We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art: the art of words.
Ursula K Le Guin, speaking at the National Book Awards, 2014
In 2014, shortly after her 84th birthday, Ursula K. Le Guin received a lifetime award from the National Book Foundation. In characteristically fearless style, she used the opportunity to remind her audience that writing is an art, that it can be a great one, and that it can change the world by allowing us – writers and readers alike – to imagine other, better ways to be in the world.
It needed saying – it always needs saying – because making us believe that things can’t change is how dictators and oligarchs stay in power. Their methods are sometimes crude, sometimes subtle, but they too use words. If you say ‘free market’ often enough, people will stop seeing how unfree markets are when the strong manipulate the rules of trade in their favour. And, as. Le Guin tells her audience of book market people, art is not immune to such exploitations either: its rewards are not profit, but freedom. It’s why George Orwell argued so hard for keeping words true and meaningful, and why we need others today to defend them from being tainted by lies.
Le Guin’s words matter because they are encouraging in a grim time – they literally give courage because they remind me that there is nothing inevitable about the future. That is what hope knows: the future is uncertain. In an essay from 2004, ‘A War without End’, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote:
The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.
Recognising that is the first step: after it must come wisdom, generosity and kindness – the courageous leap of imagination that allows us to see ourselves and others as a single, interdependent web of life.
François Matarasso 