I live on-site at Jesus College where I share a kitchen with four other postgraduates: an archaeologist, a classicist, and two historians. In the practice of making our ‘flat’ familial we hold Sunday potlucks: meals where each guest contributes a dish. Conversation covers the usual topics: classes, career aspirations, politics, supervisors. We bemoan the state of the world: looming climate disaster, Donald Trump’s inauguration in the US, neoliberalism’s intellectual hegemony, all appearing engaged citizens. Yet, a striking cognitive dissonance ensconces each dinner. As the conversation arrives at what fills our days now, and what will occupy our future — 80,000 hours of work — any social conscience evaporates.
The archaeologist studies Egyptian ruins, the classicist Byzantine literature, the historians 18th century Spanish archives. Their time between their undergraduate and postgraduate degrees? Archival research, diving at a maritime archaeology site, ‘pondering,’ working at a café in Seville. Their plans for the future: unsure, teaching English in Europe, academia, travelling. As the philosopher and policy MPhil, I query, expectedly but gently: “Why? What drives your intellectual interests and career plans?” Their answers, simple, clear: “I like it.”
I’m certainly no masochist. I believe we should like our work. But I also believe that intellectual self-indulgence and disregard for social utility — abundant at Oxford — are killing social progress.
The raison d’être of universities like Oxford and Stanford (where I completed my undergrad) is instrumental. The former: “We will work as one Oxford… to provide world-class research and education. We will do this in ways which benefit society…” The latter: “Stanford’s… vision and founding purpose [is] promoting the welfare of people everywhere..” Universities are ideal places for designing prosperous societies — they possess the human resources, research capabilities, and instructive power to mould young minds, test ideas, and scale solutions.
If only the students would oblige.
In The Destruction of Six Million, Hannah Arendt responded to two questions: (1) whether silence around Hitler’s atrocities and the rise of neo-Nazism had roots in European humanism; and (2) the source of helplessness shown by Jewish masses and leadership during the Holocaust. She wrote, “The world did not keep silent; but apart from not keeping silent, the world did nothing,” and “…Tadeusz Borowski, the Polish poet, had this to say in his report on his own stay in Auschwitz: “Never before was hope stronger than man, and never before did hope result in so much evil as in this camp… That is why we die in the gas oven.”
Arendt’s essay notes a glaring gap between rhetoric and action: public denunciations became routine but were only symbolic. Despite extensive discourse on crimes against humanity there was limited progress in holding offenders accountable. In Germany, while the public expressed guilt over past atrocities, lenient sentences for Nazi criminals persisted and former Nazis occupied prominent positions.
Now, my grasp of history isn’t so weak that I consider Arendt’s time synonymous with our own. But there are parallels. Roughly two billion people – one quarter of humanity – live in conflict-affected countries, with the highest conflicts ever recorded in 2023. Ethnic cleansing is occurring in the Zamzam camp in Darfur. Progress towards Zero Hunger by 2030 has stalled; the world will not reach even low hunger levels until 2160. Technological totalitarianism looms and autocracies outnumber democracies, 74 to 63. Elections in 25 countries have grown less free and 39 countries are tightening restrictions on press and free expression.
And so, the conversations which flow from my kitchen every Sunday at 7 PM are redundant. Arendt would scoff at our moral posturing — we express dismay and hope, again and again, without doing anything. Worse, we’ve constructed an artificial endorsement of virtue which justifies our dedication to pursuits that contribute little to the issues humanity faces. This is supported by empirical research on moral licensing — past “morality” licenses future immorality. Our Sunday dinners, then, are a dangerous ritual of self-excusal.
Arendt’s alternative to hope is natality. Influenced by Augustine’s view of creation as a political act, Arendt associates freedom and responsibility with the capacity for action that natality provides. Hope is something we wish for; natality is something we do. Natality challenges us to transform the world through direct engagement. Arendt holds that our immortality is found not in the afterlife but in the actions we take; we leave behind only what we accomplished for society.
Those who access a world-class education have a special imperative to act. Our education offers the networks, capital, and critical thinking to affect change; we are overwhelmed with fellowships, funding, speakers, legitimacy. We are also often the people who in our personal statements, vying for oversubscribed spots, wrote prosaic visions of using our education to shape a better world. It is telling that once our ticket was secured, these waned.
Though Stanford had its own problems — independent thought evaporating when private equity and FANG recruiters occupied White Plaza — there I found peers who believed the point of a university education was to try to contribute something. From my class alone, from students across disciplines, Terradot is assisting carbon capture; Grove AI is powering clinical trials; Farmlink is tackling food insecurity. Even the plethora of tech bros can articulate a case for eventual impact: take Microsoft’s $3 billion AI training investment in India which will ameliorate poverty or Google’s AI Accelerator where non-profits will scale generative AI tools to reach 30 million beneficiaries.
I am not asking my Oxford peers to abandon what they like or love, or intending to fuel scepticism towards humanities education. I’m simply encouraging my peers to explore how the skills they’ve developed can contribute to society. To, at the very least, consider social utility alongside intellectual self-indulgence. The world needs their ideas and efforts.
Moral agnosticism — the wilful refusal to contribute to the collective — is not morally neutral. While intellectual freedom does and should exist, it cannot remain above scrutiny. Neglecting the collective good is not benign. To absolve such choices is to legitimise complicity in an unjust status quo — it’s time my peers faced the music.
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