Sally Rooney is a highly profitable Irish novelist, one of the youngest writers to reach such a level of success, but her publisher will no longer carry her titles in the United Kingdom.

Rooney vowed to send some of her royalties to a group called Palestine Action, which the British government designated as a terrorist organization, per Eli Lake’s reporting for The Free Press. It’s a violation of British legislation to financially support these kinds of groups. Thus, Rooney’s books will no longer be sold in the country.

As one might expect, the incident has sparked a lot of talk about free speech and censorship. Should Rooney be censored for supporting an organization she believes in? As has been oft reported in recent years, the United Kingdom has scored dismally on free speech. Americans have rightly scorned the ways our allies across the pond seem to have cracked down on the speech the government finds distasteful.

That’s an important question and worth exploration. It’s also worth using this event as an occasion to ask what art, including literary art, is for in a time when everything is expected to make a political gesture. Rooney is on the record saying she believes art should have a political component (and that she sees the world through a Marxist lens), but not every artist agrees with her.

Matt Taibbi wrote a piece this week on Substack about how art should seek to transcend the political. Not everything needs to promote a certain political ideology. He writes,

I grew up reading and listening to artists who came down on both sides of this argument, but was always more persuaded by the ones who believed a) art spoke to something higher than politics, and b) the enemy of all good art is certainty. Chekhov felt an artist’s job wasn’t solving problems but “posing the question correctly,” Auden eulogized Yeats by saying, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” Pushkin said poets were born “not for gain, not for battles,” but “for inspiration, for sweet sounds and prayer,” Wilde said “all art is quite useless,” MacLeish said “A poem should not mean, but be,” and Keats said “we hate poetry that has a palpable design on us.”

There is so much pressure right now for all kinds of artists to make political statements or even conform their art to an overt political agenda. Many artists, as Taibbi mentions in the quote, believe art should be in service to social justice. Others, however, have a different vision for the ultimate purpose of the arts. This doesn’t mean that politics and social justice are unimportant. Those are real categories of human experience that many great novels and other works of art will touch upon. It just means that art and literature elevate us to a realm that transcends the political. We’re able to observe our world and common humanity at some distance removed. Since our contemporary society seems overly saturated with political discourse and obsesses about what side everyone is on, this perspective on the arts offers a respite to those who might be starved for something that outlasts the controversies of the age.