The Damned Human Race, Essay Example

Mark Twain’s text “That Damned Human Race” provides a radical critique of humanity from what may be termed a certain misanthropic perspective. Twain’s essential thesis is to reverse both common religious discourses conceiving man as the “crown of being” and scientific discourses that maintain that the human is a higher product of the evolutionary process. Twain defends his stance through what he terms a “scientific method”: he utilizes empirical observation of the various follies of humanity to underscore a basic stupidity and irrationality to human action. Concomitantly, Twain puts forward his thesis in the form of a satirical commentary, as humor plays a crucial role in his critique. Twain’s tone is thus above all comedic; however, this is not to detract from the seriousness of his remarks. The comedic tone rather re-enforces the very notion of the follies of human beings, in a certain sense highlighting a senseless and absurd futility. In the text, Twain thus weaves together what at first glance seems to be two diametrically opposed types of discourse: a scientific empirical discourse and a discourse of comedy.

Twain’s key thesis that “the bottom stage of development – namable as the Human Being” is the result of a methodology that emphasizes observation. Firstly, Twain supports his argument by immediately contrasting the supposedly higher and lower species of human and animal respectively. What Twain notes is that traits that are apparently undesirable, such as cruelty, are present in the human being and not in the animal. In comparing an anaconda and an earl, Twain observes that the eating habit of the anaconda is mediated by the needs of the animal. In other words, the animal only eats as much as is necessary. In contrast, Twain tells the story of an English earl who upon visiting America went on a hunting expedition and needlessly slaughtered buffalo in the name of sport and entertainment. What Twain thus identifies here is a radical re-evaluation of values that are traditionally conferred to men and beast. Twain does not see any of the negative values in the animal kingdom, insofar as its logic is not one of cruelty but of self-preservation. In contrast, the behavior of human beings seems almost limitless in its total disregard for other forms of life on a purely egotistical and abstract level.

Despite the seriousness of Twain’s thesis, he nevertheless employs a comedic tone. This tone is above all effective when the author attempts to identify some of the hypocrisies inherent to the human animal. As Twain writes: “[Man] is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight.” The juxtaposition of what human beings claim to believe and the reality of their actions provide a satirical summarization of an inherent contradiction within human existence. Human beings are continuously marked by the claim to be something, whereas their actions inevitably transgress this initial claim. Accordingly, the tone of Twain’s piece perfectly recapitulates this fundamental paradox in its absurdity, as Twain’s tone pushes the content to the limit in terms of emphasizing the absurdity of the human condition. In other words, the comedic form of Twain’s text perfectly matches the content, as both emphasize the absurd.

The success of Twain’s text thus lies in its symmetry of both tone and argument. Insofar as the text argues for the absurdity of human existence according to its internal paradoxes, contradictions and cruelty, the comedic tone repeats these key argumentative motifs. Moreover, the notion that Twain employs a rigorous observational method – a method that is supposedly exclusive to the rational animal that is the human  – to identify the inconsistencies and irrationality of his subject helps re-enforce the notion of such contradiction.