Morality In Mark Twain's Morals

In his essay Mark Twain speaks about how mankind invented all the evil in the world, from obscenities to wasteful use of pretty much everything. He states that humans are the only species that openly perform evil regardless of the moral sense. The comparison between humans and animals much to his dismay he is embarrassed that man is the least of the all the evolved species in the world. He was successful in his stance by motivating readers to really take a good look at their own morals, and ways that they are living life.

At the beginning Twain presents himself as if he is a scientist, and by doing so loses creditability to most readers. His stereotyping of the human race as everyone being cruel, greedy and unable to rationalize resources automatically identified with most of society as this is something that is consistently thought by most conservationists. Twain used the example of a buffalo hunt where men killed over seventy buffalo for sport and only used one of the buffalo for resources. The comparison is an Anaconda that has numerous calves but only kills and eats one, and shows no interest in the other calves that it could kill. This analogy essentially states that man is cruel

He took that stance to attempt to get the readers to attempt to prove him wrong. His attempt to portray the human race as a “valueless race” thru well written words was successful. However the average person could look at a colony of ants as a species that enslaves other colonies of ants, just as human’s had. Therefore an educated human being would be able to debunk the entire theory that Twain is attempting to prove. His essay almost immediately drives the average person to attempt to prove the overall thought process completely wrong. However his attempt to make people see the error in their ways was completely and utterly a success, and hopefully something the human race looks at