I wasn’t going to come today. Partly because the act of coming here—to America, as a non-American—is now a fraught, stressful, and even dangerous proposition for millions. Also: What’s the point? That’s what an old friend, another writer, asked me. By this he meant: Why talk about arts and letters when people are being gunned down in the streets? I’m going to answer the question as best I can, but I’ll say first that when I looked at the list of previous speakers and spotted the name E.M. Forster—and the year 1949—I was curious. I wondered what he could possibly have had to say to a room full of artists in the wreckage of World War II.

So I dug up Forster’s remarks. But it turned out I’d already read them—and dismissed them—years ago, when I found them in his collection Two Cheers for Democracy. The essay is called “Art for Art’s Sake.” I prepared to reread it, not expecting much. “Art for Art’s Sake.” Really? Nothing could be less fashionable. It wasn’t fashionable in 1949. It’s never been fashionable, actually. As an idea, it is always under attack. By fascists, yes, but also by all kinds of well-meaning literary utilitarians. Whenever things get bad—and things are always getting bad—any fool who raises the cry “Art for art’s sake!” only makes themselves ridiculous. They’re lucky, in fact, if they get the whole sentence out before being trampled underfoot by a stampede of their fellow artists, all keen to demonstrate that they believe no such thing. Who feel the best a novel can do, and all it should attempt—“in the current climate”—is the articulation of an argument or ideology or else the provision of an alibi. One of America’s most influential and beloved writers, Ayn Rand, achieved all three with The Fountainhead, written in the middle of a war.

Yet “art for art’s sake” is also, as Forster maintains, an idea “much misused and much abused.” He wants to dismiss, as he puts it, “a more dangerous heresy, namely the silly idea that only art matters…. Many things, besides art, matter.” This much established, he goes on to offer a concrete example of an artwork that matters: Macbeth. He notes its value as a source of Scottish history, as a study of power, and so on, although beyond the human and historical interest, he wants to defend “Macbeth for Macbeth’s sake…[as] a self-contained entity, with a life of its own imposed on it by its creator. It has internal order.” He contrasts this artistic order with our social and political lives, which represent, instead, “a series of disorders.” Ancient Athens, he thinks, “made a mess—but the Antigone stands up. Renaissance Rome made a mess—but the ceiling of the Sistine got painted. James I made a mess—but there was Macbeth.” The disorder and mess Forster blames on science. “We cannot reach social and political stability,” he writes,

for the reason that we continue to make scientific discoveries and to apply them…. If Science would discover rather than apply—if, in other words, men were more interested in knowledge than in power—mankind would be in a far safer position.

This is hard for us to compute, given what a religion we ourselves make of scientific progress. Not to mention that nowadays we are as likely to blame the artwork itself as the era from which it came. We feel that art does much to set the tone and create the mindset from which an era evolves. To really understand Forster, I think, you have to cast your mind back to 1949. Only four years earlier America had used an applied science to commit one of the greatest crimes in human history, in Japan. And when Forster goes on to suggest that our best chance of survival as a race might be via “inertia…[a] universal exhaustion”—well, that actually sounds familiar. How many of us today would prefer inertia to the planet-destroying fantasy of endless growth?

So much for my old friend Forster. There is, though, one part of his argument that I’d like to rescue from the twentieth century: the survival of the individual artwork. But instead of Macbeth I choose The Known World by the great African American author Edward P. Jones. The Known World is set in Manchester County, Virginia, around 1850. Within its pages we will find many plantations run by white people, as we’d expect, but also a few run by black people, which comes as a shock. The county is a creation—and all the characters are fictional—but the structural facts are sadly to be found in recorded history. It was published just as George W. Bush was making what Forster might call a mess and what I would call a disaster: the invasion of Iraq. It is a beautiful, disquieting, tragic novel. Like all novels, it is the product of a particular person, but because it is so affecting, it also has the force to change a person in particular ways. In my case, it forced me, as a young person, to recognize the world as a place of confounding moral complexity. I don’t know if Jones meant for that to happen, but it did.

Great art has a long tail, mostly invisible to its creators. I know I wouldn’t feel so fondly toward humans, for example, if I hadn’t read Forster at an impressionable age. Of course, many other things could have created this affection. Art is in no sense the only way. But it is a way. When I finish The Known World—and return to the real world—it is with a refreshed attention to the notion of human value. And if we can extend our concern to the afflicted characters in a novel, how much more of our concern is due to those real people murdered in Palestine, in Sudan, in Ukraine, in Iran, and—as I write this—on the streets of Minneapolis?

Of course, we know there’s no guarantee that such art-induced fellow feeling will show up in our social and political lives. We know empathy to be a fallible, changeable quality. But it is also the case that in empathy’s complete absence fresh hells are born. It’s worth noting, I think, that the strain of literary thought that has in recent years flirted with a heavy disdain—even a florid contempt—for the concept of empathy happens to share that contempt with the late Charlie Kirk, who said of the concept, “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new-age term that…does a lot of damage.”

This is to be expected. The right has long argued that fellow feeling should be severely limited, nationally or genetically. The leftist objection initially appears more surprising—until you remember the context. The right naturally wishes to defend itself against the claims of other people, for that very recognition is the first step toward justice for all. The left, meanwhile, is substantially made up precisely of the “other people” making claims—and watching our claims fail, being serially disappointed, getting angry. Anger and disappointment are potentially useful emotions. Contempt is something else. You can drift so far into contempt that you find yourself echoing the sentiments of your ideological opposites. At that point it might be worth slowing down, thinking again.

We can agree that empathy’s no magical cure-all, least of all the literary kind, and that it won’t, by itself, change laws or bestow rights on anybody. When it came to ending slavery, for example, revolts and direct political action were the essential components. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin served its purpose. It’s not a great book, or even a good book. It still changed the mental climate. But I think I’ll stop there, at two cheers. These well-worn arguments about art and empathy bore me. I want to talk instead of another aspect of art that truly interests me: autonomy.

What kind of autonomy does art have? Ridiculous to imagine art as a separate world, divorced from culture, from politics, from its historical era. But two central ideas shape every era, and I believe art is significantly separate from both. The two ideas are: power and progress. That’s what I actually wanted to say to you today: art is not powerful, and it does not progress.

The first idea is familiar, I’m sure. The relative impotence of art is one of the few things everybody can agree on just now. It’s what my writer friend was getting at: What’s the point? In a world of sheer power, where might is right, art is obviously toothless. The artist has no weapons, makes no laws, imprisons nobody, wages war nowhere. Neither Shakespeare nor Edward P. Jones could order executions at home or abroad—that was the brutal prerogative of James I and George W. Bush. Meanwhile, both artists spent their time doing what? Playing make-believe. Was their art influential? Sure. Did it create empathy? Sometimes. But powerful? No. Not in the way that states and kings and presidents conceive of power.

And what of progress? Well, I put it to you that The Known World is neither a progression nor a devolution from Macbeth, no more than the music of Stevie Wonder is a devolution from or an advance upon, say, the work of Beethoven. Unlike science and technology, art is not subject to the logic of growth or Moore’s law. It won’t definitely get smaller or faster or bigger and more lethal. It is produced in strong and weak economies alike, during war and peace. When it is good, as Forster notes, it will tend to outlast the human disorders that surround it, but it doesn’t get any better or worse at doing that. The odds of making a piece of art that truly matters never really improve. And while we can certainly interpret Jones’s portrait of black people as a progressive leap forward from Shakespeare’s portrait of Othello, the gap between Macbeth and The Known World is still quite unlike the one between washing your clothes by hand in a stream and using a washing machine. The process of reading them both will require, from you, much the same human faculties. You’ll have to imagine, think, and engage with a make-believe world, created by a stranger. An analogy for this is love. Is the love I feel for my children an advance upon or a devolution from the love a fourteenth-century woman felt for hers? Not all human experiences are subject to progress.

One of the cornerstones of the American concept of progress is “convenience.” Things have progressed when they are faster, easier, frictionless, invisible. By this logic, it is progress to have your dinner delivered to your door by an underpaid and nonunionized stranger, rather than having it made by a human being whom you know and love and who then sits down to share that meal with you. Progress to have a machine write an essay, rather than undergoing whatever time-consuming strains, joys, and miseries writing that essay yourself would involve. It’s definitely the case that a machine might easily take a bushel of novels concerning slavery—take The Known World and Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Alex Wheatle’s Cane Warriors and even my own The Fraud—and use those data points to write a comprehensive, informative, and perhaps even aesthetically pleasing novel about the “peculiar institution,” and all in a matter of moments. It might even convince most people that the book was written by a human being. But the thing is: it wasn’t. And when I read, I want to be in relation with a human being. That’s why I read. Likewise, a machine instructed to make love to me might technically be excellent at making love to me, but that won’t do, either. I want to be wanted by a human. I want to be in relation with other humans. That’s what I believe I am on this earth to experience. I think we all feel that way in the end, even if it takes us our whole lives to realize it.

That convenience should be the highest aspiration of human existence happens to be one of the many uninterrogated assumptions of capitalist ideology. When we convince ourselves that art, too, must take the shortest route to its effects, then we’ve submitted to that ideology. Yet art can be enormously inconvenient! Art can luxuriate. Wander. It may embellish and decorate, or refuse to be convenient, dogmatic, obliging. Its distance from the prerogatives of the powerful is precisely where its force of resistance lies. And if Forster could insist on something like this vision of art in the wreckage of World War II, then that is the very least I can do now. I can say, without shame, that while Americans were being murdered in the street, I was writing not only this speech but also a novel. A novel that in no way deals directly with the hellscape in which we are living. In that sense, I am on the wrong side of history and always will be, along with any artist who reserves the right to make art for her own sake, for the sake of art itself, and for the sake of her fellow humans.

Edward P. Jones was likewise on the wrong side of history if art is to be judged solely by how urgently it responds to the present disorder. The Known World is not a novel about the invasion of Iraq. It’s a masterpiece about a corrupt system’s corrupting influence on everybody, including its primary victims. It has internal order. It’s beautiful and tragic. It is human, above all. Reading it reminded me what humans are, what they are capable of, why they do the things they do, and why it is they leave so many things undone. It encouraged me to come here today and speak as I have. Such art is made by us and for us. It is for our sakes. Its power is not of the kind this president recognizes, but it has its own kind of force. It will outlast both him and his regime. It will outlast us all.