In the mood for humanities

In his book The Battle for Justice in Palestine, Ali Abunimah has an entire chapter titled ‘War on Campus’. In this chapter, the author describes centres of social science and the humanities in American universities turning into hubs of Palestinian solidarity and resistance. He describes how these institutions of higher education have become crucibles of academic and political churning. The fractious Israel-Palestine conflict is played out in and outside classrooms, inside seminar halls and on the streets.

Abunimah cites numerous incidents of faculty members and students in prestigious institutions like the universities of Columbia and California putting their careers on line rallying for the Palestinian cause. Teachers are refused tenure for protesting Israel's occupation of Palestine; students are arrested and dragged to court; a general atmosphere of fear is created. But the Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) campaign against Israel continues to gain momentum.

The author offers an interesting argument framing these events on campuses, an argument fundamental to the cynical discourse over the relevance or the irrelevance of the humanities. Many of us often wonder how the humanities, which seek to understand the complexities of politics, society and human relationships, can be considered passé, especially as our lives become more complicated and disturbing and as politics and society seem to be in a continued churn. And political violence gets normalised across the world. We need to understand and grapple with these processes to survive, to not yield to the temptation of embracing insanity. The humanities are the crutch we hold on to for surviving this increasingly violent world. These disciplines spawn political resistance and morality which propel students to participate in political actions even if they are fraught with risks.

The actor John Lithgow once said, “Without the humanities, life doesn’t have life — that’s the heart of the matter.” Without the humanities, one can argue, life is reduced to monotonous utilitarianism, a functional affair of survival. But, dangerously, today utilitarianism is holding sway. The dominant discourse in public spaces does tend to revolve around functional profit-driven, market-oriented academics. Literature, philosophy and the arts are junked as non-money-making, profit averse, irrelevant disciplines. Philosophy centres in universities are falling prey to such crass cynicism. Centres of liberal arts are starved of funds while economic and business schools are flush with funds and technical education institutes capture our imaginations.

The supremacy of economism and the simultaneous denigration of the humanities threaten to deepen the already existing crisis of ethical response in the world. From nation-building projects to prolonged wars, the alibi of collateral damage or strategic interest trumps moral and ethical concerns. Policy has no place for ‘softness.’ Economists, engineers, technocrats and financiers do not concern themselves with social and political dynamics or the unpredictability of the human mind. They deliberately separate economics from politics, society and culture, preferring instead to build models assuming patterns of homogenised human behaviour driven by the profit motive.

On the other hand, those engaged in critical thinking resist this project. That critical thinking fosters political and social consciousness is evident from the large engagement of humanities students and teachers in political movements. Arguably, most humanities departments fall on the left of centre of the political spectrum, while the departments of economics, science and engineering occupy a space to the right.

Abunimah’s War on Campus provides an impressive testimony to this ideological divide. He narrates how a White Paper brought out by the David Project — an Israeli Zionist project focus on advocacy in universities — has marked campuses like Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, as examples of educational institutions that “can serve as the most important and influential node” in an anti-Israel network. The White Paper predicts that a long term decline in these disciplines and the rise of business and economics departments, “whose faculty tend to be more politically ‘balanced’ is likely to be beneficial to Israel.” The David Project welcomes the popularity of for-profit-colleges and institutions which attract students from weaker economic sections. Abunimah writes, “If teaching critical thinking, fostering respect for human-rights values, and nurturing the humanities and social sciences are dangers to Israel, then dumbing down and privatizing education is good for the Jewish state.”

Undeniably, the humanities (and to some extent social sciences) raise the alarm for status-quoists who fear a growing band of ‘conscience-keepers’ who continuously disrupt their grand projects of development and nation-building. To silence unethical political and economic projects as well as corrupt deal-making, it is necessary to undermine critical thinking.

The American author Ray Bradbury’s advocacy of reading as a prerequisite for democracy ought not to be taken lightly. In her 2013 McGill commencement address, philosopher Judith Butler underlined the value of philosophy as a tool of tolerance. But even as the world turns more and more intolerant, philosophy continues to be denied its worth and its rightful place in the academia. A report from the Commission on the Humanities and the Social Sciences at the Academy of Arts and Sciences, titled ‘The Heart of the Matter’ cautions that the humanities have slipped into being an endangered academic species. “As we strive to create a more civil public discourse, a more adaptable and creative workforce, and a more secure nation, the humanities and social sciences are the heart of the matter, the keeper of the republic — a source of national memory and civic vigour, cultural understanding and communication, individual fulfilment and the ideals we hold in common. They are critical to a democratic society and they require our support,” says the report.

And yet the attrition continues. Is it because critical thinking is dangerous to the powers-that-be? The fate of poetry in this relentless market-driven world of arts and letters is a case in point. Publishers, looking for the latest mass-marketable easy-read commodity, discourage the writing of poetry. It ‘doesn’t sell,’ they say. In this superfast age of hyper-communication where information is power to self-promoting consumers, knowledge seems to be becoming dispensable. Perhaps this is a good time to remember the words of William Wordsworth: “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.”

But despair is possibly an incorrect response. Like many other elements of life, critical thought and the humanities might be under attack, but books like Abunimah’s show that in spite of — or perhaps because of — adversities, resistant thinking flowers. Attacks don’t force students and professors to retreat so much as always look for new avenues of expression from which questions repressed by society at large can be asked again and again.

The author is Editor, dna of thought