Evil in Um-Helat - Part 1

“The Ones Who Stay and Fight” by N.K. Jemisin is a thought experiment built on a thought experiment. In that sense it is very much a meta-story. It is explicitly a critique of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Omelas story.

I find it very troubling.

Part of why I find it troubling is that it seems to turn its back on the relationship between the storyteller and the reader and opt instead for preaching. There is nothing wrong with preaching. There is certainly nothing wrong with being a person who cares about the ethical and attempts both to live an ethical life and hold others accountable to such a life.

But this is not the life of the storyteller. In a way I still don’t understand, the storyteller and the preacher are two siblings who chose different paths through the world. The storyteller is constantly tempted to be a preacher, and the great preacher will often take on the role of the storyteller for a while. But the true storyteller resists the temptation and stays content with just the one thing: the story. And the preacher always eventunally sets the story aside for the sermon.

N.K. Jemisin’s story is a - terrifying - sermon. Le Guin’s story - I’m not quite sure.

The Start of my Prompt

This is actually the record of a one of many back-and-forths I’ve had with Claude about these stories. I find it fascinating to probe what I can get Claude to think about the story (here’s a short thing I tried that came to a quick end). Like Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT, Claude has been steered by its coders toward a progressive worldview. What this means is not easy to think through, and the point of this post is not to play political gotcha with Claude. The goal here is to ask a genuine question of literary interpretation and see if Claude can help me toward a hermeneutic of these stories.

This is how I started this most recent prompt:

I am weighing two interpretations of the two stories, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” and “The Ones Who Stay and Fight.”

1. One interpretation is that the narrators should be taken at face value and as earnest presenters of a point of view. The Le Guin narrator is presenting a thought experiment that implies by the end that perhaps the best response to profound social injustice is to opt out, to refuse to participate in this injustice. The Jemisin narrator is a harsh critique of the Le Guin story and a critique of the basic classical liberal commitments to freedom of speech and neutrality that refuse to take a side but allow every perspective and commitment its freedom to function within the state. The Jemisin narrator is willing to accept the costs of fighting for justice and against those who are “fucking evil.”

2. The other interpretation is that the stories are best understood more as sleights-of-hand on the parts of the narrators and meta-stories rather than earnest, straightforward arguments. In this interpretation, the Jemisin narrator is giving us a reductio ad absurdum, showing that fighting too simple-mindedly against what seems like obvious evil and giving up on basic liberties like freedom of speech might seem morally superior to neutrality but ends up in the greater absurdity of the social workers’ execution of the father, which is too dark for any careful reader to accept. A similar meta-story is going on in Le Guin’s story.

I am unsure which is correct. I don’t think it’s possible for both to be true. Help me find evidence of each interpretation, starting with the Jemisin story. Later we will come back to the Le Guin story.

And this was Claude’s initial response:

Let’s examine the evidence for both interpretations of “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” by N.K. Jemisin:

Interpretation 1: The narrator is earnest and presenting a genuine critique

Evidence:

1. The detailed, positive description of Um-Helat as a utopian society where “every soul matters” suggests a sincere belief in this ideal.

2. The narrator’s direct criticism of our world: “ours is a world where the notion that some people are less important than others has been allowed to take root.”

3. The justification for the social workers’ actions: “Just because they have to die as deterrence doesn’t mean they can’t be honored for the sacrifice.”

4. The narrator’s call to action at the end: “Now you might finally be able to envision a world where people have learned to love, as they learned in our world to hate.”

5. The consistent tone of moral certainty throughout the story.

Interpretation 2: The narrator is presenting a reductio ad absurdum

Evidence:

1. The extreme measures taken by the social workers (killing the father) seem disproportionate to the “crime” of accessing information.

2. The jarring contrast between the utopian description of Um-Helat and the violent enforcement of its rules.

3. The narrator’s aggressive tone towards the reader: “Are you better able to accept this postcolonial utopia now that you see its bloody teeth?”

4. The story’s structure mimics that of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” suggesting it might be a critique or subversion rather than a straightforward argument.

5. The narrator’s admission of being “insidious” near the end of the story: “See what I’ve done? So insidious, these little thoughts, going both ways along the quantum path.”

Both interpretations have merit, and the ambiguity might be intentional on Jemisin’s part. The story seems designed to provoke thought and debate about the nature of utopia, the costs of maintaining a “perfect” society, and the ethics of enforcing moral standards.

The second interpretation gains strength when we consider the story’s relationship to Le Guin’s work and the broader tradition of utopian/dystopian literature. By presenting a “solution” to Omelas that involves its own form of cruelty, Jemisin may be highlighting the impossibility of a perfect society and the dangers of moral absolutism.

However, the first interpretation cannot be dismissed entirely, as the narrator’s passion and the detailed vision of Um-Helat suggest a genuine critique of our world’s injustices and a call for radical change.

This ambiguity makes the story particularly powerful, as it forces readers to grapple with these complex issues without providing easy answers.

My Thoughts So Far

I am pretty impressed with Claude’s ability to understand my explanation of the two interpretations, and I think Claude provides good evidence for each. I have that experience of being persuaded a little bit by the first list of evidence and then persuaded a bit by the second list. I feel the tug in two directions of a good pair of arguments.

I find myself let down by the end of Claude’s analysis. But I think this is less a failing of the AI and more a mirroring of our academic culture, which is still even in a very polarized time more at home with saying, “I can see good things about both sides. Is it ok if we just stop there?”

But by ending this way, Claude has decided to ignore one sentence in my prompt: “I don’t think it’s possible for both to be true.”

I really don’t think it is possible in this case. I don’t see how the same reader can be content to call it a day here.

And so on to the second part.