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Direction for Reading Comprehension: The pass ages given here are followed by some
questions that have four answer choices; read the passage carefully and pick the option
whose answer best aligns with the passage
Although one of the most contested concepts in political philosophy, human nature is
something on which most people seem to agree. By and large, according to Rutger Bregman
in his new book Humankind, we have a rather pessimistic view - not of ourselves exactly,
but of everyone else. We see other people as selfish, untrustworthy and dangerous and
therefore we behave towards them with defensiveness and suspicion. This was how the
17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes conceived our natural state to be, believing that
all that stood between us and violent anarchy was a strong state and firm leadership.
But in following Hobbes, argues Bregman, we ensure that the negative view we have of
human nature is reflected back at us. He instead puts his faith in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the
18th-century French thinker, who famously declared that man was born free and it was
civilisation with its coercive powers, social classes and restrictive laws that put him in
chains.
Hobbes and Rousseau are seen as the two poles of the human nature argument and it's no
surprise that Bregman strongly sides with the Frenchman. He takes Rousseau's intuition and
paints a picture of a prelapsarian idyll in which, for the better part of 300,000 years, Homo
sapiens lived a fulfilling life in harmony with nature... Then we discovered agriculture and
for the next 10,000 years it was all property, war, greed and injustice....
It was abandoning our nomadic lifestyle and then domesticating animals, says Bregman,
that brought about infectious diseases such as measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis,
malaria, cholera and plague. This may be true, but what Bregman never really seems to get
to grips with is that pathogens were not the only things that grew with agriculture - so did
the number of humans. It's one thing to maintain friendly relations and a property-less
mode of living when you're 30 or 40 hunter-gatherers following the food. But life becomes a
great deal more complex and knowledge far more extensive when there are settlements of
many thousands.
"Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress and wilderness with war and
decline," writes Bregman. "In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way
around." Whereas traditional history depicts the collapse of civilisations as "dark ages" in
which everything gets worse, modern scholars, he claims, see them more as a reprieve, in
which the enslaved gain their freedom and culture flourishes. Like much else in this book,
the truth is probably somewhere between the two stated positions.
In any case, the fear of civilisational collapse, Bregman believes, is unfounded. It's the result
of what the Dutch biologist Frans de Waal calls "veneer theory" - the idea that just below
the surface, our bestial nature is waiting to break out.... There's a great deal of reassuring
human decency to be taken from this bold and thought-provoking book and a wealth of
evidence in support of the contention that the sense of who we are as a species has been
deleteriously distorted. But it seems equally misleading to offer the false choice of Rousseau
and Hobbes when, clearly, humanity encompasses both.
Q.15 According to the author, the main reason why Bregman contrasts life in preagricultural.
societies with agricultural societies is to:
1. bolster his argument that people are basically decent, but progress as we know it can
make them selfish.
2. make the argument that an environmentally conscious lifestyle is a more harmonious
way of living.
3. highlight the enormous impact that settled farming had on population growth.
4. advocate the promotion of less complex societies as a basis for greater security and
prosperity.

English

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Verbal Ability and RC

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