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TEXTO 1

WE’RE DOOMED. NOW WHAT?

The time we’ve been thrown into is one of alarming and bewildering change — the breakup of the
post-1945 global order, a multispecies mass extinction and the beginning of the end of civilization as
we know it. The world groans under the weight of seven billion humans; every new birth adds
another mouth hungry for food, another life greedy for energy.

We all see what’s happening, we read it in the headlines every day, but seeing isn’t believing, and
believing isn’t accepting. We respond according to our prejudices, acting out of instinct, reflex and
training. Right-wing denialists insist that climate change isn’t happening, or that it’s not caused by
humans, or that the real problem is terrorism or refugees, while left-wing denialists insist that the
problems are fixable, under our control, merely a matter of political will. Accelerationists argue that
more technology is the answer. Incrementalists tell us to keep trusting the same institutions and
leaders that have been failing us for decades.

Meanwhile, as the gap between the future we’re entering and the future we once imagined grows ever
wider, nihilism takes root in the shadow of our fear: if all is already lost, nothing matters anyway.

You can feel this nihilism in TV shows like “True Detective,” “The Leftovers,” “The Walking Dead” and
“Game of Thrones,” and you can see it in the rush to war, sectarianism and racial hatred. It defines our
current moment, though in truth it’s nothing new. The Western world has been grappling with radical
nihilism since at least the 17th century, when scientific insights into human behavior began to
undermine religious belief. Philosophers have struggled since to fill the gap between fact and meaning:
Kant tried to reconcile empiricist determinism with God and Reason; Bergson and Peirce worked to
merge Darwinian evolution and human creativity.

Scientific materialism, taken to its extreme, threatens us with meaninglessness; if consciousness is

In her recent book of essays, “The Givenness of Things,” Marilynne Robinson rejects the materialist
view of consciousness, arguing for the existence of the human soul by insisting that the soul’s
metaphysical character makes it impervious to materialist arguments. The soul, writes Robinson, is an
intuition that “cannot be dispelled by proving the soul’s physicality, from which it is aloof by definition.
And on these same grounds, its nonphysicality is no proof of its nonexistence.”

The biologist E.O. Wilson spins the problem differently: “Does free will exist?” he asks in “The Meaning
of Human Existence.” “Yes, if not in ultimate reality, then at least in the operational sense necessary for

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sanity and thereby for the perpetuation of the human species.” Robinson offers an appeal to ignorance,
Wilson an appeal to consequences; both arguments are fallacious.

Yet as Wilson suggests, our dogged insistence on free agency makes a kind of evolutionary sense.
Indeed, humanity’s keenest evolutionary advantage has been its drive to create collective meaning.
That drive is as ingenious as it is relentless, and it can find a way to make sense of despair, depression,
catastrophe, genocide, war, disaster, plagues and even the humiliations of science. Our drive to make
meaning is powerful enough even to turn nihilism against itself. As Friedrich Nietzsche, one of
Western philosophy’s most incisive diagnosticians of nihilism wrote near the end of the 19th century:
“Man will sooner will nothingness than not will.” This dense aphorism builds on one of the thoughts
at the core of Nietzsche’s philosophy, that human beings make their own meaning out of life.

In this view, there is no ultimate, transcendent moral truth — or, as Nietzsche put it in an early essay,
“On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” truth is no more than a “mobile army of metaphors,
metonyms, and anthropomorphisms.” If we can stomach the moral vertigo this idea might induce, we
can also see how it’s not necessarily nihilistic, but in the right light a testament, rather, to human
resilience.

Adaptado de: Scranton, R. We’re Doomed. Now What? The New York Times. Dec.21, 2015. Disponível em:
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/21/were-doomed-now-what/ Acesso em: 8 ago. 2017.

TEXTO 2
CHILDREN
A recent report by the United Nations Children’s and Educational Fund (UNICEF) stated that Britain
was the worst country of twenty-one advanced countries in which to be a child. Normally I do not set
much store by these kind of league-table statements, which are usually based upon many false
premises, suppositions and the like, and are designed to produce the very results that will confirm
their authors’ prejudices. Rarely do such reports fail to suggest that more government intervention in
people’s lives is the answer to the problems with which they deal. But the UNICEF report is right,
grosso modo. If there is a country in the developed world in which childhood is a more wretched
experience than in Britain, I do not know it. It is wretched not only for those experiencing it
themselves, but for those experiencing British children. The British are a nation that fears its own
children. I see this at the bus stop in the little town in Britain in which I live some of the year. By
prevailing standards, the children of this town are by no means bad, but their mere presence in any
numbers makes old people at the bus-stop shrivel into themselves, and huddle up together for
protection, as the Voortrekkers in South Africa used to form a circle of their wagons at night when
travelling through potentially hostile territory. If a child misbehaves — dropping litter, spitting,
swearing loudly, bullying another child, pulling hair, drinking alcohol — the old people notice, but say
nothing. Tempers these days are short, knives are often long, and children quickly band together to
defend their inalienable right to utter egotism. In Britain, violence committed by and on children has
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increased very rapidly. The emergency departments of our hospitals report a dramatic rise in such
cases, fifty per cent in five years, involving tens of thousands of cases. Teachers are increasingly
subjected to threats from their pupils. In the year 2005-6, for example, 87,610 children, that is to say
2.7 per cent of all children at secondary school, were excluded for a time because of verbal or physical
attacks on teachers (in Manchester, 5.3 per cent of secondary pupils were so excluded, and it is an
unfortunate fact that where metropolitan areas lead, other areas usually follow). A recent survey
showed that a third of British teachers had suffered physical attacks from children, and a tenth of them
had been injured by children. Nearly two thirds had been verbally abused and insulted by children. A
half of them had thought of leaving the teaching profession because of the unruly behaviour of
children, and as many knew of colleagues who had done so. As if this were not bad enough, five-
eighths as many teachers have faced aggression from parents as from the pupils themselves. That is to
say, teachers cannot rely on parents to back them up in trying to deal with an unruly, aggressive or
violent child, quite the contrary (this is exactly what my patients who were teachers told me.) The
complacent suggest that ‘twas ever thus, and in a sense they are right. There is no kind of human
behaviour that is utterly without precedent: the world is too old for people to invent wholly new ways
of behaving. For every act of viciousness, malignity or brutality, there is always an historical
precedent. Nevertheless, it is within living memory that in most cases when a child misbehaved in
school, and his parents were informed of it by a teacher, the child could expect retribution at home as
well as discipline at school. Now, in a large number of cases, he can expect neither. The question is not
whether each individual case is without precedent — clearly it is not — but whether the number of
cases has increased, and whether there is any reason, other than a decline in the numbers of children,
that it should decrease.

Fonte: Adaptado de: DALRYMPLE, Theodore. Spoilt Rotten: the toxic cult of sentimentality. London: Gibson Square,
2012.

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QUESTÕES
As questões de 1 a 5 referem-se ao TEXTO 1.
5) ‘It’ e ‘it’, grifados em sequência no 8º parágrafo,
1) As seguintes afirmativas estão corretas, estão relacionados à/ao
EXCETO: (A) desespero e depressão.
(A)‘The world groans’, grifado no 1º parágrafo, tem (B) sentido evolucionário.
sentido metafórico no contexto desse parágrafo. (C) motivação humana.
(B)‘Will’, grifado ao longo do texto, tem o mesmo (D) significado coletivo.
sentido em todas as ocorrências.
(C)‘Meaninglessness’ e ‘nothingness’, grifados no 5º As questões de 6 a 10 referem-se ao TEXTO 2.
e 8º parágrafos, respectivamente, denotam falta de
sentido e de valor, no contexto desses parágrafos. 6) Sobre os dados divulgados pelo relatório da
(D)‘Ultimate’, grifado no 9º parágrafo, pode ser UNICEF, o autor
substituído no contexto desse parágrafo por ‘most (A) admite estar de acordo.
important’, sem prejuízo de significado. (B) apresenta argumentos contrários.
(C) contesta a veracidade dos resultados.
2) No 3º parágrafo, o que o autor conclui sobre (D)duvida da gravidade do tema pesquisado.
o futuro que imaginávamos e o que se
aproxima? 7) O que o autor relata para ilustrar sua
afirmação de que ‘a Grã-Bretanha teme seus
3) Por que o autor afirma que o niilismo não é próprios filhos’?
nada de novo?
8) Quais tipos de ocorrências foram divulgados
4) Nos parágrafos 6º e 7º, o autor contrapõe por uma pesquisa recente envolvendo
argumentos de dois outros autores e afirma professores do ensino secundário na Grã-
que Bretanha?
(A) somente o apelo de E.O. Wilson sobre a
sanidade humana é convincente. 9) Ao lidar com as questões de comportamento
(B) apenas o apelo de Robinson é cientificamente reportadas pela escola, a maioria dos pais dos
comprovado. alunos na Grã-Bretanha
(C) nenhum dos dois autores questiona o livre (A) orienta seus filhos.
arbítrio. (B) não apoia os professores.
(D) ambos apelos se baseiam em inverdades. (C) reforça as medidas disciplinares.
(D) está sempre atenta às notificações .

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10) Assinale a alternativa CORRETA:

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RASCUNHO