On the Social Workers of Um-Helat (pt II)

So the social workers of Um-Helat stand, talking now, over the body of a man. He is dead���early, unwilling, with a beautifully crafted pike jammed through his spine and heart. (The spine to make it painless. The heart to make it quick.) This is only one of the weapons carried by the social workers, and they prefer it because the pike is silent. Because there was no shot or ricochet, no crackle or sizzle, no scream, no one else will come to investigate. The disease has taken one poor victim, but it need not claim more. In this manner is the contagion contained . . . in a moment. In a moment.

Beside the man���s body crouches a little girl. She���s curly-haired, plump, blind, brown, tall for her age. Normally a boisterous child, she weeps now over her father���s death, and her tears run hot with the injustice of it all. She heard him say, ���I���m sorry.��� She saw the social workers show the only mercy possible. But she isn���t old enough to have been warned of the consequences of breaking the law, or to understand that her father knew those consequences and accepted them���so to her, what has happened has no purpose or reason. It is a senseless, monstrous, and impossible thing, called murder.

���I���ll get back at you,��� she says between sobs. ���I���ll make you die the way you made him die.��� This is an unthinkable thing to say. Something is very wrong here. She snarls, ���How dare you. How dare you.���

The social workers exchange looks of concern. They are contaminated themselves, of course; it���s permitted, and frankly unavoidable in their line of work. Impossible to dam a flood without getting wet. (There are measures in place. The studs on their scalps���well. In our own world, those who volunteered to work in leper colonies were once venerated, and imprisoned with them.) The social workers know, therefore, that for incomprehensible reasons, this girl���s father has shared the poison knowledge of our world with her. An uncontaminated citizen of Um-Helat would have asked ���Why?��� after the initial shock and horror, because they would expect a reason. There would be a reason. But this girl has already decided that the social workers are less important than her father, and therefore the reason doesn���t matter. She believes that the entire city is less important than one man���s selfishness. Poor child. She is nearly septic with the taint of our world.

Nearly. But then our social worker, the tall brown one who got a hundred strangers to smile at a handmade ladybug, crouches and offers a hand to the child.

What? What surprises you? Did you think this would end with the cold-eyed slaughter of a child? There are other options���and this is Um-Helat, friend, where even a pitiful, diseased child matters. They will keep her in quarantine, and reach out to her for several days. If the girl accepts the hand, listens to them, they will try to explain why her father had to die. She���s early for the knowledge, but something must be done, do you see? Then together they will bury him, with their own hands if they must, in the beautiful garden that they tend between caseloads. This garden holds all the Um-Helatians who broke the law. Just because they have to die as deterrence doesn���t mean they can���t be honored for the sacrifice.

But there is only one treatment for this toxin once it gets into the blood: fighting it. Tooth and nail, spear and claw, up close and brutal; no quarter can be given, no parole, no debate. The child must grow, and learn, and become another social worker fighting an endless war against an idea . . . but she will live, and help others, and find meaning in that. If she takes the woman���s hand.--N.K. Jemisin (2018) "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" in How Long the Black Future Month?, pp. 10-11.

Last week (recall), I focused on the pecularities of the coming of age ritual in Um-Helat (a "postcolonial utopia" (p. 12)). The ritual alluded to, again, near the end of the story (quoted above). Because the daughter of the man executed by the social workers of Um-Helat has not undergone the ritual yet. She is, hence, unaware of her father's crime and the reasons for his sudden death. 

Presumably, this lack of awareness has also spared her life: there is in her no mens rea. Because she did not undergo the coming of ritual, she had no knowledge of the taboo on Earthly (social) media consumption, and the effects that may follow from the violation of it. This despite the fact that she is also infected with the Earthly ideas her father pursued and shared secretly. These ideas involve the denial of equal respect, the advocacy of social hierarchy. But also directed, or exclusive love like the intense love the child feels for her late dad. To be sure, it's okay to love one's children and parents in Um-Helat, but not at the expense of others--so in the ideals of Um-Helat, one should be aunties to many children (p. 1).

Um-Helat is governed by the ideal of mutual, egalitarian respect. But also by a kind of principle of sufficient reason (PSR) because, as the passage quoted above implies, all actions in Um-Helat can be explained (and so justified) to each other. This suggests that Um-Helat does not lack philosophy. The mutual respect ideal and the PSR are defended violently against those that seek out and circulate ideals of social subordination associated with our world. If capital punishment were not shocking enough, Um-Helat's 'social workers' act as secret prosecutors, juries/judges, and executioners at once in defense of certain kind of social taboos. 

The lack of separation in the juridical functions of social workers is presumably rationalized by their commitment to keep the fact of contagion as quiet as possible, and to weed it out as quick as possible. The law and its severe consequences are known to adults, and there is even a kind of consent to it in Um-Helat.* And so, one may think this meets minimal ideals of public reasons. But the execution of the law is not. There is a clear denial of publicity in Kant's sense (e.g., "all actions relating to the right of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is incompatible with publicity"). In addition, the law of Um-Helat does not build into its execution any safeguards against false accusation or mistakes. So, the social workers of Um-Helat are more akin to the guardians of a Government House utilitarian society (than a Kantian one).

The language of 'contagion' reminds us that the social taboo on forbidden knowledge is medicalized. Violation of the taboo on consumption of Earthly (social) media is treated as a disease. And the 'social workers' are Um-Helat's immune system. Strikingly enough, the 'social workers' of Um-Helat are themselves partially infected or "contaminated themselves" (..."it���s permitted, and frankly unavoidable in their line of work") with the very thing they are tasked to fight.

That the angry child is a potential recruit to what we may call the 'guild of social workers' makes a lot of sense upon reflection. She is spirited and loves too-partially, which are, in fact, two key qualifications for the guardians of Plato's Republic (375). So, part of the implied (invisible to us) education of such contaminated young kids into would be 'social workers' of Um-Helat is the redirection, the turning of this angry, powerful directed love into a love capable of serving the common good ferociously. 

In fact, the un-deviant, and unquestioning healthy citizens of Um-Helat are not suitable to the task of social worker. They are basically too happy and too dutiful for the task of defending the psychic health of Um-Helat with extreme measures.+ So, it makes sense that 'social workers' who are central to the survival of the ideology/ideals of Um-Helat are recruited from those like the child, spirited and with intense love. We learn that these social workers can otherwise be anyone (including (recall) a gethen).

The reason I have adopted the language of the Republic, is that the social workers themselves are both an elite of Um-Helat and, simultaneously, may also be controlled by somehow. That they are a kind of elite becomes clear early in the story, when one of them is seen to promote common mutual acknowledgment publicly (see p. 3). And, in fact, the official task of these 'social workers' is "to ensure the happiness and prosperity of their fellow citizens." (p. 7) Those that are entrusted with this noble task are those that have experienced a secret grief and kind of loss of a sort unknown (and unknowable) to the rest of Um-Helat.  

We get a hint about the function of "the studs on their scalps;" at an earlier point in the (very brief) text we were told that these are "implanted." (p. 3.) And it is also implied that all social workers have them (p. 7). Presumably to allow control from afar, a safe-guard. This is a city known for its great technological innovations, so such distant control is not beyond the possible for them. What's left unclear is who controls, who can be entrusted with power over those studs in a city in which every question is supposed to have an answer. 

*There is ambiguity in the "father knew those consequences and accepted them." Did he accept and approve the justification for them, or is the passage merely conveying that he acted in light of knowledge of the consequences?

+The citizens of Um-Helat also lack curiosity of the forbidden. Admittedly, the children of information gleaners need not be inquisitive themselves, but presumably they have more a propensity for it than those that lack such parentage. Such curiosity will be needed to find those that are information-gleaners.