Opinion: Novelist and professor Saikat Majumdar on humanities education in a post-truth world

The bitterest battles in the world today are being fought in the humanities and the imaginative social sciences. This isn’t entirely new. Emotions, ideas, beliefs, faith, and ideology have always been the most violent and sensitive points of contact – no less than land, wealth, food, technology, the material body, and other issues that might belong to the natural and the harder social sciences. Human health, freedom, and development have always required both, without any hierarchy between them. That is one of the key reasons we study both the humanities and the natural sciences – and the social formations that turn individuals into communities.

But what I want to say today is that the influence of the humanities has expanded far beyond its usual historical measure. And that influence makes me deeply worried and ashamed as a humanist.

Most university subjects, in their modern forms, can be traced back to the European Enlightenment. New ways of thinking, from Newtonian physics and Cartesian philosophy created a faith in science and reason. A rational appraisal of reality shaped many things that we take for granted today – from positivism in the social sciences to realism and interiority in literature. Older knowledge forms, ranging from philosophy to...

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