I realize I am selling him short right now, but that a fair amount of my own work and thinking finds home in a Russian philosopher who was kind of giving the academic middle finger to Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet machine. 

Before I brought my buddy Mikhail onto the scene, I was saying that we need to change our behavior around the utopias that are reflecting back our image in the mirror. If Le Guin’s story has accused us by lifting a mirror where we can see our own utopia’s Suffering Child, we have choices. And, because of dialogics, we can ask some questions of ourselves. And, because of the dialogic nature of thinking, we can shift our stance, spend more time examining ourselves and deciding to do something different.

Maybe we don’t remain an Omelasian citizen any more, ignoring the suffering that we have rationalized into “acceptable losses.” Maybe, too, we don’t walk away looking for a better life, a different world, a new society where these rules don’t exist. Besides, we’ve already speculated that those Walkers Away are still carrying the seed of the Suffering Child inside of them. These are the terms Le Guin has offered us, true, and I’ve argued up until now that we must accept the terms that Le Guin has served us: it’s the nature of utopia and of narrative.

But what Le Guin did is offer the mirror, hold it up and make us look hard. Now the looking is over, and we’re left as readers deciding what to do about it. We can set the story down and think little more about it, saying something like, “Wow! That really made me think!” and then promptly return to our scrolling of “rutabaga crunch” trends on TikTok. (Bt dubs, that trend does not exist, don’t search for it and don’t start it.) We can, essentially, return to our Omelasian ways, occasionally reminded about the Suffering Child and then slipping back into our quiet rationalizations and selfies. Or, Le Guin suggests, we can “walk away” from the story’s dilemmas, a quiet hope that something somewhere might some day be different if only we keep going . . . and hope, I guess? 

We can do those things as readers, the mirror still hanging there in the foyer. We hang a cloth over it, kind of like they try to do in movies like Oculus or Mirror Mirror or Behind You. And, by the way, that strategy failed in every one of these awesome and bad horror films. 

Or we can engage this story in dialogue. Keep wrestling with it, keep challenging ourselves. Fight back.

 

N. K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”

We’ve already seen how across time literature speaks to literature. And I’ve suspected, you suspect, that you’ve seen me doing this in all of our episodes up until now. We’ve looked at William James and Fyodor Dostoevsky and painter Thomas Gainsborough and Andrew Marvell and Thomas Gray and Langston Hughes and Stephen King and even Oscar Wilde. All of these (and many more who have crafted utopias before her like Bellamy and More and Charlotte Perkins Gilman)–all of these are in dialogue with Le Guin’s story. And if they weren’t before, they are now because I put them next to each other for us to see them in dialogue. 

But really, after Le Guin, has no one written anything afterwards about this Suffering Child? As Star Trek’s George Takei famously says, “Oh, my.” So yes, the answer is probably hundreds now. I have found dozens. In other words, many many readers have already been where we are now. Countless school students have been too. And it would not surprise me a bit that teachers around the world have compelled them to write their own utopias or essays about whether or not they would walk away. What more might be said?

Well, directly answering Le Guin’s question is not exactly the goal, is it? The story is now about what we readers understand and do about our own positions in that story, about what lives inside of us that our chummy little narrator has so delightfully shown us. 

Just last month as I record this in August of 2025, an online writer known as Sadoeuphemist has written a provocative little set of Omelas variations in Lightspeed fantasy magazine called “What Else, What Else, in the Joyous City?”–I’ve linked it in the Show Notes. In the first variant, everyone in the city suffers misery and deprivation, except for a single child who lives the best life ever, making art and living in beauty. All sacrifice for this child’s benefit. The section closes with: 

One day, it is said, the inhabitants of Salemo will rise up and overthrow the tyrant child, tear down its golden castle, and in its place raise up instead flourishing green parks and public libraries and song. The child will be locked away in a dismal cellar, fed on rations of corn meal and grease, and left on display for anyone to gawk at, a living monument to the misery it once inflicted upon so many. On that day, parades will sing throughout the land, flags will flutter in the breeze, and bells shall send the swallows soaring. From that day on, the city will know unimpeded joy.

Now that’s a very different dilemma, worth probably a few months of strategic planning.

But that’s this year, over 50 years after Le Guin’s Omelas, and it makes no direct reference to Le Guin. It presumes we get it. And we do. I also found a thread on BlueSky socials that rewrites Le Guin though the narrator is now someone presiding in the US White House. Many are humorous, many merely ironically turning Le Guin to make the messages more obvious. And some, I think, really have some traction, have something also to say to Le Guin as we encounter ourselves.

One of these, of course, is science fiction writer N. K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” written in 2018. I’ve been a fan of Jemisin once I (far too late) discovered her works: The Broken Earth series, the short novel Emergency Skin, and the short prose collection of How Long ‘til Black Future Month? Don’t worry. If you don’t know her work, she’s only been publishing for the past 15 years or so, so you’re still (we hope) early on in her career. Time to catch up.

Jemisin takes on Le Guin in “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” not because she is challenging the two choices that Le Guin is offering us, exactly. She isn’t arguing that the Omelasians should go and storm the child’s basement and release him like some carnivalesque scene with Quasimodo. 

I’ve dropped a link to this story, too, in the Show Notes, and it’s worth the time to read it on your own–probably several times over to see what she’s up to. So I won’t offer all spoilers for the work, but I will offer a few here. 

Jemisin creates a different utopia, Um-Helat, and she offers us a different idea of what James’s “strenuous mood” would look like if enacted. As the title suggests, Jemisin’s citizens fight for their utopia. Her Um-Helat is not built on the same grounds as the amorphous Omelas, a city apparently with very little history. Um-Helat’s history might as well be our own, a history filled with violence and ignorance and injustice, with racism and colonialism. And so there is “hard work still to be done,” for the city is not complete, built as it is upon the terrible history of suffering. What was perhaps implicit in Le Guin (globalism, capitalist exploitation, sexism, and the like) Jemisin brings out into the open. It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate Le Guin’s subtle ironies in her narrator; it’s that she has different work to do on and for the reader altogether. Jemisin realizes that in our world, walking away from exploitation is an insufficient response, an impossible response. It is global suffering, after all, a worldwide condition. Where you gonna go? 

Yes, this piece is a bit of Afro-futurism, but what of it? Who better to understand the hard work of resolving history than the global South that has lived its miseries? (And if you haven’t been reading the exciting work of Afro-futurists, I’ve got more to add to your list: Samuel R. Delany, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, Nisi Shawl, Steven Barnes, Nalo Hopkinson, Colson Whitehead, so many!)  Jemisin’s city, at least, is highly diverse and open to all forms of identity and freedoms. It understands the purpose of a city, “to shelter and nurture the people.” It is a technologically advanced city, it has become prosperous without war, no one lacks food or shelter or health. Everyone speaks several languages; the place revels in its diversity. 

But we are always in conversation with our history; we are built ideologically upon our history, and if that history is one of injustices, we must find a way to reconcile with that. Who I saw in the mirror at age 20 is not the same person as I see at age 40 (or, um, even at age 60), but we still must acknowledge and accept that earlier persona and their acts. The “fight” for Jemisin is many things, but it is at least partly with ourselves, with the recognition of the ugly exploitative narratives in us and how we can revise them, live better stories and build better communities.

Ah, I make that sound like a Hallmark card or a cliched liberal political speech. Bakhtin understands it, though. None of us like living with contradictory ideas, few of us can see the new narrative beyond the closed walls we’ve built–whether they are walls of a garden or a prison–, and few of us enjoy change, even if we are currently in unease. But Jemisin invites us in baldly, plainly:

This is Um-Helat, after all, and not that barbaric America. This is not Omelas, a tick of a city, fat and happy with its head buried in a tortured child. My accounting of Um-Helat is an homage, true, but there’s nothing for you to fear, friend.

We see Jemisin’s narrator, so openly like Le Guin’s, an arm around our shoulders. But she does not invite us to co-author the utopia of Um-Helat. Instead she has quite a different purpose. She tells us of the history, of the past, of the relics of war and pain that still litter the far countryside, shared with the people of Um-Helat once they are of age:

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.

Perhaps this is a good sign, this surprise and incomprehension, perhaps not. But the history is not hidden, not censored, not obscured or revised. Jemisin uses the word “curated,” suggesting that it is selected. Hmm. Is even this the best strategy? We could debate it. I’m sure the people do, their leaders and social workers do. Because nothing is settled yet in Um-Helat. They are still doing the hard work.

Jemisin’s utopia is worth keeping, though, she promises. But it’s not easy. She knows that remnants of the past still appear here and there. She writes: 

But there is only one treatment for this toxin once it gets into the blood: fighting it. Tooth and nail, spear and claw, up close and brutal; no quarter can be given, no parole, no debate.

What, exactly, is the toxin that we must fight? That I will leave for you to find in the work along with the narrator’s design. But, in keeping with the spirit of those before her, Jemisin unapologetically offers her own Hideous Bargain, one that perhaps conjures its own “strenuous mood” of moral outrage, but as likely–and this is the fiendish and necessary part–is defended by a mood equally strenuous. The “sacrifice” in Jemisin’s work is something a little . . . different.

I’ve read a lot of variations on Le Guin’s bargain, but none I’ve found so far match the worldly revisionism of Jemisin’s. I can’t imagine the two texts apart from each other anymore. Yes, we’ll find critics out there who suggest that Jemisin’s moralizing is too overt, but Le Guin also has a fair amount of it buried in her narrative chat. And yes, Jemisin’s narrator appears a bit too condescending, perhaps, a bit uneven at times, chiding, and this is a criticism I can agree with without losing track of the story’s larger importance.

But the one thing I really admire about Jemisin’s utopia is that it really isn’t one, not like we imagine, that blueprint design for a static end-world of perfection. As we’ve argued before, critic Tom Moylan and I–he calls them “critical utopias” and I called mine “thorny utopias”—these aren’t flawless places but dynamic ones, utopias that help us clarify that moral compass direction, so long as we actively engage them.

Um-Helat will change over time, but it has a number of its principles worked out. It changes because people change, needs and pleasures change, cultures shift and adapt, interactions vary, new creations in art and story abound, and all demand a response. We need not call it “growth” exactly, because that is too easily tied in our minds to models of profit and economy and technology. The answers will not be simple, the people may stumble along the way, but they can keep their foundation values secure: one is that the city’s purpose is to “shelter and nurture its people.” Take a moment and consider how different the word “nurture” is from, say, “keep order” or “increase productivity.” 

Narratives of Power and Normalization

Clearly, our words impact how we frame the stories we live. Le Guin’s chummy lures and seemingly kind insights turn to wonder at the horror of the Hideous Bargain. Jemisin’s language, nurturing narrator, and absolutism in combative stance, frames a very different kind of response from us. I want to pause and think a bit more on normalizing, how we can make ourselves accept anything–and I’m not going to bring up the boiling frog metaphor (which, by the way, is only a metaphor; no frog is going to sit in boiling water). 

In Le Guin’s story, the Omelasians have learned to normalize the Suffering Child, make its presence a part of their everyday lives. In Jemisin’s tale, there is another kind of normalizing. We run into an ethical aporia, that is, a place where the answers are less certain, and there is no clear route to finding any. Where is the line between righteous resistance and adding a new kind of systemic violence into our lives? For instance, I took a lot of my notes for this massive 5-part episode on Omelas and dumped them into a Google AI to help me sort them without missing any key points. Okay. People do this; it’s becoming fairly normal, for better or for worse. But by doing so, I contributed to the massive cooling requirements and energy requirements for AI and the environmental damage it creates. That’s a new kind of systemic violence we’ve created. Shouldn’t I instead be resisting every moment of microprocessing slow death? Look how fast we normalize it!

Every part of our culture works upon every other, conditioning our words and the narratives we tell ourselves. My quick use of AI is a recognition of trade-off; it makes me more open to accept future trade-offs, perhaps. I stop asking about where my clothes are made, maybe. Or I pay less attention to the working conditions of the army of one-day delivery drivers. Would my behavior change if, for instance, every time I used AI I would receive a hard tweak in the nose? Or if I was publicly shamed? Or if I knew there was a chance I might be imprisoned or executed for it? What do our systems do to what we wrap up into our normal responses? 

This sounds a lot like Bourdieu’s work we talked about near the beginning, and it is. Cultures teach us the tolerance levels for our misbehavior. We learn how to respond. 

Le Guin’s story “others” our child, makes the child an it, others it by its isolation and dehumanization in order to serve all of us. Inclusion and exclusion, of people and of ideas. Jemisin’s story makes these choices explicit. 

And now imagine that you had never read the Omelas story, engaged its thinking as we have. How would our behavior be different? What might we question less often? What becomes somewhat “less normal”? This is how stories, narratives, themselves perform as acts of resistance. They change us.

And maybe we’re thinking something like, “All Le Guin did was make me feel bad and now I can’t do anything about it,” so I counter, so what did Jemisin’s tale do? It explores the long, slow, painful work of building a world based on a different vision, different principles, different words. No matter what you think about the work and ending of Jemisin’s story–and man, by now you just have to read it yourself, don’t you? Good! No matter what you think about its work and ending, how have your questions and choices about what we might do changed?

Each culture or society, even utopias, must have boundaries, limits. People and ideas and stories they will accept into the world and those which they will not. Let’s call them taboos. The question is as often not which behaviors and ideas are taboo and which are not, but what methods we will use to subdue them. Monologic narratives? Punishments? Excommunication? Suppression? Censorship? Go ahead and choose. Because as much as we might finally agree on the vision ahead of us, that moral compass utopia, we will have a more difficult time deciding our route. Le Guin’s story offers us no methodology. Jemisin’s, problematically, does.

There is no single dreamworld perfect place in our past nor in our future, despite political promises. The healthiest place we can build for ourselves is one responsive to healthy change, the natural condition of life and mind. And it’s one vigilant to threats to those goals. 

Here’s the thing. All sides of politics envision for us static utopias that we might reach one day soon. But I suspect most of us suspect that utopias are the realm of liberal good feelings and plushy unicorn dreams. These inevitably fall to a simple moral principle of tolerance. Can we find room for the acceptance of the dignity of others, those different from ourselves? We say yes, of course, respect for others is the only way to fulfill the dignity of human beings. And then we come to the supposedly killer counter-argument: “Well, if you accept everyone’s opinions, then shouldn’t you also accept my opinions of chaos and terrorism?” Gotcha! Owned the libs!

And, well, in a word, no. As a brief response to the liberal utopia tolerance arguments, I offer Austrian philosopher Karl Popper who, surprise!, has already considered this. He offers a paradox of tolerance. He says that for a tolerant society to exist, it cannot therefore tolerate intolerance. Sounds non-sensical on its surface, and this is probably how most bumper stickers and memes offer Popper’s views. But here is what Popper really says, a bit more deeply:

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

This is from his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, written while in political exile in 1945. It’s not the simple paradox meme that is at work here, and I am not at all surprised by the laughter that sometimes resulted in my classrooms when I occasionally found reason to offer it to a very wise sophomore. We need to think about tolerance and ideas in terms of that moral compass, that destination we seek. Is our practice getting us closer to it or further away? The principle, the law in practice, is merely the vehicle. Constitutional amendments and statements of liberties are tools to help us reach a particular kind of society. If we’re not envisioning that society, that utopic conception, not wrestling with it, not challenging our own prejudices, holding on to our rights as unassailable lifeboats might not move us where we need to go.

Did I just argue that freedom of speech is not absolute? Yes, I think I did.

Jemisin told us the work is hard. It won’t be accomplished by memes and thoughtless “gotcha” logic.

The Ambiguity of Moral Action: Bataille

By now, it seems, we have left Le Guin’s “walking away” question behind us. Staying seems intolerable. Walking away is at best a failure of self-recognition and at worst an abdication of responsibility, a privileged noncompliance that changes nothing for the child left behind. Jemisin says that there is nowhere to walk away to, that the world is already filled with injustice across history and today, and so individual choices of conscience will do little to change it. She would reject a Taoist reading of the story I heard that suggests that those who walk away are spiritually transcending the world suffering. Well, okay, that’s definitely not in the text, but it still doesn’t answer the question of our Hideous Bargain. Walking away, in any event, is an action built upon privilege, like billionaires buying themselves private bunkers against the coming environmental apocalypse they helped fund. 

But, on the other hand, this idea of “stay and fight” that Jemisin offers is itself troubling. What does that look like? What am I being asked to pay here? To sacrifice?

Well, I don’t know exactly. The stories do not tell us, though Jemisin’s offers some pretty powerful suggestions. With all of these utopias and challenges before us, we’re in Bakhtin’s dialogic space of ambiguity, of changing dynamic opportunity. There is no end “solution” just as there is no perfect utopia; rather, there is a continuous and complicated struggle before us that demands an on-going, multi-vocal engagement, not a tidy plan for action.

And I promised you in our earlier episode that we would talk about French philosopher George Bataille, and I don’t want to renege on that promise. But rather than open up all of Bataille’s theories–and they are many and challenging and bizarre and off-putting to most, including me—I will touch briefly upon one which may be relevant here.

Bataille wants to redeem our Ones who Walk Away as worthy response. To get there, let’s start with the Book of Job from the Old Testament. So many folks are uneasy with this story, and it’s pretty simple to understand why. Job is a good and faithful servant to God, but he is made by God’s agreement to suffer terrible losses across time. He philosophizes and laments, but there is no end and no answer to them. Finally God appears to him, this good and suffering man, and he asks Why? God answers, basically, “I am God and that’s all the answer you need.” Job’s faith is renewed in complete submission to the ultimate authority.

Bataille comments on this, calls it a “useless suffering.” It’s a giving without a getting, a senseless expenditure. Already we can see how Bataille’s language frames a particular way of seeing the story. But surprise, Bataille loves it. For sacrifice to be pure, glorious in his words, it must be separated from this utility of exchange, this sort of capitalist notion of trade-off. That’s another ideology living fairly deeply within us.

Notice how this is different from the Suffering Child. In Omelas, the child does offer a trade; its suffering–voluntary or not–builds the happiness in Omelas. It’s utilitarian. Ah…. For Bataille, that is the problem in our moral dilemma, this idea of utility and connectedness. Is our moral outrage based only upon the idea that we connect the suffering to our own well-being? The phrase we’ve been using all along is “hideous bargain.”

In the case of the ones who walk away, they might be perfect sacrifices. It isn’t because they did not accomplish anything that they are to blame, but that their sacrifice is a perfect end in and of itself: the child does not gain and they do not seem to, either. They abandon the society’s predictable, normalized life and step into the darkness of the unimaginable world; they sacrifice the certain tragedy of Omelas for the unknown, a life without guarantees. 

In Jemisin’s story, we might have similar questions. The hard and uncertain work Jemisin describes in creating this utopia could be seen as another “uncertain future.” She and Le Guin’s walkers are engaging with what Bataille calls the “Will to Chance,” what we might commonly call risk, though it is one entirely of intention. 

Herein is the core of the activist problem, of the challenge to acts of resistance. We only want to resist if we have the guarantee, the certainty, of outcome. Good will win! If we can know the price of the sacrifice we choose to make. That’s not how it works.

Bataille tells us that the Will to Chance is an affirmation of disorder and randomness, it is a refusal to despair when ways to act seem closed. It means stepping outside of the comforting spaces we inhabit, the normalized predictability of it all, of willfully entering into a space that Le Guin says at the end is “even less imaginable than the city of happiness” and risking themselves in the process. 

And what can I tell you? Most of us who read these tales nod and say “Yes, but…” and defend their inaction, their lack of stepping away. Responding to injustice and stepping towards the unknown imaginative spaces of utopia, resisting the failures of the world we inhabit, repositioning ourselves in the mirror, requires stepping outside of our walled gardens, our comfortable lattes and otium pastimes, our privileges and our recording studios. It requires engaging the full world without knowing what it has in store for us, with our imagination of someplace better and without the promise of exchange for our risk.

A Call to Ethical Attentiveness

And so here we are. Our little utopias that we began talking about, oh, a dozen episodes ago or so now, have brought us here. We are challenged to move from passive complicity in our present to active, difficult action for change, to own up to our part in the construction of injustices. If you wish, Le Guin is the diagnosis and Jemisin is the prescription. 

But we are confronted with something you and I have long ago discussed and continue to. Uncertainty. 

And let me take a moment and reinforce where we’ve been with it.

Uncertainty is healthy and productive. It keeps us open and questioning, not closed and absolute. It recognizes that we are dynamic people, changing, not finished and narrow. It can be dizzying and confusing, but it resists resolution and closure; it keeps our experiences alive.

Uncertainty is inherently a part of literature and language. Art and the nature of meaning are themselves ambiguous, open, full of seeming contradictions to explore. We’ve talked about polysemyWhen many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literatu... More in this context, the many meanings in our words, the resistance to single, objective meaning.

Uncertainty is a reading strategy. It means embracing all of the slippery meanings, to accept the interpretative vertigo without letting it paralyze us. It’s a way for us to read and question instead of merely consume. 

Uncertainty is a human and a political condition. Our minds are uncertain, but then so is the world, it seems to us. Treading into it with a bludgeoning singular ideology is unlikely to prove successful. Instead we navigate it actively, listening and questioning, learning and shifting. 

And that we teach and learn in Uncertainty. Notice how this makes teachers no longer experts in content, but demands they be experts in navigating the ambiguous and the changing spaces before us. We understand that no reading is complete, that all reading is a kind of misreading. It seeks more. 

I talk about all of this in more detail in an episode in the middle of Journey 5, “Reading and Living in Uncertainty,” linked in the Show Notes.

Healthy and sustained uncertainty is a virtue, an essential part of genuine ethical engagement. It fits neatly into Bakhtin’s thought of dynamic meanings, the dialogics for change. The goals of art and culture are to elevate our thinking and experiences, not to “tidy things up.”

What are we supposed to do? Step out into the darkness, which is not a grim place but simply an unknown one, ask questions, and choose.

Book Clubs and Classroom Engagements

Whether we’re reading alone or in a more formal setting, dialogue about this story seems a “must do,” doesn’t it? Reading alone? Get online and find some book communities that are talking about it (it seems someone always is) or start a thread of posts yourself: who cares what the platform is: something Meta, something X, a little Federated Universe, a little BSky Blue Sky, a TikTok rant. It doesn’t matter. Process this, your thinking about it, your questions, your challenges. Because you know what? Your challenges will be the ones others are considering too, or need to be. The narrative works when dialogue is happening. Heck, what do you think I’m doing in this comfortable little studio, anyhow?

But if you’re in a book club or classroom, you’ve got a kind of built-in community. It’s a great place to wrestle with these ideas, maybe stage some Socratic Seminars (that’s what the teacher-types have been calling them for the past decade or so, though there’s not much truly Socratic about them–never mind). Stage some group discussions!

But maybe, if I can make a suggestion, teachers: maybe skip the debates. Setting up this challenging system of ethical questions as a pro/con argument simplifies it and reduces its importance to an ego contest for winning points, probably literally. Dare I suggest: the stories deserve better? The questions they raise are more important?

If you’ve gotten to this point with our lengthy examination of Le Guin, you understand that these self-examinations are personal, uncharted spaces for many of us. Let’s make room for that. And if you’re in a more community-based discussion group, the same: it’s a good space to help each other through the issues rather than simply demand they follow our own thinking on it. If the community or classroom minds feel an “action” of some kind is needed by its end, follow and join them in it. What happens if, as one of my classrooms did, they decide they want to connect to another classroom in the global south and form a partnership? What happens if they decide that the classroom rules for discussion need changing? What happens if a group decides that the uniform supplier of a school team needs to be fired? Or that an administrator’s reliance upon punishments as motivators must be ended? Support them into these unknown spaces.

There’s platform or position, and then there’s method. Le Guin and Jemisin each underline the required discussions. Maybe there are questions to pursue in our discussions. A few might be:

• What ethical differences between active maintenance of an unjust system, passive acceptance of it, figurative or symbolic resistance to it, and active resistance to it?
• What does complicity look like? What does resistance look like? If there is a between-space, what do we call it?
• What differences are there in the Hideous Bargains between Le Guin and Jemisin? Is one more justifiable?
• What can we say about the limits of human imagination in conceiving a truly just society?
• What level of injustice can be tolerated and which cannot? Is it a matter of degree (qualitative measurement), of amount (quantitative measurement), or of duration (temporal measurement)? Is there another factor in deciding tolerance?
• Is there such a thing as absolute tolerance? If not, on what do we base selective tolerance?
• What possible psychological obstacles do we have which reduce our action or resistance to injustice? How does this list reveal possible methods for activism?
• Does the scale of resistance matter? At what point do personal behavior choices become political choices?

Doubtless these past episodes might generate dozens more. The important thing is to frame the questions not as either/or, yes or no, agreements, not to place anything in a binary relationship, but to explore the relationships between the terms we use and the behaviors we inhabit. 

Personal journaling around these questions? A great idea, and one that will surely help us when we “write back” to Le Guin and Jemisin in future episodes (because you know we will). How about creating a personal manifesto which addresses these questions for individuals? Great idea. Or just creating our own utopia compass directions as responses to any of these writers? Or mapping out the plausible results of resistance through a story? That fiction could be a “safer” warmup step to the actual behavior. And, of course, there are plenty of authors who have done exactly that. 

Where We Haven’t Explored

It’s safe to say that we haven’t touched upon everything, even now. As I said last time, several have written with comments and questions, and I’ll add an episode next week to address these. If you still have a few comments of your own, feel free to drop them in the Mailbag; the link is in the Show Notes. And while it may be too late to fit you in now, I will certainly write back personally. 

But when I look at all my notes for this series, there are areas we could have explored and which I will take on in later episodes this season’s journey or encourage you to. We could talk much more about the psychology of complicity, which I think is a fascinating area. I could have opened up the Dostoevsky contradiction, the fact that Aloysha responds to Ivan’s concern about God’s plan and says that Christ is a “willing victim.” Doesn’t that make a difference to the turd in the punchbowl? Maybe! Or, in the spirit of our earlier Le Guin story, “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” we could have better addressed the entire Omelas reading as ecological or climate allegory. And of course, in dealing with science fiction and fantasy, we certainly should have touched on Darko Suvin’s ideas of “cognitive estrangement,” and with a name like Darko Suvin, who wouldn’t want to know?  I wanted to spend real time with thinkers like Michel Foucault (whose ideas I touched upon this time but didn’t elaborate) or bell hooks, though I suspect we’ll get to her when we bring Seneca back and talk about otium as a place for thinking and planning our negotium. Oh, and speaking of Seneca, we have to look at stoicism and how it addresses these issues, along with the marvelous parable of Cincinnatus. We haven’t spoken about citizenship and what it means to build and live in cities, right back to Aristotle.

You see what happens? We find ideas in dialogue with ideas. And then more ideas. And then still more. And this episode is already running far longer than I usually do. But the overflow doesn’t paralyze if we’re careful, but it frees us to discover, excites us to engage ourselves. We haven’t spoken about Le Guin’s larger “ambiguous utopia” in The Dispossessed, the movie The Truman Show, or the poetry of Tennyson. We haven’t touched upon Nigerian writers like Adichie, Soyinka, and Emezi. We haven’t touched upon some decent manga comics I know, or the music of Marvin Gaye or Pink Floyd, or even a Star Trek: Strange New Worlds “Omelas” episode. Dozens more.

The journey ahead of us is vast, and there are permutations and variations and defenestrations that I haven’t told us about, even yet. Maybe they involve writers like Ionesco or Borges or de Assis, or stage writers like Euripides or Britten. Who can be sure? But here, at this moment having looked over the Le Guin story of “Omelas,” the key questions are posed. Now it’s up to us to explore them.

We have to process some, in an episode I call What I Carry With Me, a way to capture what’s most significant for us so that our future wandering into dark spaces is with purpose. Then we’ll spend some time in writing, in activating ourselves, in reconsidering and regrouping, in developing plans for our reading and thinking. In considering what worlds we want to shape. This isn’t just an intellectual game, after all.

For me, some of it involves what I’ve already told you. I know that I stayed with the broken high school for so long because, even in those dysfunctional spaces, there were communities of young people who I might serve as a counterpoint to the larger school narrative. Together and separately we produced a lot of friction I’m proud of. But how fast 15 years went by from there is anybody’s guess. When I left, retiring early soon after Covid, I had already understood that I was not abandoning my responsibilities, just shifting them. Since the ship of public schooling was too massive to reroute on my own, and since post-Covid it seemed by inertia alone bound and determined to return to its serving out injustice on so many, I used my downtime in Covid to plan myself when the school would not. I would not retire but continue to educate myself and others, to discover new questions and thinkers, to help map out ways forward, to make meaning. (And if I read that with just a little more rhythm, it might sound like Captain Kirk speaking.)

I’m in a good place, I think. I can speak and write a bit more openly, somewhat less suppressed in the questions I raise than I might have been in a K-12 school. My curriculum is my own design, and I can offer it freely with others, a more considered approach than I ever had time to produce while teaching so furiously. And who knows? Maybe our exploration here, with Nomads and through Waywords, can help a few teachers with resources, can help students and readers who never get the chance to meet these questions where they learn. 

It’s a manifesto for my own resistance, a reader’s manifesto, which I will talk more about very soon. It’s a frictional response to what we so understandably rush through, another topic for soon. Where will we end up? It doesn’t matter; it’s like Alana of that Star Trek episode said to her father Sulu:

Oh, but father, it’s not how long we live, it’s how we live that matters. Let my life mean something!

Or Gandalf:

So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

Just because it’s corny doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

And, sitting in my comfortable studio space here in Waterford, Michigan, itself a place of work and change but in a country and state built upon some unjust history, here’s a small start:

Waywords Studio acknowledges that its space and work exist on land stewarded by Niswi Ishkodewan Anishinaabeg (nih-SWEE ish-koh-DAY-wun ah-NISH-in-ah-BEG): The Three Fires People who are the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Boodewadomi along with their neighbors the Seneca, Delaware, Shawnee, and Wyandot nations. This is land, like almost all property in the United States, which was gained, generally in unconscionable ways, from indigenous peoples who continue to be unconscionably treated.

With this acknowledgment, Waywords recognizes these First Nations’ contemporary and ancestral ties to the land, and it hopes, through scholarship and pedagogy, that it can create a future in which understanding of the past supports present-day justice, balanced by care and compassion. (adapted from a statement by The University of Michigan)

It’s a small thing now, but words form the principles which push us in the right direction. And what follows is methodology, is practice.

Go read something. And read something good.

 

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonuses, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

 

Bibliography

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Bereola, Abigail. “A True Utopia: An Interview With N. K. Jemisin.” The Paris Review, 3 Dec. 2018, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/12/03/a-true-utopia-an-interview-with-n-k-jemisin/.

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