One can’t just turn away, hoping for a deus ex machina to hose down the flames. Neither would a simple rejection of hell inherently be an embrace of happiness. The good life—a life of possibility and joy, of hope and growth, of a chance to redeem others and be redeemed in turn by their love—does not merely appear as a fantastical gift when one trains attention away from a burning world. Without fully considering a horrible situation, without examining what Arendt calls “the real story,” we grant hell the grand power of limitless myth, one that we never engage with directly but only invoke, theorize, and fear. To recognize hell in the realm of reality is to understand its true role in our lives right now—and to begin to articulate the good life we hope someday to earn. Be not distracted: the glimpses of hell do us good.

Human beings don’t all react the same way to a bad situation, however. Each person encounters hell first as an individual; for some that’s also where the response ends. In 1759, nearly two decades before publishing his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wondered about a proper moral response for a European man to faraway disaster in Asia. He imagined one “would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labors of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment.” But after expressing a modicum of humane sentiment, the man would move on, “pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened.”

Smith even criticized the idea that one might care about the well-being of others enough to have it affect one’s own life. He lamented the existence of “those whining and melancholy moralists, who are perpetually reproaching us with our happiness, while so many of our brethren are in misery.” The Scotsman preferred instead a person who knew how to keep his boundaries up: one of “real constancy and firmness,” someone “wise and just who has been thoroughly bred in the great school of self-command,” who can be exposed to injustice but remain in control of “passive feelings on all occasions.” The individualist advice feels familiar: you must stay calm enough to put on your own oxygen mask.

The late writer Ursula K. Le Guin offered in 1973 a thought experiment that tests this idea. Inspired by a moral formulation of William James and along the lines of a scheme proposed in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” describes an absolutely happy society whose pure joy is predicated on the total misery of one captive child. Nothing can be done for the child or “all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed…to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls.” Most accept the bargain. But others simply walk away and never come back. Where do they go? The narrator cannot describe the place and admits “it is possible that it does not exist.”

The reaction of these Omelans is not individualist, but neither is it one of “melancholy moralists.” They walk toward an unknown, toward the possibility of a paradisiacal life that is not contingent on the unremitting torture of another person. They abandon persistent bliss when that bliss is revealed to be corrupt and, per Arendt, “take their point of departure.” The scholar Shoshana Milgram Knapp has argued that by bringing the reader to this new horizon, Le Guin showcases “the limits of dissent.” It is not possible—even in Omelas, a city of fable conceived by a master of speculative fiction—to reorganize in small increments a society with such an elemental atrocity at its heart. The Omelans who exit are not turning their backs: they demonstrate the extraordinary difficulty of recognizing malevolence and refusing to countenance it.

Staying in Omelas, that is, generally gets presented as the most reasonable choice.

(...)

It’s not easy to do, and it’s impossible to do alone—one can’t be duty-bound to humanity at large without concern for another. Smith’s assertion that one should stay self-composed even while a faraway land undergoes a fatal calamity is sensible advice to get through one’s daily life without falling apart. But the strange and terrible truth in a world spewing forth the deathly effects of human-caused climate violence, one thundering with violent shows of inane, racist force—our world—is that every day presents new reminders of how inseparable care for one life is to care for another.

(...)

Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses that when Orpheus went down to the underworld to find his love, Eurydice, “all the places that he’d seen before / He recognized again.” He passed through these horrors to find her and began to lead her back into the light. “There hand in hand they stroll, the two together,” Ovid wrote. “Sometimes he follows as she walks in front.” I chose to put out of mind what happened next in the myth. My wife and I—we are not living a myth. We got engaged in view of a glacier we knew might not survive our lifetimes. We’re alive in the world, this world, to which we are beholden, as we are to each other, as we are to all. We are only two, but two is a beginning. I grabbed her left hand with my right and did not let go.

Hell Breaks Loose, Searching for hope in a blazing world. By Henry Freedland