Responding to Tom Cotton’s 1619 Project Legislation: Ursula Le Guin Teaches us How to Walk Away from America’s Brutal History
By: Tim Libretti
Tags: Politics, Literature, Culture, Race, History

Responding to Tom Cotton’s 1619 Project Legislation: Ursula Le Guin Teaches us How to Walk Away from America’s Brutal History Tim Libretti, PhD Follow Aug 17 · 6 min read

Ursula Le Guin offers us a way to respond to Tom Cotton’s proposed legislation regarding the New York Times; 1619 project. Commons.wikimedia.org

In a previous piece I wrote responding to Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton’s proposed legislation regarding schools’ use of The New York Times’ 1619 Project, I drew on my study of U.S. literary history, invoking the writings of Frederick Douglass to let his thinking do the work of presenting an analysis of U.S. history and political economy that provides a rather stringent critique of Cotton’s ignorance.

Cotton, remember, proposed legislation to deny federal funding to any school that implemented in its curriculum The New York Times 1619 project, a series exploring U.S. history through the lens of slavery. Cotton, seemingly, wanted children to see the smiling side of slavery and come to terms with it as a “necessary evil” in U.S. national development.

In this installment, I want to invite the late great American writer Ursula Le Guin into the conversation and to draw on her capacious imagination and intellect — and exquisite sense of social justice — to develop further critique of Cotton’s position, asking us to think, in decidedly human terms, about what it means to sanction “necessary evils.” I also want to look at the way Le Guin, in her story “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas,” offers to Americans struggling with how to relate and even atone for the brutal elements of our history and their contemporary manifestations, a way to begin to imagine a way forward that helps us at once confront and address, and yet also transcend, this burdensome past.

In this 1973 philosophical short story, Le Guin describes a rather idyllic, even utopian world, where people enjoy lives of quiet joy and peace. There is no autocracy or repression, no antagonistic relationships or fighting over resources.

But there is just one little thing readers need to learn about this joyful community of Omelas. It has a condition.

Le Guin explains that joy of this community depends on the suffering of a child, living under a beautiful building in a basement in a dirty room full of mops. She writes:

“In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals . . . It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.”

Le Guin explains in the story that in Omelas children are brought to see the child some time between the ages of eight and twelve, and they learn that what is joyful and wonderful about Omelas would all disappear if the child were to be released from his suffering and set free from his imprisonment in the room. Omelas’ success is dependent on that child’s suffering.

Those exposed through this ritual to the child, learning the truth of Omelas. Often have a reaction of horror, shock, outrage, and disgust.

The people who process this experience tend to fall into two groups.

The first group Le Guin describes as coming to reconcile the life they enjoy in Omelas with this child’s suffering. The abject degradation is in some sense, to borrow Tom Cotton’s view of slavery, a “necessary evil.”

She writes of them:

“Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy.”

They reason that this “necessary evil” is precisely what endows their civilization with meaning: “It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children.”

Another group of people tend to respond another way.

Le Guin concludes the story describing them, as follows:

“At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. 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.”

These people choose not to be complicit in accepting this necessary evil, which is not just an element of their past, but an ongoing condition of possibility in their lives.

They realize what Cotton doesn’t — or what Cotton doesn’t care about: that accepting a necessary evil doesn’t just become a matter of history but a deeply embedded cultural principle.

The next thing might be caging children in order to protect our borders. It might be mandating workers return to dangerous meat-processing plants during a pandemic with no guarantee of safety — because our civilization must be fed. It might be putting the lives of our elderly at risk so our beautiful and civilized economy might re-open.

It doesn’t stop once we start making exemptions for necessary evils to make possible our so-called civilization.

How does it stop?

When people, like those who walk away from Omelas, confront the reality of suffering, of evil, and decide it cannot be supported.

Confronting the reality of the suffering we sanction means not engaging in abstract terms for Le Guin but in deeply human, sensuous, and individual terms. If we say slavery was a necessary evil, are we prepared to witness another human being lashed and mutilated repeatedly, or to be subject to rape, terror, and violence without recourse, so we can enjoy clothing made from cotton fabric?

Le Guin in this tale re-orients our sensibility so we cannot understand the larger structures organizing violence in our lives in abstract and distant ways but must understand the consequences of the structures we sanction in the most immediate individual ways.

So what does it mean to walk away from Omelas, from structural violence?

I think we in America can read the story figuratively, and see that it teaches us not to walk away literally to another place, but to confront and address our history so we can walk away from the practices, attitudes, and structures of the past into a new future we have not yet fully imagined because we have yet to live as Americans in a land without brutality and exploitation. Such action is the alternative to reconciling ourselves to others’ suffering as a necessary evil.

We face it, not to reconcile ourselves to it, as Cotton does, but to stand against it and walk beyond it, making America a new place.