Dostoevsky, Abortion, and Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas"

"But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas." - Ursula K. Le Guin

Dec 06, 2024

When I was about fourteen, a school librarian recommended I read Ursula K. Le Guin. She was a kind woman and we shared a love of books, but her recommendation could not have been more wrong.

I picked up The Dispossessed and hated it from the first page. I found the language sharp and jarring, and the intricate plot, replete with neologisms, felt overwhelming. After I gave up on The Dispossessed, I did not read Le Guin again for fifteen years.

Imagine my surprise when I learned a few months ago that Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov inspired Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas.”1 “Omelas” is only four and a half pages long, so I decided to give Le Guin another try.

In this story, Le Guin describes a beautiful village called Omelas in which the children are happy and their parents are “mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched.” Omelas is a beautiful place free of slaves, soldiers, and deleterious modern technology. It has parades, farmers’ markets, and a thriving community.

It also has a secret. Omelas - all of its beauty and happiness - hinges on the total misery of one tortured child. The child is locked away in a dark closet to suffer alone, never touched and never loved, barely fed, and often beaten. The child is what Le Guin calls “feeble-minded,” with a limited capacity to understand its own pain. Per the rules of this grim tradeoff, nobody may even speak a kind word to this child.

Citizens of Omelas learn about the child when they are teenagers. They must view the child and witness its suffering. Most people are horrified by the spectacle yet, for the same reason any of us accept daily horrors, they accept it.

But a few people choose to walk away. Says Le Guin,

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.

As it turns out, this story is drawn from a thought experiment posed by Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov.2 Ivan, a proud atheist, says to his devout brother Alyosha:

[L]et’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that, in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say [a little girl], and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it?

For the record, Alyosha says no. But some people would probably say yes. In fact, I’d argue that most people would. Ivan, for his part, cannot reconcile the suffering of even one child with the existence of a loving God. That’s part of why he debates Alyosha. Ivan wants to understand how his brother can accept the notion of an all-knowing, all-loving God who nonetheless permits innocent suffering.

Ivan’s dilemma is an age-old one that almost everyone has pondered. Yet it’s Ivan whose atheist, materialist ideology more readily countenances suffering on a practical level. For the Christian, the pain of even one innocent is a moral stain. In other words, the ends do not justify the means. But under a utilitarian paradigm engendered by atheist materialism, such suffering would have to be a matter of calculation. If one innocent might suffer to protect the many from the horrors of the world — illness, poverty, starvation, early death — I think the utilitarian would have to accept it. How can one who does not hold human life as sacred resist the temptation to sacrifice one for many?

There are several reasons why it is interesting that Dostoevsky inspired “Omelas.” One is that Le Guin rejected Dostoevsky’s cherished worldview, Christianity, and embraced Taoism.3 Another is that Le Guin had an abortion, which seems to belie the message of “Omelas” and certainly contradicts the moral themes of The Brothers Karamazov. Le Guin said of her first pregnancy:

[I]f I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child. But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. […] If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, [my other children] would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law.4

Le Guin’s wording is brutal, if incisive. She recognizes that her unborn child was “a life,” though, in her opinion, one of no value.

Like the ones who choose to remain in Omelas, Le Guin was willing to accept an offense against an innocent life to secure her future happiness. What’s more, Le Guin framed her abortion in purely practical, even utilitarian, terms. Some might say that an aborted child does not “suffer” in the same way as the so-called “imbecile” child in “Omelas,” even if that fictional child could not understand its suffering. But even Le Guin acknowledged that her unborn child was a life, and that she took this life for her own benefit and the benefit of her future children.

One might feel justified in asking, then, what value a child has in Le Guin’s worldview. If the value of a child derives from its wantedness, then the value of a child - born or unborn - can change at any time. In fact, the suffering or death of an unwanted child could be called good.

Is it possible that Le Guin would have viewed the ones who walk away from Omelas as fools? Did she understand why, for most, practicality won out in the end?

Any reader of Dostoevsky knows that he was devoutly Russian Orthodox. The Russian Orthodox Church fiercely opposes abortion, so Dostoevsky surely would have too.5 What’s more, Dostoevsky had particular reverence for life given that he once avoided a firing squad by minutes.6 He also lost his first child, a daughter, to an illness when she was three months old.7

How, I wondered, could Le Guin admire Dostoevsky yet oppose his fundamental belief in Christianity and its concomitant reverence for life? Dostoevsky knew suffering better than most. After his arrest for joining a politically subversive literary society, he toiled in a Siberian prison camp for years, then went into exile. In total, Dostoevsky spent nearly eleven years in prison or in exile before he returned home. In other words, Dostoevsky had as much reason as anyone to doubt God’s goodness. Still, he believed. These were his last words to his children, spoken on his deathbed:8

“[N]ever forget what you have just heard. Have absolute faith in God and never despair of His pardon. I love you dearly, but my love is nothing compared to the love of God. Even if you should be so unhappy as to commit some dreadful crime, never despair of God. You are His children; humble yourselves before Him, as before your father, implore His pardon, and He will rejoice over your repentance, as the father rejoiced over that of the prodigal son.”9

Dostoevsky’s deathbed sentiments reflect the edifice upon which Brothers Karamazov was built - a deep conviction of the moral necessity of God. A significant portion of that novel involves both Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov encountering innocent children who suffer and die. It is Alyosha, the novice monk who embraces the mystery of such suffering, who is the novel’s hero. Ivan, by contrast, discovers that his refusal to accept God creates more problems than it solves. Ivan may not understand how a good God can allow the innocent to suffer, yet he also comes to realize that “if there is no immortality of the soul, then there is no virtue, and everything is permitted.”10 That is, under a godless paradigm, people may do what they please without moral scruple, constrained only by fear of punishment. Indeed, this attitude is what causes the murder of Ivan’s father.

One would think Le Guin appreciated the problems with Ivan’s worldview after reading “Omelas.” After all, it is Alyosha who would have chosen to walk away. Yet Le Guin displayed the same mercenary attitude as those who stayed in Omelas when discussing her abortion. She, too, calculated the price of sparing an innocent life from suffering. She, too, thought it too high.

I suppose the answer to my confusion about Le Guin is there in Dostoevsky’s last words to his children. Dostoevksky told his own children to never despair of the mercy of God, no matter what they had done. One imagines he would have said the same to Le Guin, and that is what matters.

Dostoevsky, Abortion, and Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas"

"But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas." - Ursula K. Le Guin

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