Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

Nobody can do anything very much, really, alone.

What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen.

Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence.

Reading is a means of listening.

Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shouting rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you so fast and hard and loud that you’re overwhelmed. Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind. You aren’t being brainwashed or co-opted or used; you’ve joined in an act of the imagination.

I know no reason why the media could not create a similar community of the imagination, as theater has often done in societies of the past, but they’re not doing it. They are so controlled by advertising and profiteering that the best people who work in them, the real artists, if they resist the pressure to sell out, get drowned out by the endless rush for novelty, by the greed of the entrepreneurs.

Much of literature remains free of such co-optation simply because a lot of books were written by dead people, who by definition are not greedy.

And many living poets and novelists, though their publishers may be crawling abjectly after bestsellers, continue to be motivated less by the desire for gain than by the wish to do what they’d probably do for nothing if they could afford it, that is, practice their art—make something well, get something right. Books remain comparatively, and amazingly, honest and reliable.

They may not be “books,” of course, they may not be ink on wood pulp but a flicker of electronics in the palm of a hand. Incoherent and commercialised and worm-eaten with porn and hype and blather as it is, electronic publication offers those who read a strong new means of active community. The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

Some thoughts, written down at intervals, about oppression, revolution, and imagination.

My country came together in one revolution and was nearly broken by another.

The first revolution was a protest against galling, stupid, but relatively mild social and economic exploitation. It was almost uniquely successful.

Many of those who made the first revolution practiced the most extreme form of economic exploitation and social oppression: they were slave owners.

The second American revolution, the Civil War, was an attempt to preserve slavery. It was partially successful. The institution was abolished, but the mind of the master and the mind of the slave still think a good many of the thoughts of America.

Phillis Wheatley, poet and manumitted slave, wrote in 1774: “In every human Breast, God has implanted a principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.”

I would no more deny the truth of that than I would deny that the sun shines. All that is good in the institutions and politics of my country rests on it.

And yet I see that though we love freedom we are mostly patient of oppression, and even refuse deliverance.

I see a danger in insisting that our love of freedom always outweighs whatever force or inertia keeps us from resisting oppression and seeking deliverance.

If I deny that strong, intelligent, capable people will and do accept oppression, I’m identifying the oppressed as weak, stupid, and inept.

If it were true that superior people refuse to be treated as inferiors, it would follow that those low in the social order are truly inferior, since, if they were superior, they’d protest; since they accept an inferior position, they are inferior. This is the comfortably tautological argument of the slave owner, the social reactionary, the racist, and the misogynist.

It is an argument that still bedevils consideration of the Hitlerian holocaust: Why did the Jews “just get into the trains,” why didn’t they “fight back”? A question which—as asked—is unanswerable, and so can be used by the anti-Semite to imply the inferiority of the Jews.

But the argument appeals also to the idealist. Many liberal and humanely conservative Americans cherish the conviction that all oppressed people suffer intolerably from their oppression, must be ready and eager to rebel, and are morally weak, morally wrong, if they do not rebel.

I categorically judge as wrong any person who considers himself or herself racially or socially superior to another or enforces inferior status on another. But it is a different matter to pass categorical judgment against people who accept inferior status. If I say that they are wrong, that morality demands that they rebel, it behooves me to consider what real choice they have, whether they act in ignorance or through conviction, whether they have any opportunity to lessen their ignorance or change their conviction. Having so considered, how can I say they are at fault? Is it they, and not the oppressors, who do wrong?

The ruling class is always small, the lower orders large, even in a caste society. The poor always vastly outnumber the rich. The powerful are fewer than those they hold power over. Adult men hold superior status in almost all societies, though they are always outnumbered by women and children. Governments and religions sanction and uphold inequality, social rank, gender rank, and privilege, wholly or selectively.

Most people, in most places, in most times, are of inferior status.

And most people, even now, even in “the free world,” even in “the home of the free,” consider this state of affairs, or certain elements of it, as natural, necessary, and unchangeable. They hold it to be the way it has always been and therefore the way it must be. This may be conviction or it may be ignorance; often it is both. Over the centuries, most people of inferior status have had no way of knowing that any other way of ordering society has existed or could exist—that change is possible. Only those of superior status have ever known enough to know that; and it is their power and privilege that would be at stake if the order of things were changed.

We cannot trust history as a moral guide in these matters, because history is written by the superior class, the educated, the empowered. But we have only history to go on, and observation of current events. On that evidence, revolt and rebellion are rare things, revolution extremely rare. In most times, in most places, most women, slaves, serfs, low-castes, outcastes, peasants, working-class people, most people defined as inferior—that is, most people—have not rebelled against being despised and exploited. They resist, yes; but their resistance is likely to be passive, or so devious, so much a part of daily behavior, as to be all but invisible.

When voices from the oppressed and the underclasses are recorded, some are cries for justice, but most are expressions of patriotism, cheers for the king, vows to defend the fatherland, all loyally supporting the system that disenfranchises them and the people who profit from it.

Slavery would not have existed all over the world if slaves often rose against their masters. Most slavemasters are not murdered. They are obeyed.