A Critical Review of Twain's "The Damned Human Race"
Around the turn of the 20th century, Mark Twain wrote “The Damned Human Race”, a short essay that was later posthumously released in his anthology, “Letters from the Earth” (Twain). Throughout this work, Twain uses satire and flawed reasoning in an attempt to assert that humankind is in fact not the highest species, but the lowest, having “de-evolved” from the other animals. Twain wrote this essay at a dark time in his life, when he was experiencing both financial issues, as well as the loss of his wife and daughter, causing his feelings of negativity and extreme pessimism to clearly show. Twain’s lack of credibility, generalizations, and false dilemmas, are all reasons why he fails to prove his point and do little more than to briefly entertain the reader.
Train’s credibility to assert the claims he makes throughout “The Damned Human Race” can easily be called into question. It is well known that Mark Twain was most famous for his works of fiction, such as “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, and “The Prince and the Pauper”. While obviously a very talented writer, Twain was not, however, a biologist, zoologist, or genealogist, nor was he particularly known for his scholarly works. The entire essay was presented using a great amount of satire and sarcasm i.e. not the way a scholarly work would normally be written (Twain). Twain states that his claims were based off of actual experiments in the London Zoological Gardens. It at first appears that some of them could have actually been conducted, although not by Twain i.e. testing to see if an Anaconda would kill more than it could eat and determining that it would not. He then, however, goes on to talk about more outlandish experiments such as locking an Irish Catholic, Scotch Presbyterian, Turk from Constantinople, Greek Christian, Armenian, Methodist, Buddhist, Brahman, and Salvation Army Colonel in a cage together and...