English mock exam

We’re not literally in public but I think it’s harder and harder to maintain a really private life in the big-data age where companies like Google and Facebook know everything about us a

ENGLISH 2 WRITTEN EXAM

Read the article below (it is an interview with Andrew

Keen, author of The Internet is not the Answer) and

then answer the three questions at the end.

Watching the Ashley Madison hack unfold would make even Pollyanna doubt human virtues The Internet service itself—a tool for partners to cheat on their significant others—was bad enough But then hackers stole and leaked private data of 30 million users, leaving an

aftermath of shattered families, unconfirmed suicides and devastated careers Extortionists are now adding fuel to the inferno, falsely promising to expunge records for AM users who haven’t yet been outed

The scenario highlights the digital dark side that author and entrepreneur Andrew Keen criticizes in his latest book The Internet Is Not the Answer Keen, who reaped the Web’s

benefits as the founder of Audiocafe.com and an employee at various technology companies, has turned sour on Internet culture “Rather than making us happy,” he writes, “it’s

compounding our rage.” Keen is director of FutureCast, a series of salon-style discussions with tech influencers, and hosts Internet chat show “Keen On,” where he bills himself as the

“Antichrist of Silicon Valley.”

While Keen takes big swipes at the Net’s impact on humanity, he doesn’t completely sidestep tech’s benefits; rather, he wants humans to take more responsibility for shaping the

technology that shapes us We asked Keen to expand on those views for #maketechhuman What excites you about where we’re headed with technology?

I’m excited by technology that can really solve profound problems like educating people who have had no chance historically and who might have a chance if they learn to read I was just

reading The Economist, which has a story about $1-a-week schools.

Technology that solves core problems like global warming… While I’m dubious in some ways of self-driving cars, because of the big-data element and the idea that we can be tracked wherever we go, the idea and the principal notion of self-driving cars can solve a lot of our environmental problems and also be a tremendous lifesaver

Most aspects of technology excite me—and that we have enough problems in the world for it

to address What doesn’t excite me is the way in which some people, particularly in Silicon Valley, think all solutions are technological

What worries you?

The thing that most worries me is the way in which technology is on the verge of destroying jobs More and more technology is replacing labor whether it’s drivers or people who work in stores and I think that we’re on the brink of a profound crisis in labor

I also think about privacy We’re not literally in public but I think it’s harder and harder to maintain a really private life in the big-data age where companies like Google and Facebook know everything about us and their business model is mining our data It doesn’t mean

they’re evil They’re not Big Brother This isn’t 1984 It’s something different, but it’s still troubling

Why are you such an outspoken critic of Internet culture?

The idea of there being technology and culture, or technology and society, or technology and the individual, and technology shaping those things is very problematic Technology is part of

a complex web of things that are determining our identity Technology itself wasn’t delivered

by a stork It comes with cultural assumptions and biases of its own It comes out of a specific place, particularly in Northern California So rather than seeing technology as the cause of narcissism or isolation or loneliness or ignorance, it’s both a cause and a consequence of both the great strengths and weaknesses of our culture

There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of remarkable creativity and energy, vitality, vibrancy on the Internet, but on the other hand, it’s also compounding the narcissism of our culture Narcissism wasn’t invented by the digital revolution Greeks were the ones who invented the idea of it We’ve always been a little bit in love with ourselves, but selfie culture certainly compounds that It’s creating a culture of what Nicholas Carr calls “the shallows,” where we can’t concentrate on anything Where we’re forever obsessed with the latest new thing Douglas Rushkoff calls it the “culture of now,” where we’ve lost both our ability to remember and to forget Many of the things which I think are troubling people are themselves

problematic about the Web, and I think one has to be very careful not to fall into the trap of blaming everything on the Internet

You’ve said the Internet needs a “Bill of Responsibilities.” What would you include?

When I talk about a bill of responsibilities, I’m contrasting that with the idea of a bill of rights, which Tim Berners-Lee calls for The idea of a bill of responsibility is it’s part of a social contract When we go on there, we have certain obligations One thing would be to treat other people decently, not to steal other people’s content We have a bill of responsibilities towards ourselves not to be addicted to this thing, so we don’t spend 12 hours a day checking our Facebook updates, and our Twitter updates, and our email The idea of responsibility is something that’s lacking broadly in our culture and it’s certainly lacking on the Internet That’s what troubles me about, say, the network neutrality debates—the idea that they’re taking the Internet away from us As if the Internet is this thing that was delivered to

everybody on Christmas because we behave well, which is nonsense

We don’t deserve the Internet Most of us don’t deserve the Internet because we’re abusing it

I like the idea of a bill of responsibilities as something that gets to the core of what’s going on That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have rights on the Internet, but I think that

responsibilities are more important than rights, and if we were more responsible in our use I think [the Internet] would be a better place

How you do think about the Internet in your personal life?

As a communications tool, as an information resource, it’s invaluable I couldn’t do one percent of what I do without the Internet

We have to get beyond this idea that either one is against technology and living in a cave or one is super-networked The reality is that most of us are super-networked, but we’re also ambivalent about some of the technology and that’s the camp I would put myself in I’m anything but a Luddite One of the things that annoys some of my critics is that they cannot believe that I’m both an entrepreneur and a critic You can be—and actually the best ones are, like Jaron Lanier He invented virtual reality and now he’s very critical of technological culture

How do you imagine our digital society will evolve?

One of the dangers of my kind of work and position is that we can fall into this generational trap We turn into a generational island and say there’s people like myself who appreciate books and movies, and then there’s young people who are ignorant and stupid and wasting their time on Twitter and Facebook The reality is that all of us, whether we’re 60 or 16, are wrapped up in a lot of this nonsense

My belief is that we’re going to be led out of this by young people We’re still in the 1950s with all this technology We’re still in the Eisenhower years, where we never had it so good We’re on the brink of the ’60s—the rebellion The kids who are growing up now and have been given iPhones since they were two, who are being surrounded with all this technology, they’re the ones who are going to rebel People who’ve grown up in purely digital culture are going to rediscover the book; they’re going to rediscover physical newspapers; they’re going

to rediscover the physical meeting.

1. Write out the ten passages underlined IN YOUR OWN WORDS

2. Write a summary of the whole article in about 300 words (250-350 words)

3. Do you agree with the argument in the concluding

paragraph in italics? Write an answer in about 300 words (250-350 words)

_

ENGLISH 2 EXAM

Read the article below and then do the following THREE things.

2 Summarise the main points of the article (10 pts)

arguments (10 pts)

Do we really want to live forever – or even for an extremely long time?

It might seem that this is something we would relish After all, we have

a strong instinct of self-preservation Danger rarely raises a yawn, while to

be saved from death brings gasps of relief and a new appreciation of life 1

Suicide is rare, and frequently provoked by intolerable conditions of health

or life Therefore it would appear that we love life and want as much of it

as we can get This is the point at which Miguel de Unamuno seems to

arrive in his Tragic Sense of Life:

What we really long for after death is to go on living this life,

this same mortal life, but without its ills, without its tedium and without death Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to

this in his Consolatio ad Marciam (xxvi); what he desired

was to

live this life again: ista moliri And what Job asked for (xix

25-7)

was to see God in the flesh, not in the spirit And what but that is

the meaning of that comic conception of eternal

recurrence, which

issued from the tragic soul of poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality?

Unamuno thinks that what we desire is this life with a few

unpleasantnesses shaved away - illness, chores and death That is why, in his view, writers as different as Seneca, Job and Nietzsche all want to ground their views of the hereafter in what they are already experiencing here on earth

'How well the Spiritualists bait their hook', writes C.S.Lewis '"Things on this side are not so different after all." There are cigars in Heaven For that

is what we should all like The happy past restored.'

But is that true? In the sense that Lewis, grieving after the loss of his wife, wanted her back again, it might have been true But is a future that stretches this life out to eternity, while peeling away a few discomforts, really what we long for in any afterlife? Lewis may not be right in the view that we just want the happy past restored and then extended indefinitely One could tire of an endless supply of cigars, even if it no longer mattered that they were a health hazard

Mortality as a Friend

One of the most famous accounts of the supposed bitterness of

immortality is provided by Jonathan Swift in 'Gulliver's Travels' Swift

introduces us to the immortals of Luggnagg, called Struldbrugs, who are born with a red spot on their foreheads over their left eyebrows, a

characteristic that marks them out to live forever

Gulliver is asked what he thinks of the Struldbrugs His initial reaction is that theirs is an enviable state They are 'born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehension of death.'

Gulliver's hosts are interested in this remark, and ask him what he would

do if he were himself a Struldbrug Gulliver replies that he would amass wealth and learning, acquiring an encyclopaedic knowledge so as to

become a 'living treasury of knowledge and wisdom' He would observe with unceasing interest and wonder the path of history, seeing 'ancient cities in ruins and obscure villages become the seats of kings' He would

be able to record the advance of science and, if not moral advance (Swift does not seem to allow for this - he talks of 'barbarity overrunning the politest nations, and the most barbarous becoming civilised'), at least the changing fortunes of different countries He would cease to marry after 60 (by which time he would presumably be a widower) and would concentrate upon educating the young with the wisdom born of his ever-lengthening experience of life We may conclude that Gulliver sees himself as an

eternally happy boulevardier of human existence, marking it, recording it and from his greater knowledge of it instructing others

Gulliver's reaction causes great amusement among the Luggnaggians They point out to him that countries without any Struldbrugs of their own always fear death and see it as the greatest of evils In such lands

'whoever had one foot in the grave was sure to hold back the other as strongly as he could' In Luggnagg, however, it was generally recognised that immortality was a fate worse than death Gulliver had forgotten the effects of age He was imagining himself forever in the prime of youth, with the mental vigour and physical health that attend it He should bear

in mind that the perpetual life the Struldbrugs lead comes with 'all the usual disadvantages which old age brings along with it' By the age of eighty they have 'all the follies and infirmities of other old men', made worse by the knowledge that there would be no escape from them to death, the 'harbour of rest to which they themselves can never hope to arrive' Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions Their failing memories mean that they can hardly be the repositories of

knowledge and wisdom that Gulliver imagines them to be 2 Over the

centuries senility steadily sets in, until they are robbed of the power of reading - since by the time they reached the end of a sentence they have forgotten how it began - and even of talking, since language has by then changed out of recognition, making them foreigners in their own country

As for their fellow human beings, they tend to despise these immortals At the age of eighty they lose their property to their heirs, have no

employment and are left to eke out a miserable existence on a pittance Their immortal lives are a misery to every one of them, except perhaps the lucky minority who have relapsed into complete dotage If in Gulliver's own country there still exists a fear of death, his hosts tell him, he might like to take one or two Struldbrugs with him in order to educate his fellow

citizens

Gulliver meets a few Struldbrugs and is persuaded that theirs is indeed a miserable existence He concludes that 'no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run with pleasure from such a life'

Despite Swift's comments, there are plenty of people who seem

determined to live on, even as a Struldbrug The last chapter mentioned the interest in cryonics, a technique for keeping bodies at sub-zero

temperatures until a way can be found of reviving them But even were it

to succeed, it would still raise all the problems of Swift's Struldbrugs

Certainly it might be exciting to come back in a hundred years' time and see how the world had changed - it would carry some of the excitement of being whisked off in a time machine But the seventy-year-old cancer victim who is 'frozen' in, say, 2010, and spends two hundred years in

suspended animation, effectively comes back in 2210 as a seventy-year-old who has recovered from a two-hundred-year-long operation and now has to find a way of continuing his or her life in an entirely unfamiliar

environment He or she would continue to age, might well fall victim to other diseases requiring further periods of suspended animation, and would eventually lose so many faculties that at the age of a hundred and ten or a hundred and twenty the option of coming back might not seem so compelling

However, we might feel that Swift's account is less about the horrors of immortality than the horrors of old age Part of his satire concerned the treatment of the elderly, and might well resonate in the twenty-first

century where the old are constantly portrayed in negative terms as a drain upon the exchequer 3 Immortality, we might feel, would indeed be

terrible if it was attended by the ever-increasing infirmity of old age We would be left, in the famous words of Jaques as he concludes his soliloquy

on the seven stages of human life in Shakespeare's As You Like It, 'sans

teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything' - and in the Struldbrugs case sans an end to it all as well

But there are other ways in which we might conceive of immortality We might, for instance, live forever at a particular age The elixir of life, after all, is one of eternal youth If we were forever young, wouldn't immortality then be the sort of unending delight that Gulliver at first imagined it to be? Don't those people who keep hoping that somewhere in our genetic

makeup there lies the instructions for ageing and death have a justifiable aim? They want to cut out the undesired instructions for ageing from the corresponding strand of DNA and enable us to remain young indefinitely The argument therefore becomes that mortality is only a friend to those who have to endure the terminal illness which we call ageing If we could

be forever thirty years old, (the age often chosen by Christian writers speculating about the afterlife, and taking the age when Jesus began his ministry as the moment when a person is at the height of their powers) what sort of a friend would mortality be to us then?

The Makropoulos Case

Interestingly, even the prospect of eternal youth has not led all writers

to embrace the prospect of living forever with relish In 'The Makropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality' Professor Bernard Williams

concentrates not on the question of whether we are immortal but, in his words, 'what a good thing it is that we are not' Though he regards death

as an evil, he also believes that 'from facts about human desire and

happiness and what a life is, it follows that immortality would be, where conceivable at all, intolerable.'

'The Makropoulos Case' is the title of a play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek The play is less well known than the opera based upon it by Czech composer Janaček Its central character is a woman on whom the court physician to a sixteenth century emperor has tried out the elixir of life At the time of the action she is 342 years old and her unending life has

resolved itself into boredom and coldness She refuses to have anything more to do with the elixir and dies; meanwhile a young woman destroys the formula

Elina Makropoulos was 342 because she had been 42 for 300 years, so her problem was not that like the Struldbrugs she had grown old and

decrepit Through the repeated patterns of social contact that make up her life, she increasingly finds that experiences happen to her without

affecting her, making her increasingly detached and withdrawn

Everything is joyless to her

Of course we may say that such a reaction depends on the character of the person making it We may also note, as Williams points out, that an environment where everyone was immortal might have a different effect

to one in which, as in the Makropoulos case, only one person is But he does not think that these qualifications affect his main argument ' to suppose more generally that boredom and inner death would be

eliminated if everyone were similarly becalmed, is an empty hope: it would

be a world of Bourbons, learning nothing and forgetting nothing ' Elina Makropoulos descends into 'boredom and distance from life'; these 'both kill desire and consist in the death of it.' They show that the prospect of immortality can be of no comfort to those 'who want to live longer because they want to live more'

Swift referred to the ageing Struldbrugs as becoming 'incapable of

friendship' and 'dead to all natural affection' The suggestion of Čapek, picked up by Williams, is that this might come from mere longevity, and not through the ever-increasing mental and physical incapacity that

attends growing old We would not lose our physical and mental virility, but we would be drained of feeling and love Life would be the endless pleasure that ultimately cloys

Wordsworth provides a slightly different variant of the idea that life loses its vitality as we grow older:

There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of

Turn whereso'er I may,

By night and day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more

Wordsworth, unlike Williams, has a strong sense that we have come from God ('trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God who is our home'), and therefore that the magnificence we have lost is something which we once had, as if life simply took us further and further away from the glorious past we had in the direct presence of our Maker

The poem is not, perhaps, entirely settled in its view On the one hand Wordsworth feels increasingly detached from nature and his childhood vision, a sentiment that suggests Elina Makropoulos and her increasing distance from life On the other hand the poet strikes an optimistic chord too He is still linked to that childhood vision through memory and thought

- 'O joy! that in our embers/Is something that doth live' - and age does not obliterate it - 'Though inland far we be,/ Our souls have sight of that

immortal sea/Which brought us hither' Such a power of reawakening past glory through the exercise of reflection can be compared to Wordsworth's famous account of poetry as 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'

Nevertheless, some of the most powerful passages of Wordsworth’s poem present an inescapable sense of loss, of something that is either irrecoverable or only recoverable second-hand, as if the person who fell out of love had now to be content with reading about the passions of

others 4 When the child grows up and 'fits his tongue' to 'dialogues of

business, life or strife', he is already parted from this early glory He has become 'the little Actor' who 'cons another part';

Filling from time to time his 'humorous stage'

With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,

That life brings with her in her equipage;

As if his whole vocation

Were endless imitation.

Endless life in the popular imagination

On a lighter but still significant note, the supposed boredom of endless life has been a regular theme in science fiction The only two of Terry

Pratchett's novels to centre upon science fiction themes, Strata and Dark

Side of the Sun, both suggest the tedium of immortality In Strata rich

people don't die of old age; they pay for a regular operation But 200-year-old Kin Arad, beneficiary of a surgical company that pays in 'days' rather than cash (days added to life by surgical improvements), is the Struldbrug tiring of life in this novel Indeed as death becomes more avoidable, so the willingness of people to go on dangerous, 'death-defying' expeditions increases All that happens through the great strides taken by medical science to prevent people dying is an increasing take-up of backpacking expeditions on the wrong side of Saturn

In Dark Side of the Sun death is avoided through a technologically

guaranteed capacity to predict the future and thereby avoid all risks, with

similarly unrewarding results Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe and

Everything has a similar theme with the 'infinitely prolonged Wowbagger',

who is made immortal by accident and can't cope with his 'good luck'

Though Adams' book implies that there are immortals who do know how to

cope with endless life, we don't discover anything about how they do so It

is Wowbagger's feelings, dreading yet another turgid Sunday afternoon, that are given full rein

It is not difficult to think of characters from literature with no end to their lives in sight who are presented in a state of suffering, like the endlessly wandering Flying Dutchman, captain of a ghostly ship doomed to sail the seven seas forever, and for whom the 'land' he yearns for might as well be the end of his life Why else is the literary creation of the 'undead' seen as

a punishment rather than a reward? Dracula knows better than any the endless wandering, the sadness of never-ending life Such literary

creations appear to echo Mark Benecke’s view that ‘if death does not curb life, life loses its value' He seems to think that continuous living here on

earth would make us feel like the pusillanimous souls in Dante’s Inferno

who are rejected by Heaven and Hell alike:

They are without even the hope of death;

Their blind existence is of such abjection

That they are envious of every other fate

Given the treatment it is given in much popular literature, we might be inclined to feel some sympathy with the position of Professor Williams, who died himself at the age of 70, keeping strictly to the requirements of a biblical threescore years and ten If suicide is, as this chapter began by arguing, a rare event and most people relish the living of life, it is because they are aware that it is relatively short Were endless centuries of living suddenly to stretch out before human beings, suicide might rapidly

become the most common cause of death

Mortality as an enemy

Williams makes a powerful case for the potential staleness and ennui of

living forever, 5 which will be taken up and developed further in the

chapter on Heaven However, some have questioned the creative impulse brought by mortality as much as others have undermined that brought by

immortality It should not be assumed, they suggest, that the coming of

death 'concentrates our minds wonderfully', as Dr Johnson famously

remarked concerning the prospect of a hanging, or that somehow knowing that the symphony will end enables us to enjoy the music even more The prospect of an inevitable end to our lives might instead drain us of energy

or immobilise us Death might be the shocking reality round the corner that saps us of our will to live or react In other words, it might be

romanticising death to see it as the spur to creativity or even intensity of feeling in this life

An example of this view would be Philip Larkin's poem Aubade The first

lines make it clear that the prospect of death has a negative rather than a positive effect on the subject of the poem Rather than being

'concentrated wonderfully' by the prospect of death, the mind of this

individual is distracted and upset by it

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare

Till then I see what's really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die

There is no sense here of the prospect of death somehow being

stimulating Far from it Death, which constantly 'stays just on the edge of vision' as an 'unfocused blur' is described as 'a standing chill that slows each impulse down to indecision' Death does not encourage creativity It freezes it out, mesmerising the person who is moving closer every day towards an unavoidable dissolution Like an animal frozen by headlights in the dark, the ageing individual can think of nothing else than impending death It could even be said that Larkin himself exemplified this, in that his

output dried up in middle age Aubade, written in 1977 when he was 55,

was one of very few that he managed in the decade before his death Perhaps death had become the one thing that he could still write about The horror of death, the poem insists, has nothing to do with remorse for things done or not done ('time torn off unused'), but rather concerns the prospect of 'total emptiness forever', of 'the sure extinction that we travel

to and shall be lost in always'

Religion, the poem goes on, offers no solution in its pretence that we never die Nor is there solace to be had in the Lucretian observation that there is nothing to fear in death since we will not be there to regret the situation we are in For it is precisely the fact that we will not be there that

so upsets us, so that 'realisation of it rages out in furnace-fear when we are caught without people or drink' The phrase 'furnace-fear' suggests imagery of hell, but a hell brought into this life precisely by the fear of death The only answer is to have recourse to distractions, like the

monarch described in Pascal's Pensées, forever demanding endless

entertainment from his court jester - in modern 'democratic' times

everyone has their personal court jester in the form of a television set Even courage in the face of death serves no purpose, because 'being brave lets no one off the hook Death is no different whined at than

withstood' 6

Not only has it been claimed the prospect of death robs life of its

creativity, but it has also been claimed that it robs it of meaning In Being

and Nothingness, Sartre examines the idea that ‘death becomes the

meaning of life as the resolved chord is the meaning of melody’ The

metaphor recalls the idea of a finite life as the only tolerable one, much as even the most beautiful music can be heard once too often However, Sartre’s understanding is very different Finitude, for him, is a very

different matter to death Finitude is bound up with the fact that human existence involves choices, and whatever we choose means inevitably rejecting a different pathway through life Sartre’s existentialism is

strongly based upon the idea of human freedom; not simply the pathway

we choose through life but our personality itself is a project made by our

will (he quotes approvingly Alain’s idea that ‘character is a vow’)