On Child Sacrifice

In her seminal 1973 short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, Ursula Le Guin presents us with what at first glance appears to be a utopia. In the titular city, we are told, the people are happy. ‘Mature, intelligent, passionate,’ they lead lives of ‘boundless and generous contentment’ in ‘the splendour of the world’s summer.’

Yet the city has a dark secret. In a tiny, cramped basement room somewhere at its heart, there is imprisoned a small child who ‘looks about six, but is actually nearly ten.’ Forced to sit naked in its own excrement hour after hour, day after day, and fed only on a diet of corn meal and grease, it can now no longer even cry, but merely makes ‘a kind of whining.’ Everybody in the city knows that the child is there. And each of them knows the ‘strict and absolute’ terms on which their happiness is founded. The child must never be released, never cared for, and indeed may not even have a kind word spoken to it. If such a thing were to happen, the happiness of the city would be destroyed. The people knowingly and willingly make that trade-off, accepting the suffering of the child for their own well-being - except, that is, for those few who cannot tolerate such a state of affairs and choose to leave.

The story is generally read in two ways. First, it is understood to be a critique of utilitarianism. Ultimately, the ongoing happiness of the populace may, when viewed dispassionately, outweigh the eternal suffering of the single child. But Le Guin’s heroes, the ‘ones who walk away’, clearly do not see matters in those terms. The whole point is that one cannot, and should not, view any single person’s suffering dispassionately in the first place. As William James put it in the essay which inspired the tale, keeping a ‘certain lost soul’ in permanent ‘lonely torture’ in order to make millions happy would be a ‘hideous thing’ if it was the result of deliberate choice. Real life may involve often unconscious trade-offs. But taking a conscious decision to inflict misery on an innocent in the name of general happiness is a different matter.

Second, Le Guin was clearly of the view that most people, when confronted with such a dilemma, would quickly reconcile themselves to the fact that their happiness was contingent on suffering. In this respect the story is very bleak. There are some individuals who cannot go on living as normal when faced with the fact that their happiness is founded on another’s misery. But they are in the small minority. Most people do not experience any cognitive dissonance in thinking of themselves as a ‘good person’ while tolerating the very suffering that allows them to live a comfortable life. And, indeed, even the small, virtuous minority who cannot ignore suffering tend not to be able to act to change matters. There are no Good Samaritans in Le Guin’s tale - only Bartlebys.

Looking at recent developments, however, one begins to see a third reading of ‘Omelas’ that is in fact much more direct. It is important that the central figure in Le Guin’s dystopia is a child. Children are stereotypically innocent. And though every parent understands this to be a sweet myth, if they are good parents they try to protect that innocence - at least when it comes to the big things, like sex, death, and sorrow - for as long as they can. One should not wrap one’s child in cotton wool, as the saying goes, but there is plenty of time as a grownup in which to confront the realities of life. Childhood should be a period of calm before the storm and it is the duty of adults to protect it insofar as they can.

Moreover, we all understand that children lack responsibility for their actions, as they cannot properly foresee the results in advance. While any good parent knows that children must learn that actions have consequences, they also recognise that there is a fundamental injustice in forcing children to bear full responsibility for their conduct. Children are not just innocent in the sense of lacking knowledge, then. They are also innocent in the sense that they cannot be held fully guilty for doing anything wrong.

This is undoubtedly why Le Guin had her scapegoat take the form of a child - it brings about the point more forcefully. One can and should feel sorry for a suffering adult, but it is partly the job of adults to suffer on occasion for a higher cause. It is the fact that children should in principle not do so that gives the story its power. And there is something uniquely horrible in particular about the notion that a child should endure torment in order that adults can be free to enjoy lives of bliss. That is the real obscenity at the heart of the tale: that adults, who by rights should be the ones to shoulder the responsibility of suffering, visit it instead upon a child. This completely inverts the proper relationship between the two stages of life.

Le Guin’s story can therefore also be read as a tale about sacrifice. It is a meditation on the way in which adults abdicate their own duty to sacrifice their interests for their children, but also how they force children to make sacrifices instead on their behalf. And when thought of in this way, it is difficult not to see Omelas all around us.

The most salient recent example of this is the way in which children were treated in most developed countries during the era of the Covid lockdowns.. The young, at minimal risk from the virus and with every precious moment of their childhoods at stake, were in that period subjected to months of quiet torment for essentially no reason other than to assuage the mostly unfounded fears of their parents and teachers. (If you think ‘quiet torment’ is an exaggeration, remember that rates of sexual abuse of children skyrocketed during the lockdowns. Can a worse torment be imagined than a child forced to spend every moment of every day cooped up indoors with their abuser?) There was something very Omelas-like about adult members of the laptop classes enjoying their sunlit gardens and baking sourdough while insisting upon ‘stopping the spread’ as an entire generation of children were forced to put their youths on hold.

Consider also how in our societies, children - often much too young to even really know what sex is - are able to access the most extreme and violent pornography imaginable at a few taps on a smartphone or tablet. How is that this situation is allowed to go on, and has gone on now for over a decade? It is because adults wish to be able to explore their every sexual whim untrammelled, without having their privacy disturbed by the requirement for age verification in order to access porn. And it’s because parents prefer that little Johnny remain quietly absorbed in a screen rather than pestering them with pleas for attention and thereby disturbing their peace. Like the people of Omelas we wish to enjoy our ‘dreamy langour’ and ‘wonderful visions’ without a pang of guilt. We do not wish to sacrifice our own pleasure for the sake of our children; we offer up their innocence on the altar instead.

But the inversion of responsibility between adults and children takes place at a much wider and more pervasive scale. The ills of family breakdown and the consequences of it for children, for instance, are as plain as day. Yet the idea that adults might restrain their impulses or sacrifice their own happiness for the sake of their children has become an anathema in public discussion of the topic. Better that children should suffer than that the field of adult options should be constrained. Think also of the way in which the problems of the young – anxiety, depression, ADHD, and so on – are medicalized with easy palliative pills so that adults do not have to confront the idea that perhaps there is something deeply wrong with the way modern youths are being raised, and with the society in which they find themselves. We wish away their anguish because we have bigger things on our minds - work to do, dinner to make, TV to watch. And let us not mention the issue of child care, where despite the evidence being pretty clear that spending a long time at nursery/daycare is bad for children’s outcomes, politicians can barefacedly brag about their ‘investment’ in the practice as a potential vote-winner. Who cares about what children experience? The important thing is the economy.

When one has read Le Guin’s story in this light, then, one begins to see the playing out of this dynamic in the relationship between adults and children everywhere. We modern adults are continually reconciling ourselves to children’s unhappiness, and sacrificing their interests, because we are just more comfortable that way. Like the people of Omelas, we might initially baulk at the ‘abominable misery’ of a suffering child, but we soon get over it, and manage to persuade ourselves (if we think about the matter in the first place) that there’s nothing we can do about the problem anyway. We shrug off responsibility; our children are forced to bear the consequences. We aren’t in the end so very different from the population of Omelas after all.

With a tide of anti-natalism on the rise there is a growing sense in our culture that the creation of children is itself ‘harmful’ - bad for the environment and guaranteed to increase the sum of human suffering. This is accompanied by a much more trivial mean-spiritedness towards children typified, for instance, by the growing clamour for child-free flights. People seem less and less likely to see children as a delight, and increasingly to perceive them as irritants. At the same time, declining birth rates mean that, by definition, the number of voters who do not themselves have children is inexorably rising - meaning that parents (the ones who inevitably think most, on average, about the interests of children) themselves are set to play a smaller and smaller role in our democratic decision making. Our societies have already come to resemble Omelas a little too closely for comfort, as we have seen. But this trend may be about to accelerate.