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Street Roots • September 29-October 5, 2017
“As a preventive measure against the
abuses of the press, absolutely nothing
should be printed for years. With this maxim
as a rule we should soon get back to God
and the Truth.”
That was said 200 years ago. What’s
changed?
People who believe that they have a
corner on God, the Truth and Power don’t
change (even though the Gods and the
Truths may change). For the us/them
people, there is only one book: “our” holy
book; the Bible, the Koran, the Thoughts of
Chairman Mao. All other writings are
dangerous, evil. Information is a threat.
Education is an enemy. The sciences are all
fakes. Arts and humanities that don’t
directly preach God are against God. The
men in power speak for God - nobody else
can. Nothing should be printed for years.
What was under threat in the Austrian
Empire of the 1820s is what’s under threat
in America now: Freedom.
A.W.: When you accepted the National
Book Award in 2014, you said in your speech,
“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be
wanting the voices of writers who can see
alternatives to how we live now, can see
through our fear-stricken society and its
obsessive technologies to other ways o f being,
and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll
need writers who can remember freedom -
poets, visionaries - realists of a larger reality. ”
What role does writing and the arts play in
ensuring individualism, free thought, and an
egalitarian society - ideals o f our country, at
least when it was founded?
U.K.L.: As I see it, writing and the arts
Ursula K. Le Guin on the porch o f her Portland home.
Ursula
Le Guin
A free press is liberty in action, the renowned author says.
A nd that terrifies those who want to rule the world.
BY A M A N D A W ALDROUPE
S T A F F W R IT E R
any consider the arts, and the
ability to produce art, intrinsically
connected to freedom of
expression and essential to ensuring a
democratic and egalitarian society.
“Artists are advocating for a highly
individual approach to humanity. Artists, by
definition, are anti-authoritarian,” as Andrew
Proctor, the executive director of Literary
Arts, put it in “the Arts for All,” (Street
Roots, Sept. 15).
That message is one that Ursula K. Le
Guin has espoused for decades. Le Guin is
one of Oregon’s grand dames of literature,
the author of the classics “The Left Hand of
Darkness,” “The Dispossessed,” and the
“Earthsea” trilogy. The New York Times
described her in 2016 as “America’s greatest
living science fiction writer.”
In 2014, the National Book Foundation
awarded her the Medal for Distinguished
Contribution to American letters, a lifetime
achievement award for contributions to
literature.
When she accepted the award at the
National Book Award’s ceremony, she
M
ripped into the commoditization of
publishing and those who prioritize profit
before art. Calling Amazon a “profiteer,” she
said, “books aren’t just commodities.
Resistance and change often begin in art.”
Le Guin, who is 87, took time to respond
to a couple of questions from Street Roots
regarding the importance of the arts and
the threat individual expression faces under
the Trump administration.
A m anda W aldroupe: The proposed
elimination o f the National Endowment o f the
Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment of
the Humanities (NEH) are a continued attack,
from the Trump administration, on arts,
letters, journalism and intellectualism. One
could say this is a continuation o f the “culture
wars” o f the 1980s and 1990s. When we talk
about the administration’s proposal to
eliminate the N E A and N E H this go around,
what is under threat?
U rsula K. Le Guin: I wasn’t familiar
with the term ‘culture wars.’ Wikipedia tells
that it goes back to a 1991 book, and that
those who use the term are mostly talking
about a struggle between religion and
culture.
In any definition of the word “culture”
that makes sense to me, religion is an
aspect of culture, just as technology, politics,
art, education, etc. are. So talking of a
struggle between religion and culture is kind
of like talking about a struggle between your
nose and your face.
In any case, I am deeply troubled by the
way we put everything we talk about in
terms of struggle, fighting, battle, and war.
I believe that the more we can avoid this
binary, oppositional approach to every
problem and undertaking, and replace the
metaphors of war and conquest with those
of discovery and co-operation, the sooner
we’ll arrive at a much more useful and
hopeful mode of thinking and behavior.
The current administration and its most
vehement supporters are entirely trapped in
the war mode, the us/them mentality: “They
don’t think like me, so they’re my enemies.
They’re out to attack me and all I believe
and am - so I will attack them, defeat them,
silence them.” A dangerous mentality to
put into power.
Now I can’t resist quoting (Friedrich) Von
Gentz, the head of the Austrian Imperial
Police :
(and the sciences, and all learning) don’t
play a role in ensuring our freedom - they
ARE our freedom - the heart of it. The arts
and sciences are the shared property of
each of us and all of us in each country and
all countries and all centuries. They are
(ideally and sometimes actually) where
every voice gets to speak, and everybody
gets to hear what’s said. They’re our true
common wealth.
The free press, the honest artist and
scientist, accept no orders from above,
resist outside control, give free thought free
play. That’s liberty in action.
Those who want to control the world are
terrified by it. They see The Enemy in every
first-grade classroom. (So: don’t teach, just
test!) Their own demons of selfishness and
denial drive them to suppress efforts to
discover and share factual truth - in the
press, in the schools, in the sciences - and
efforts to guess at truths beyond the factual,
in all the arts.
Greed, fear and denial are dead ends. If
we try to fight the reactionaries with their
own weapons of hatred and contempt, we’re
letting their acts dictate our acts - following
their way. In that direction there’s no
freedom and no victory. Just wreckage.
Let’s go on going our own way, doing our
own work. Workers in science and the arts,
all workers doing any honest work, are
obliged (at least some of the time) to look
straight at reality. They see an infinitely
complicated world in which right and wrong
can’t be dictated, and each of us is
responsible - to God, to other people, to
ourself - for our thoughts and acts. In that
great world all things are possible, even
peace and freedom.