Two. Using the Toulmin model, write an essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the assertion that the evil witnessed in Night bears moral witness to the truth and points to "freedom from the prison" and this moral agency gives Night its redeeming value. In other words, we must have accounts that bear witness to evil in order that we don't make the error of denying evil and history. Otherwise, we will rewrite history and these revisionists histories are false. Some however would argue that the evil evident in the book compels serves no purpose other than for us to embrace a nihilistic worldview; therefore, they would argue, the book has no redeeming value.
In the above essay prompt, you would be well served to evaluate the book's redeeming value by looking at its value in terms of using a criteria. We see how to apply a criteria or standard on pages 112-114 in How to Write Anything.
Here's a sample criteria or standard I would apply to the above essay prompt:
1. Is the book true?
2. Is the book moral?
3. Does the book contain a moral lesson we can use to better our lives?
4. Does the book connect with a wide audience by appealing to universal concerns?
Three. Related to the above essay prompt, some might argue that the fate of the people in Elie's town was that they suffered from a "failure of imagination." Or more specifically when presented with the evil of the Nazis, they could not believe or comprehend such evil. Therefore, they could not prepare for it. In this context, write a cause and effect analysis of the way we tend to deny evil and how this capacity for denial results in our destruction. You might compare the evil rendered in Night with the denial that preceded the 9/11 attacks. Or you could use another example.
Example of an Outline for Book's Moral Value: It Warns Us of Evil Creep or the Acclimation to Evil
Page 1: Write about "evil creep" in which you or someone you know descended gradually into a very bad situation.
Page 2: Thesis Paragraph: Likewise, Night resists nihilism by warning us about the conditions that lead to evil creep, which include ____________________, ________________, _____________________, and ______________________.
1. We deny evil.
2. Truth is inconvenient.
3. Change is excruciating in the short-term.
4. Evil can go beyond our comprehension of it.
5. We dismiss the truth-tellers of the world as nuts.
6. We believe our parents and our religion will save us.
Pages 3-6: You'll write body paragraphs that match the blanks above. Of course, you'll fill in these blanks. These blanks can be found in Lecture One.
The Nature of Evil
Introduction: Alternative Explanations to "Evil"
Misguided beliefs
Childhood trauma or abuse
PTSD
unconscious triggers that setoff childhood trauma
"going mental" or "going postal"; in other words, mental illness
too much sugar; Twinkie defense
compensation; we "act out" to compensate for some deficiency for which we cannot control
the misfit, the loner
cat parasite alters your brain: How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy
Can We Learn Lessons from the Holocaust?
Ron Rosenbaum discusses evil, Godwin's Law, and deriving "feel-good" morality lessons from The Holocaust.
Can We Discuss Evil in a World of Moral Relativism?
Ron Rosenbaum discusses evil and moral relativism.
Are There Degrees of Evil?
Ron Rosenbaum discusses degrees of evil.
Is evil the cause of the suffering inflicted on Wiesel and the Jews described in this book or is their suffering the result of a misguided, sincere ideology?
The best book I’ve read that addresses the way we look at evil behind the Holocaust is Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum.
Rosenbaum realizes a lot of people, including intellectuals and scholars, cannot accept evil; they’d rather find explanations that, explicitly or not, deny the existence of evil.
Part of this denial of evil is the need to say we are "rational beings" who can come up with a scientific explanation for everything. If we accept an evil force, we are showing signs of antiquated religious fanaticism.
So to avoid being "backwards" and "antiquated" in our thinking, we believe that horrible, evil things happen, such as the Nazi scourge, not because people are evil, but because people have childhood traumas or become insane, beholding to misguided, sincere beliefs. Or people have a chemical imbalance that compels them to do violence. Or there are political and social forces that lead to a type of evil behavior, sometimes referred to as the "banality of evil."
But Rosenbaum argues--and I agree-that evil is a diabolical force, a demonism, not necessarily in the religious sense, that animates Hitler and other evil people.
Many scholars reject the idea of an evil or a diabolical force. We can call such deniers of evil rationalists, those who believe there is a scientific explanation for everything.
You don't have to be religious to identify evil: I should add here that the famous atheist Christopher Hitchens, no friend of religion, believed in an evil force and said Osama Bin Laden was guided by such an evil force. I mention this to show you don't have to be religious to see evil.
I would further argue that many people, as I said before, including the nonreligious, believe in evil. They simply don't use the word evil. Rather, they use another word that I can't say here to describe evil people. The word begins with the letter "a."
I would further argue that Hitler and his Nazi minions were giant "a . . ." who used their ideology as an excuse to be big "a . . ."
What is an "a . . ."? A person who enjoys hurting other people for no other reason than the sheer pleasure of it. What is the pleasure? It's the feeling of power over the victim. This type of perverse pleasure is called sadism.
We can avoid the A word to describe such people. Other, better words for college writing are malevolent, sadistic, malignant. These adjectives mean the person is animated by an evil force.
A noun we can use is a sadist.
A sadist, who takes pleasure in committing cruel acts against others, is driven by an evil force.
These people are worthy of our hate. We hate them because evil is worthy of hatred.
But too many people deny evil and say we shouldn't hate people like Hitler. We should "understand" them. They argue that Hitler was not so much evil; rather, he was insane, a true believer in his own ideology and this wrong belief caused him to do wrong, but he and his followers were not evil.
These people argue that we are irrational, we are psychologically wounded, we are even mad, but we are never evil.
Rosenbaum, and I agree with him, rejects these over simplistic explanations, which evidence people are too frightened to face the brutal truth that there is evil in our world.
Some argue that Hitler was delusional, a sincere believer in his killing of the Jews as an act that was good for Germany and the world; he thought he was doing good like “killing germs.” I reject this view. Hitler took sadistic satisfaction in killing the people he hated. He used his “vision” as an excuse to exercise his cruelty.
Fatuous (Stupid) Theories That Excuse Hitler
Here’s an example of someone trying to say Hitler was delusional. It’s the ludicrous Hitler Billy Goat Theory . . . Theories such as this one are an absurd oversimplification of evil. Often these lame theories, like he was a repressed homosexual or a closet Jew, are an attempt at finding false comfort from denying evil. There is in fact no way to explain away Hitler’s evil. He was in fact evil and this makes the Holocaust not entirely explainable.
There is an element of frightening mystery behind evil of this magnitude that escapes conception and language. We call this ineffable or inexplicable evil. Theorists and academics like to think they can explain anything, including Hitler’s evil, because such a view gives them the illusion of control. In other words, explanation becomes a sort of comfort or “consolation.”
Three. What is the danger of denying evil?
If we reject evil and explain bad behavior by saying we are sincerely misguided, insane, or chemically and/or neurologically imbalanced, we are saying we are helpless pawns to forces we cannot control. We are innocent, yes, but such innocence comes with a price, because we are slaves to psychological and biological forces and as such we have no free will. Having no free will, we have a diminished definition of what it means to be human. We are less human, more robot.
If we reject evil, then no one is accountable in a court of law. Every evil act can be explained by the "Twinkie defense," the infamous defense that a killer went on a murder spree because of a sugar overload, which caused his brain to go haywire.
Four. What is the either/or fallacy of evil?
When it comes to looking Hitler, people are often divided into two camps There are those who believe Hitler to be a cynical manipulator while others believe Hitler is a sincere madman, but in fact he can be both. Often in life we start out dishing out B.S. to others and if people believe in B.S. we start to believe in it. That’s the beginning of going crazy. Evil can result from someone who is both delusional and consciously evil. It’s not an either/or proposition. All of us are clearly a mingling of unconscious and conscious impulses.
Can normal people turn to evil?
The short answer is yes. Our longing to believe in a authority figure, our need to belong to the tribe and conform to its ways, our willingness to be obedient to the powers at be often compel us to do evil while cowardly denying responsibility for our evil. Think of all the German citizens who collaborated with the Nazis in the name of obedience.
Also we become evil through "evil creep"; we gradually become evil once we make the wrong choice. A great film about this is called A Simple Plan, a tale of greed.
However, let’s be clear: While we all have evil in us that can be triggered by societal pressures such as the need to conform or the need to obey authority, Hitler’s evil is “off the grid”; he shows an evil that lacks the controls and boundaries we associate with a sadist and a sociopath.
Let us not compare the evil of a sadistic tyrant to a bunch of cowardly sheep.
Was the Nazi evil dependent on Hitler?
Even with Europe’s Christian-based history of anti-Semitism (hatred of the Jews), it appears the Holocaust needed the Cult of Hitler’s Personality to fuel something as unspeakable as the Holocaust. Hitler had the will: Killing six million Jews didn’t help Hitler’s war cause. He didn’t kill them because he had to. He killed them because he wanted to. One compelling and convincing theory is that Hitler’s evil was a form of art, a lifestyle, complete with architecture, design, music, clothing, etc.
What does Hitler teach us about evil?
Evil is associated with sadism, which means taking perverse pleasure in inflicting cruelty on others. As an amateur psychologist, I would make a comparison between Hitler and the BTK serial killer, not on all levels, but on this one: It appears they both took sadistic pleasure in controlling and torturing and killing others. Evil can reach a magnitude, as in the case of Hitler and the Nazis, that is not entirely explainable. In an evil sense, Hitler became a “hit,” a “blockbuster,” a phenomenon for which there is no explanation or formula.
In the entertainment industry people try to come up with hits all the time, like Spice Girls or Twilight series or Tim Tebow or ****** ******. Evil is born from a lack of authenticity.
Hitler was a quack, a fake, a charlatan, a mountebank, a clown who became a hit and when people took him seriously he took himself seriously and became a true believer in his own B.S.
Evil can be so horrific that many are compelled to explain it away with a stupid theory. Some people can’t accept “evil without the fig leaf of rectitude.”
In other words, people have to believe, as an article of faith, that evil is driven by a sincere madman. Not so, argues Rosenbaum, and I agree with him.
What are some distinguishing characteristics about evil?
If we look at Hitler and Osama Bin Laden, we see some parallels that give some insights into evil:
1. Delusions of grandeur and perhaps clinical definition of narcissism: inflated self-regard
2. Sense of rectitude (being right) that no one can challenge.
3. Surrounded by sycophants so no reality check resulting in solipsism (your self becomes your only reality, a form of insanity).
4. Vain belief that you have special knowledge that the world's idiots cannot understand so it's your right to will your vision on the rest of the world. This is a vehicle for exercising your control over others.
5. Sadism: you enjoy hurting and killing others and use phony ideologies as your vehicle for this.
6. While many serial killers suffered abusive childhoods, Hitler and Bin Laden apparently did not. They do evil for its own sake. "I do it because I can." Evil is a pleasure, an imposing of the will over others, not to achieve anything other than the sense of power from asserting such a will.
Writing Options:
Was Hitler's Final Solution, which resulted in the Holocaust, the product of evil or the misguided vision of a sincere ideologue?
What has happened to the idea of evil in the face of psychology and science? And what are the consequences of explaining away evil? This is a two-part essay.
Examples of Thesis Statements You Shouldn't Write
Don't write a thesis that is too broad, general, or obvious.
Hitler's evil spread across Europe.
We need to study Hitler's evil.
No one knows what evil is so it's stupid to call Hitler evil.
Why is McMahon so obsessed with Hitler's so-called "evil"? Is McMahon a religious fanatic? I think McMahon is trying to make us religious and I resent this. I hate his class and I refuse to write this essay.
Why call Hitler evil? He was simply wrong about his solution for the world's problems. People make mistakes all the time.
All of us are evil.
Let's stop talking about this fiction McMahon calls evil and talk about the real forces behind Hitler's bad deeds, psychology and biology.
Calling Hitler evil doesn't help us understand Hitler.
We've allowed fake science to explain away evil.
More Successful Thesis Statements
Hitler was not a benign creature with a twisted vision but rather an evil-inspired demagogue evidenced by _________, __________, __________, and __________.
McMahon's focus on Hitler's "evil" fails to bring us to a closer to an understanding of Hitler's motivations, which can be explained by established psychology and sheds light on Hitler's five major unconscious motives.
These so-called "unconsious motives" the writer speaks of are mere speculation and cannot proven. They tell a story about how people do bad things that allows us to deny evil. But we deny evil at our peril. Hitler in fact embodies "off the grid" evil evidenced by __________, __________, ___________, and _____________.
Bogus science has created the delusion that there is no evil in this world. Science denies evil in five major ways, which include ____________, _____________, ____________, and ______________.
Example of a Personal Introduction and Transition to Your Thesis:
Recently, I was in the Kaiser Urgent Care in Harbor City to have a doctor confirm my pink eye and prescribe me drops. I was reading my Kindle. Two other people were reading. The three of us were the only non-fat people .
The other few dozen were all conspicuously fat with huge, elephantine neck rolls and impossible-to-conceive bellies drooping below the knees, and were either on their cell phones or watching TV. At one point I wasn't sure if I was in a hospital waiting room or a HomeTown Buffet.
No doubt, I am a mean person and I deserve to go to Hell with my eager scorn of people whose girth is larger than mine; however, I am mean with a small "m." Mean with a capital "M" is reserved for evil people, those who actually enjoy inflicting harm on others. However, there are those who would use science and psychology to deny Mean with a capital "M," by excusing evil in egregious ways, including _____________, ___________, ____________, and ______________.
Research Links
Understanding How Signal Phrases Help You Write Your Research Paper
Here is a helpful link for understanding signal phrases.
MLA Format Research Paper Checklist
First Page
- Do you have a salient, distinctive title that is relevant to your topic and thesis?
- Do you have your name, instructor’s name, the course, and date (in that order) at the top left?
Format
- Are you using 12-point font with Times New Roman?
- Are your lines double-spaced?
- Is your font color black?
- Do you make sure there are no extra spaces between paragraphs (some students erroneously use 4 spaces between paragraphs)
- Do you use 1-inch margins?
- Do you use block format for quotes of 4 or more lines in which you indent another inch from the left margin?
Introduction
- Does your introduction have a compelling hook using an anecdote, a troubling current event, a startling statistic, etc.?
- Do you avoid pat phrases or clichés? For example, “In today’s society . . .” or “In today’s modern world . . .” or “Since the Dawn of Man . . .”
Thesis
- Do you have a thesis that articulates your main purpose in clear, specific language?
- Is your thesis sophisticated in that it makes an assertion that goes beyond the obvious and self-evident?
- Is your thesis debatable?
- Do you address your opponents with a concession clause? (While opponents of my proposal to raise the minimum wage to $22 an hour make some compelling points, their argument collapses when we consider _____________, _______________, __________________, and ________________. )
- Does your thesis have explicit or implicit mapping components that outline the body paragraphs of your essay?
Sources and Plagiarism
- Does your research paper contain accurate information from credible sources?
- Are your sources timely, relevant, current, thorough (detailed) and definitive (the sources that peer experts refer to)?
- Do you use signal phrases to introduce sources that you are integrating into your argument?
- Do you use complete parenthetical citations throughout your essay?
- Do you mix quotations, paraphrases, and summaries in your references rather than just relying on one form of citing your sources?
Body Paragraphs
- Are your paragraphs well developed with a good 120-150 words per paragraph (with the exception of your conclusion, which can be shorter)?
- Do you have clear topic sentences (mini thesis statements) that control the supporting details in the paragraph?
- Do you have varied transitions within the paragraphs and transitions that connect the paragraphs?
- Do make sure you don’t continue the same paragraph with a second topic sentence?
- Do you make sure that for every cited quotation, paraphrase, or summary you have a minimum of three sentences of your own analysis of that quotation, paraphrase or summary?
Counterarguments and Refutation Section
- Did you address at least two of your opponents’ strongest arguments against your thesis by using clear counterargument-refutation templates? (My opponents make a strong point about X, but their overall assertion collapses when we consider _____________, _______________, and _________________.)
- Did you make sure you didn’t twist your opponents’ arguments (Straw Man fallacy) in order to make it easier to refute them?
Conclusion
- Did you restate your thesis in more emotional style (using more pathos than logos) to give emphasis to your points?
- Did you show the broader social implications of your thesis to show its urgency and relevance?
- Did you avoid the conclusion cliché? (In conclusion, as you can clearly see . . .)
Mechanics
- Did you check for spelling and word usage?
- Did you proofread for comma splices, sentence fragments, pronoun errors, verb tense shifts, missing apostrophes, and other egregious errors?
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