The statement that can best be made about the purpose of The Lowest Animal by Mark Twain is that he believes that mankind is immoral, vulgar, wasteful, vengeful, discriminatory; cruel, greed, and obscene. This is because he has a moral sense and conscience despite this, doesn’t make our decisions right and properly. However, contrast with Mark Twain’s thesis; I think human beings are not that all bad and not the lowest animal, but perhaps not the highest animal either.
Mark Twain’s essay, The Lowest Animal, details about our human beings’ bad and disgusting aspects. He talks about human beings’ greed, cruelty, vulgarity, wastefulness, and other lots of evil aspects. By introducing these things, he exclaims that human beings are the lowest animal in the world. He is also very angry about their behavior, because they do evil things even though they have consciousness about what they are doing. He emphasized that it’s the biggest reason why humans are the lowest animal, because he thinks the moral sense enables men to do wrong.
Mark Twain is wrong, because there are also good aspects about human, but Twain just lists human’s bad aspects. There are lots of positive aspects of humans, he says like there are only negative aspects of human. If there are bad people, there can also be good people. It’s true in these days, and was also true in the time period which Mark Twain lived in. In 1860s, when Mark Twain lived in, there was an American Civil War and this helps me understand why he is so critical thinks about human beings. Possibly, it’s because he was disillusioned by racial discrimination that was in American’s mind and the unnecessary war that they were fighting. But, there’s something he missed about humans.
According to Mark Twain, man is cruel. He exampled man’s brutal punishments to the others, desire of destruction, the unnecessary war that man makes, vengefulness, and etc. But, man is not that all cruel, because man is