GP: COMPREHENSION assignment 01

Read the passage below and answer the questions that follow:

As is usual in any romantic theory, we find the name of Byron conspicuous. The Byronic hero in his successive metamorphoses has filled and also written – more books than the tongue can tell. He is volcanic, extreme in all things, magnificent in sin. He is adored of woman (or, conversely he is misunderstood and betrayed by women and retires into lofty isolation and the pageant of his bleeding heart). With the help of modern psychology he has developed complexes and neuroses. At times, to be sure, he evinces a spasmodic and spectacular goodness, but this is a manifestation of his superb energy and must never, according to the theory, be confused with the goodness of good people.

Early in the nineteenth Century, this theory got tangled up with Napoleon and also with far –reaching consequences, with German philosophy. Students of the history of philosophy point to the doctrines of Fichte. From this source come the Superman, the Master Race, Prussianism, and Hitler. Until there was an actual outbreak in war, we did not resent this kind of thing because the ideas were not very different from ones that we had been brought up on. Not many of us were fooled by Hitler as a person. A bad egg if ever there was one. Yet there was something comic about him, we are such a good –natured people that we find it hard to realize that funny things can be dangerous.

Furthermore, we saw that Hitler and his friend had energy, and we rather admired them for it. We didn’t blame them for not wanting to be bullied. We were inclined to discount the stories of domestic terrorism. Even after the war began in Europe, we felt a certain respect for Prussian competence and efficiency. We were genuinely confused by the romantic theory of evil. The thing that awake up was not the badness of the egg but the terrific consequences of the things that particular egg did. When the war is over, unless I miss my guess, we are likely to be again misled into the same confusion of values.

There is still a third modern theory of evil, and this I shall call the scientific theory. According to this, there is no such thing as sin. Human beings are merely very complicated mechanisms, and they are what they are because of the regular operation of heredity and environment, economic law, vitamin deficiency, hypertrophy of the glands, or whatever else you happen to believe in. Hitler is a paranoiac, and the whole German nation is suffering from a secondary, or induced, paranoia. Exponents of this theory remind us that science doesn’t judge; it only explains. You can’t blame Hitler for being a paranoiac any more than you blame poison ivy for being poisonous. Some day science will tell us what to do about it, but what if that day doesn’t come soon enough?

Here are ways of looking at the evil in human nature –the sentimental, the romantic, and the scientific. Each one of them has qualities that commend it to be the American temperament. Our good heartedness makes us like the first; our energy and independence incline us to the second; everything that is scientific in our education and training prepares us for the third. The fact that they are often contradictory doesn’t worry us. Whatever our characteristic American virtues are, logic isn’t one of them. We share with the other English –speaking peoples a genius for living happily with contradictions, anomalies, and compromises. And where does it all get us?

Let me return momentarily to Milton. Far be it from me to say that he knew all the answers, but he knew some of them. He knew that ambition leads to cruelty and terror; he knew some of them. He knew that the human race can be saved only by goodness, the goodness of God in man. He knew that the forces of Hell are real and everywhere and always. He saw them in his imaginations, surging and seething and boiling up onto this earth. theologies, to be sure, are transitory, far mor transitory than poetry. So far as Paradise lost is purely theological, it may be obsolete, but as an analysis of good and evil, it teaches a lesson that we still need to learn. Over the theology of the poem towers Satan, incarnate evil, the arch fiend, the destroyer, and on his head sits horror plumed.

I should like to finish this with a noble peroration on the splendours of American goodness, secure in its native right and triumphant over evil in all its forms; but I shall be on much safer ground if I merely sum up what I have said already. Taking us by and large, we have considerable faith in good people. That faith is probably greater than we realize, and in this respect we are lucky, because a faith in the goodness of men is the one thing that democracy cannot do without. Beyond that we are entangled in a lot of familiar notions about good and evil, accepting now one and now another, never following any of them to their logical conclusions. We can get through this war, I am sure, on our faith in ourselves and our native goodness. It is after the war that we are going to run into trouble. Shall we look at Germany as a nation of beautiful souls, temporarily misled in their emotions but presently to return to an idyllic existence of Beethoven, beer, and Grimm’s fairy tales? Or as a Byronic hero –nation, magnificent in sin, romantic in its defiant energy, and then tragic in its defeat? Or as the victim of an unfortunate environment, needing merely a treatment in international economic therapy?

Or shall we really get down to the roots of good and evil and wrestle with our theories until we bring them into some kind of working conformity, not only with one another but with fact?

Questions:

1. Suggest a suitable title for this passage.                                                           [2mks]
2. What does the author mean by:
   1. “funny things can be dangerous”?                                 [3mks] ii)       “living happily with contradictions”?                                          [3mks]
3. In not more than 100 words, summarise the theories of the evil in human nature.

[12mks]

1. Explain the meaning of the following words and phrases as used in the passage, using your own words wherever possible: i) Conspicuous
   1. Lofty isolation iii) Domestic terrorism  iv) Complicated mechanisms  v) Temperament  vi) Obsolete  vii) Familiar notions  viii) Defiant energy  ix) Economic therapy
   2. x) Working conformity                                                                          [2mks]

Spelling and Grammatical Expressions (SPGE)                                          [10mks]