Read the passage carefully and answer the question that follows.
Passage I
I once made a statement in a room full of college students that the most important thing a young person could
acquire in college might be a sense of her own limitations. I realised when I said it that it was not a very
fashionable thing to say. Popular books on how to therapy, stress the glorious potential of every human being
and urge us to accept ourselves, finally, as being only a little lower than the angels. I heartily approve of any celebration of human potential, but I believe that we must acknowledge our potential for limitless evil as well. We must understand what we can do in the way of evil before we can even pretend to be good. This is the
beginning of morality, the psychological or spiritual or, in a religious tradition, the mythical basis that makes morality possible. One of the most moral book of the past century is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, because Conrad faces the problem of evil in people. He tells us that we must recognize in ourselves the ability to put the head of our enemy on stick and dance around a fire with it, and only when we recognize that can we even begin to deal with any moral question at all. Students who have been nourished on pop psychology and told “I’ m O.K.” have some trouble dealing with Conrad, and some of them regard him as perverse.
I am amazed at the number of educated people who believe that we are somehow better , more moral, than our
ancestors were. I have seen otherwise intelligent people grow red in the face at the suggestion that human
beings are not better now - less cruel , more considerate , less animalistic , more humane- than they were when
Nero ruled Rome or when the Pharaohs ruled Egypt or , when the Druids at Stonehenge readied their sacrifices.
In one way we are more likely to have become dull to our potential for evil (and so discover it suddenly and with disastrous consequences) today than we were a few centuries ago. This is because we actively suppress the
kind of self-knowledge that makes intelligent moral decisions possible. Sin and guilt are such old -fashioned
terms that most of us are embarrassed by the very words.