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This time four years ago, I was interviewing applicants for a joint undergraduate degree in history and literature. This was a job I\u2019d come to treasure over the years; new thinkers are always interesting, and joint honours students often particularly so.<\/p>\n
But something was different. The interviews took place about a week after Donald Trump\u2019s presidential election victory and five months since the UK\u2019s vote to leave the European Union. Their tone had changed. When I asked \u201cWhy history?\u201d, candidate after candidate replied along similar lines: \u201cI want to know what really <\/em>happened\u201d; \u201cI want to understand how to get to reliable sources\u201d; \u201cI need to know when I am being lied to\u201d.<\/p>\n The Instagram generation had woken up early to something that would later become clear to the rest of us. You can spin the world all you like \u2013 \u201cThat\u2019s your opinion,\u201d we can say to one another; \u201cI see it differently\u201d \u2013 but when a shared world of tangible evidence somehow becomes irrelevant to our politics, we\u2019re in different territory altogether.<\/p>\n Once the facts don\u2019t matter, anything becomes possible \u2013 even the impossible, as the political theorist Hannah Arendt once said, describing the totalitarian elements of the past century. As Donald Trump continues to refuse to concede the fact that he has lost the 2020 election, it seems that we\u2019re not yet quite done with dangerous impossibilities.<\/p>\n You might think that literature students would be fine with a world of made-up stories, but this would be to miss the moral seriousness of humanities study. Ask a student why they want to study literature and they usually say they are interested in people, the mind, emotions. What they are also saying is that they are interested in how we have imagined one another across the centuries: how we\u2019ve come to agree about what counts as a life, and what it means to live together with the mysteries, pleasures and dangers of human otherness.<\/p>\n These are the kinds of questions that matter very much when it comes to the political and legal business of creating the rights and norms by which we live together.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve known for some time that common sense isn\u2019t doing so well just now. It is hard to maintain a shared sense of the world when our perceptions, understanding and judgements are being constantly provoked, agitated and manipulated \u2013 click, rage, repeat. It is no coincidence that, at the same time, humanities scholars are being told, not always accurately, that their subjects are struggling and that while they are nice to have on top of the real-world stuff \u2013 sometimes they can even help \u2013 they\u2019re not exactly core to what society needs from higher education.<\/p>\n Yet the stark truth is that if we cannot find the narrative and imaginative forms to make the world real to one another, we run the risk of permanently losing our politics \u2013 and so the sense of our lives together \u2013 to the fantasists and cynical purveyors of lies. To prevent that, we have to start taking seriously again the humanities\u2019 rigorous attention to detail, difference, difficulty and context.<\/p>\n This can no longer mean evoking an Anglo-European humanism, confident of its values and judgements but unable to learn from the writers and thinkers within minority communities or from the Global South who have more reason than most to understand injustice and suffering. Decolonisation is important for inclusivity, but it is also a powerful statement of our core activity. Who matters, what counts as a life, and how that counting has been done is at the centre of humanities enquiry. How that human story gets told is intensely important, to ourselves, our communities, and our future \u2013 which leads me back to the Class of 2016\u2019s concern to protect the reality of the facts.<\/p>\n All history students understand that each generation will rearrange the facts according to their views and that history is in large part storytelling. But plausible storytelling requires painstaking and often imaginative documentation, which is no mean feat in world where an apparent abundance of information is so hard to access and interpret.<\/p>\n Still, documenting by itself is never enough. In the phoney culture wars \u2013 as in the phoney science wars of climate change and now Covid-19 \u2013 researchers have tirelessly been shouting \u201cfacts\u201d only for their words to be dismissed as \u201copinion\u201d or ground down into tweet-size nuggets of ignorant outrage.<\/p>\n