#  Seeking Justice Beyond Retribution 

 





June 28, 2024

 

 

     ![Headshot of Dr. Diane Moore](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/rsz_1dr_diane_moore_1.jpg?h=f0b97760&itok=iLJdM18g) 

 



 

 These are challenging times to talk about just peacebuilding when the overwhelming public representation of justice is as retribution. Anything labeled “war,” for example, is fueled by multivalent representations of retribution and their counter justifications of “defense” with a zero-sum, winner-take-all formulation. In these scenarios, “winning” is defined as vanquishing the foe to a sufficient degree that killing and other forms of direct violence are no longer required to maintain the conditions of “order” that victors determine. This is often presented as “peace.”

 Though common and accepted, these forms of justice and peace are delusive. Gandhi was right. “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”

 So, we ask ourselves: what other forms of justice and peace are possible? Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” invites us to consider alternative possibilities.

 The story begins with a vivid description of a community festival in a picturesque town called Omelas. There, residents are depicted as happy and content, fulfilled by a balance of love, meaningful work, and multiple opportunities for play and creative pursuits. The narrator anticipates the reader’s skepticism regarding the credibility of this story with the following lines: “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.”

 The “one more thing” is an equally vivid description of a child locked in a small, windowless room with dirt floors. Referred to as “it,” the child is equipped only with a bucket and two foul-smelling mops that the child fears. No one visits or speaks to the child. Their only interaction with others is when they are periodically fed small portions of food and water to stay alive. Sometimes during these feedings, others will come to stare and sometimes mock the child, but none stay. The child wasn’t always locked in the room and remembers their mother’s love and happy times before.

 The narrator goes on:

> They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

 Le Guin ends the story describing how every now and then, after seeing the child and contemplating the conditions of their existence in Omelas, a person decides to leave the city of happiness for a place “even more unimaginable.” They always leave alone, and their destination is unknown to others. Le Guin ends the story with the following: “But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

 There are many ways to interpret this story. If taken literally, for example, it is quite despairing.

 But I find Le Guin’s story profound as a metaphor for moral imagination. I interpret the ones who walk away as those who refuse to accept as inevitable the structured existence of Omelas, where the well-being of some is dependent on the abject misery of others. For me, Omelas is a metaphor for binary, zero-sum interpretations of existence where “othering” is presumed as inevitable. To walk away is to step into the “unknown,” where we create a world where collective flourishing is possible.

 This story invites engagement. People read the story as one of despair, or an abdication of responsibility. Yet, the possibility of creation is in recreation.

 Another interpretation takes us further. N.K. Jemisin wrote “The Ones Who Stay and Fight.” In this story, she writes of a city called Um-Helat where people have a shared responsibility for keeping the society functioning. That means there is a shared responsibility for facing suffering and alleviating it. There is a shared responsibility for restorative justice. There is a shared responsibility for healing. She ends the story with this reflection:

> Now you might finally be able to envision a world where people have learned to love, as they learned in our world to hate. Perhaps you will speak of Um-Helat to others, and spread the notion farther still, like joyous birds migrating on trade winds. It’s possible. Everyone—even the poor, even the lazy, even the undesirable—can matter. Do you see how just the idea of this provokes utter rage in some? That is the infection defending itself . . . because if enough of us believe a thing is possible, then it becomes so.

 Le Guin gives us critique and questions our role in the world. She makes us question how we are responsible for suffering, and we must each provide our own answers. Jemisin offers a new way of seeing the world. She invites us to think about our role in creating a more just world. We have agency. We can imagine our own world anew. We can work to create a new reality. My dear friend and HDS Writer-in-Residence Terry Tempest Williams invites these same kinds of opportunities. She insists that we refuse to settle for the given, the predictable, and the probable. “There are so many ways to change the sentences we have been given.”

 Justice fueled and motivated by love is our “antidote to extinction,” in the words of MRPL graduate Sara Jin Li. An expansive, open-hearted, radical love that defies the death-dealing power of “othering” requires a recognition of our profound interdependence with one another and all of creation, where the ecology of life is assumed and celebrated.

 Religious and spiritual traditions function to both inspire and thwart this radical vision of love. Understanding the power of religion for good and ill can help us identify why good intention alone is insufficient to transform the zero-sum binaries that lock us into paradigms of fear and retribution. We at RPL believe in the existence, promise, and power of radical love as the foundation for engaging in the process of just peacebuilding. We are honored to collaborate with others as we strive to “walk away” from paradigms based on “othering” to create an alternative present and future fueled by radical love.

 by Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean for Religion and Public Life