December 15, 2016 - 18:41
“He had given up his self to the alien, an unreserved surrender, that left no place for evil. He had learned the love of the Other, and thereby had been given his whole self” (LeGuin, “Vaster...” 37). The lines, from Ursula k. LeGuin’s short story ‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow’ read like a celebration of empathy. This is surprising in its contrast to LeGuin’s other tale, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, which portrays empathy as too weak to overcome fear, an ineffectual emotion that appropriates the suffering of others in order to provide a more complex emotional experience. In the story about planetary explorers on a conscious world of interconnected plant life, empathy plays a very different role. It saves the crew from the fear projected by the plant-conscious, overcoming the barrier separating the nature from the human “others”. An “empath”, capable of receiving and transmitting the emotions, “gives in” to the nature and by ceasing to reject the fear eliminates it. While ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’ explores the role of empathy and fear in social change (or lack thereof), ‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow’ deals with the emotion in the context of our relationship to the natural world. Can the ideas of the first story be reconciled with the ideas of the second?
In ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’ a fear of sacrifice leads to a false rationalization of the suffering in the world, and an acceptance of the citizens supposed inability to confront it. The citizens are afraid that if they show kindness to a suffering child their utopia will crumble. While the story depicts society as feeling pity for, and regretting the costs to individuals sacrificed for its overall prosperity, these feelings are too weak to help overcome the fear of abandoning a system that serves one. For most of the citizens of Omelas, their empathy for the child locked away in the cellar leads to no real action. The emotion is undone as a basis for social change, because, we can too easily rationalize not acting on our feelings. The people of Omelas weep when they see the child suffering but still do nothing for it, believing its unhappiness is the necessary price of the cities well-being.
According to this story, it is rejection of fear, rather than empathy that will ultimately allow us to risk "walking away" from a society that benefits us at the cost of another. The people of Omelas justify not letting the child out because " to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed" (Le Guin, “Omelas…” 4). The type of empathy that we may see as awareness of the needs of all members of society (an emotion that is easy to hold because it demands nothing from us) can actually make us more passive.
The notion of empathy in ‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow’ is in some ways reminiscent of that of the people of Omelas, in that its main beneficiary is the feeler rather than the subject. This said, rather than being purposefully used to build up the being of the feeler- as the people of Omelas use their knowledge of suffering to enhance their cultural expression- this empathy serves as a necessary salvation for the humans forced to live with a foreign other. The “enemy” in the story is the fear of the other, projected from the forest, that threatens to drive them all insane. The essential obstacle to be overcome is their separation itself. Empathy serves this function by allowing love to be established between the empath and the plants consciousness. It implies an “unreserved surrender”, a complete coming together.
On reflection, it makes sense that this relationship would be useful in reconciling ourselves with nature, but not with other human beings. As Oswald, the empath, repeatedly demonstrates he has gained little from feeling the emotions of others besides the compulsion to reject them in a reflection of their own resentment towards him. The people of Omelas justify their rejection of the child because it serves them to do so. Their pity for the child is not the central issue and they are capable of ignoring it, at little physical cost to themselves. In the relationship with nature, on the other hand, the scientists are at the mercy of the planet and are themselves endangered by its fear. What they must overcome is a purely psychological barrier, created by themselves. Empathy, in their case, serves not so much as a means of connecting with the other, as it does to eliminate the concept of the other altogether. Ir is irrelevant to talk of the emotion failing to initiate a moral stance( like in the story of Omelas) because it is not a question of morality but of necessity. A failure to establish a connection with the planets conscious would result in them all being driven mad from fear.
Together, LeGuin’s two stories propose the proper place for empathy in any effort to create change. Empathy for “the other” is insufficient as it can be too easily overcome by fear and false rationalization to inspire a moral stance for action. Instead, it must be used to bring oneself into the issue at hand- to eliminate the barriers that allow for the frame in which harm to the “other” can be justified as separate from one’s own destiny. This is not to say that empathy should be used to shift the focus from where it belongs to oneself. Instead, it ought to shift the experience of self, such that we feel our dependence on our relationship to the “other” too clearly to dismiss it.
Works Cited
Le Guin, Ursula. “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. n.p, n.d.
LeGuin, Ursula. "Vaster than Empires, and More Slow." The Wind's Twelve Quarters: Short Stories. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. 148-178.