Oregon Humanities Council hosts Think & Drink with Ursula Le Guin and Lani Roberts
Nearly 350 people packed rontoms bar (and the sidewalk outside) on a pleasant June evening in Portland to Think & Drink with Ursula Le Guin and Lani Roberts. The event was the fourth in the Oregon Council for the Humanities new conversation series, intended to spark provocative discussions about big ideas.
Le Guin, the award-winning multigenre writer, and Roberts, an Oregon State University philosophy professor, sat and the front of the crowded room discussing the theme of morality and self deception and using Le Guin’s famous short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” as a starting point. Le Guin explained how work by both William James and Fyodor Dostoyevsky influenced her story, which posits the question of how people can live with themselves when they know their happiness depends on the suffering of someone else. Roberts, using an essay by Samuel Johnson, described some techniques that humans use to deceive themselves about who they really are, which elicited chuckles of sheepish recognition from audience members and a comment from Le Guin that the techniques were “devastating” in their accuracy.
During the second half of the event, Le Guin and Roberts turned the discussion over to the audience. Because many audience members couldn’t make it through the crowded room to the microphone, several shouted their questions and comments from the floor (or, in one case, from the sidewalk through an open window). Some questioners prodded LeGuin to further interpret her story; she acknowledged that the story has no closure and no correct interpretations, which she says, “really irritates readers.” Other people made comments and observations about slavery, capitalism, and inequities both in third-world countries and the U.S. After the event, some audience members continued the discussion: on the sidewalk outside the bar, a couple was overheard arguing about what it meant to have evolving morality.
A sound file of the discussion is on the OCH website: www.oregonhum.org/think-and-drink.php
The next Think & Drink event will feature Representative Earl Blumenauer (OR-D) and Portland State University President Wim Wiewel on August 12, 2009.
Photos courtesy of Tor Clausen www.torstudios.com