Britain’s Tory Government Wants the Humanities to Be a Luxury for the Rich
British prime minister Rishi Sunak has launched a crackdown on what he calls “rip-off university degrees.” It’s really a push to discourage working-class students from choosing subjects that will help develop their critical understanding of the world.
A view of the Radcliffe Camera at the University of Oxford in the UK. (Julian Herzog / Wikimedia Commons)
Socrates is famously reported by Plato to have said that the unexamined life was not worth living. Such a life was not simply inferior to that pursued under the shadow of reflective self-criticism, he thought, but intolerable.
For the Athenian philosopher, the moral duty of every citizen in his fifth-century BCE Athens was to “know thyself” — to come to a sense of oneself, both as a personal entity and as one individual component of a broader political community, by way of private rumination and public deliberation with one’s fellow citizens (a category that excluded women or the enslaved, of course).
The individual who failed to do so could not be regarded as living. The struggle toward self-understanding was the core struggle of Greek ethical life, and one that Socrates extended far into the political sphere. He would not stop asking questions: What is justice? What is the good life? What is knowledge?
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