The purpose of a writing class is to develop a meaningful thesis, direct or implied, that will generate a compelling essay. Most importantly, a meaningful thesis will have a strong emotional connection between you and the material. In fact, if you don’t have a “fire in your belly” to write the paper, your essay will be nothing more than a limp document, a perfunctory exercise in futility. A successful thesis will also be intellectually challenging and afford a complexity worthy of college-level writing. Thirdly, the successful thesis will be demonstrable, which means it can be supported by examples and illustrations in a recognizable organizational design.
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Using the Toulmin model, write a 5-page essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the assertion that the evil witnessed in Elie Wiesel's Night eradicates the philosophical notion of theodicy (the reconciliation of an all-loving, all-powerful God to the existence of evil).
Using the Toulmin model, write a 5-page 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 value. Some however would argue that the evil evident in the book compels us to embrace a nihilistic worldview.
In a 5-page Toulmin model essay, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the question if Hitler and his minions were crazy sociopaths or sane evil agents.
Your guidelines for your Final Research Paper are as follows:
This research paper should present a thesis that is specific, manageable, provable, and contestable—in other words, the thesis should offer a clear position, stand, or opinion that will be proven with research.
You should analyze and prove your thesis using examples and quotes from a variety of sources.
You need to research and cite from at least five sources. You must use at least 3 different types of sources.
At least one source must be from an ECC library database.
At least one source must be a book, anthology or textbook.
At least one source must be from a credible website, appropriate for academic use.
The paper should not over-rely on one main source for most of the information. Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.
This paper will be approximately 5-7 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required. This means at least 5 full pages of text. The Works Cited page does NOT count towards length requirement.
You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.
You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Your paper must be logically organized and focused.
What is the stunning achievement of Night?
The book gives us a picture of unspeakable evil, a teenage boy’s firsthand account of the Holocaust, one that some people cannot comprehend or believe.
This is "evil off the grid" that cannot be explained with words or exposition. Rather, we need a narrative, a rendering, a showing of evil.
In other words, Wiesel has done the impossible: He's used words to describe the unspeakable.
Through this first-person narrative, we experience the horror of loss and evil as seen through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old boy, a boy who, before being taken away to a concentration camp, believes in the wisdom of his father and the justice of God.
These beliefs are challenged, or rather abolished, as Wiesel sees evil take over the world in the face of a silent God. He sees a world surrendering to evil as his father, an image of strength, can only watch on helplessly.
Another achievement of the book is the way it makes us examine the nature of evil. We often attempt to reduce evil to a theory to create the illusion of control but in reading Night we see that evil has an element of mystery that is unexplainable.
Many people want to explain evil, reduce it to a scientific explanation because they can't accept evil, they can't accept an evil force and because they want to further their own theory as part of their self-interest.
Night the memoir is not a theory about evil; it’s a boy’s experience of evil, an evil of such magnitude that his faith is changed forever. He recreates the ordeal of going through evil no one could have imagined and what this ordeal did to his faith.
Night Is a Necessary Book Because to This Day There Are Those Who Deny the Holocaust.
Book Consulted: Denying History by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman
One. The Doctrine of the Deniers
Six million Jews did not die.
The German state did not have a policy to exterminate Jews with the gas chambers
Legit, mainstream historians are “revisionists,” those who rewrite history to push an agenda, the “pro-Jew” agenda.
The Jews invented the lie of the Holocaust to use their victimization as a power play over others.
Two. Anticipating the Deniers
After World War II during the liberation of those imprisoned in the concentration camps General Dwight D. Eisenhower foresaw that people would deny or not believe the horrors of the Holocaust so he ordered a gathering of evidence and documentation in every conceivable way.
Eisenhower knew that cynics would dismiss the Holocaust in part by saying “the winners write history but it’s not an accurate history.”
Three. What Is History?
There are three types or “tiers” according to Michael Shermer.
First Tier: Historical Objectivity, let the facts speak for themselves and do no interject opinion. It consists of 7 principles:
History exists outside the minds of historians.
Historians discover the past as astronomers discover the cosmos.
Historians can know and describe the past.
Historians can be unbiased.
One historical event leads to another in a series of cause and effect.
Historians can discover this cause and effect objectively.
Historians must show the past “as it actually happened.”
According to Shermer, the problem with the first tier is it denies something called interpretation. You simply don’t just record events. You must interpret them. The first tier woefully ignores this fact. Because we are always interpreting events, the first tier DOES NOT EVEN EXIST. IT’S A MYTH.
The Second Tier: Historical Relativism, the Seven Principles
History only exists in the minds of historians.
Historians construct the past the way a sculptor constructs a figure out of marble.
Historians construct the past with partial documentation that always gives only a partial, incomplete, and therefore unreliable history.
Historians can never purge themselves of bias, unconscious or otherwise.
There is no logical cause and effect between contingent historical events.
Historians impose their own causal structure on history to give themselves the illusion of order.
Historians cannot show history; only one flawed interpretation of it. Therefore, one version of history is just as valid as the next one. All versions of history are valid, which means none are.
Problems with the Historical Relativism Approach.
If relativism is true, we can know nothing, and if we can know nothing, then communication is stupid, feeble, and not worth trying.
If nothing can be known, then there is no meaning, only nihilism, the belief that our existence amounts to nothing.
The historical relativist suffers a paradox: As soon as he “makes history,” he contradicts his belief that there can be no real history. He has in effect admitted the futility of his own mission.
The Third Tier: Historical Science, the Seven Principles
History exists both outside and inside the heads of historians.
Historians both discover and describe the past the way a natural scientist discovers and describes natural phenomena.
Historians can discover and describe a defined portion of the past through the available data.
Since historians will always be partly biased, the real question is the quality and degree of the bias. By what methods and with what evidence do scientists arrive at a particular conclusion? And in what cultural context? And with whose funds?
The past does have a causal structure that we can see with scientific evidence.
Recognizing the objective nature of discovery and the subjective nature of description, historians can discover and describe the causal structure.
Historians’ job is to present this past as provisional interpretation of “what actually happened” based on current available evidence , much as natural scientists do with evidence from the natural world.
It is only this final tier, the historical one, according to Shermer, that is legit and without contradictions.
Using Historical Science to Authenticate the Holocaust
We have a “convergence of evidence” that shows the Holocaust really did exist. This evidence includes:
Written documents.
Eyewitness testimony
Photographs
The camps themselves
Inferential evidence: population demographics, for example.
The Conditions That Pointed to the Extermination Camps Many Years Before
Nazis developed sterilization and euthenasia programs in the 1930 targeting undesirables. They also used secret murder and deportation as tools to get rid of undesirables.
Student Eric Peterson
Professor: McMahon
English 1A-Section 6373
4 March 2012
Night by Elie Wiesel
Denial and Acclimation to Evil
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, we are very painfully reminded to the core and fiber of our very being that there are many ways in which human beings cave in to both denial and acclimation to evil and we can learn from this both profound and powerful lessons of life and human nature itself. It begins with Wiesel questioning his ability to use language to convey to the readers that which he had witnessed and came to accept as the darkest zone of man and he states that others will never truly understand (Wiesel Preface ix). Even as the book Night officially begins in the first unnamed chapter, the Jewish people in the village did not believe what Moishe the Beadle tried so desperately to tell them (Cengage Enotes). Another way we see Elie Wiesel himself manifest denial was the fact that he himself did not see the entire picture of the facts that not only did Hitler and his accomplices war on all Jews, but also on the Gypsies, the disabled, the Slavic people, the Communists, the Socialists, the African Germans, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the homosexuals (Wiesel Preface viii). Not only do we see Elie Wiesel’s denial, but we see this denial of what was really happening to all of them in a form of groupthink. After all, this process did not occur in just one moment or even in just one day, but transpired over a period of years and began with the cool and calculating manipulation of a puppet master who knew how to use situations to turn long time neighbors against one another. Those of us who have experienced large measures of dysfunction and denial in our own families and communities can both empathize and identify with the progression of denial, division, and evil creep starting with Elie Wiesel, his father, and the members of their entire Jewish community. What is the powerful lesson we learn from human history of what denial and acclimation to evil has done and has the potential to do in our own lives, families, and communities?
At the very beginning of the book Night, Elie Wiesel tells us the readers that he knows he must bear witness to what he experienced and saw and yet at the same time he confesses to the very limitations he had and that he simply did not have the words to say and he felt and still feels helpless over the limitations of language (Wiesel Preface ix). Even as a survivor years after the holocaust, the very raw and primitive horror Wiesel must have felt during his recollections made it easier and more convenient to document transending sentences which wandered on the outer perimeter of the core horrors of the holocaust. One may ask if perhaps I am being too critical of Wiesel, for after all it was he who experienced this and it was he who found the courage to tell all the people of what happened. I feel that in order to truly reach the core reasons that this evil was allowed to continue so long, I must encourage the reader to also look at his role, as Wiesel must look at his, and I at mine. Since Roman times have politicians found clever catch phrases and crowd soothing placating words to speak as great orators, allowing thousands of wonderful thought provoking words to come out to dance around the core issues and distract the undisciplined minds from true events which are transpiring as they listen to the soothing words. Was it the enemy who betrayed and perverted the words, or was it us the people who allowed it to come to this level with barbed wire outside of our windows and armed guards preventing us from leaving our homes and neighborhoods, after taking and selling our wedding rings and personal things? A man I knew who was a homeless rock cocaine addict and a telemarketer for the National Veterans Foundation told me before of the power of both the spoken and written word, for it was those words which brought a ray of truth into the darkest concrete prison cell in which a strong mind was trapped for part of a human lifetime. Interestingly, even today in American cities, the narcotics flood the streets and bodies of addicts as the gas flooded the lives of the people inside of the German chambers.
And so begins the book Night in the first unnamed chapter, the man in their community who first saw the truth of what was happening is called Moishe the Beadle, and the fourth sentence refers indirectly to Moishe the Beadle being the only one liked among the poor in Transylvania (Wiesel 3). This fact alone provokes thought about the various mindsets of the locals in Wiesel’s childhood town and how seriously they took the lives and words of those who were transients and considered to be of a lesser class. This raises serious questions about the very beginnings of “evil creep” (McMahon Breakthrough Writer) and the ways in which it had already pervaded the Jewish community in Transylvania, “As a rule, our townspeople, while they did help the needy, did not particularly like them” (Wiesel3). By in fact already having an attitude of the needy or poor not being particularly liked, this is a fundamental core issue which must be acknowledged, for although Moishe the Beadle was more accepted than the other so called needy, this is strong evidence that there was already a bias among the Jewish community. I can see parallels to this on both our campus and in our community, there is bias toward persons who are poor, those who do not fit in, and the disabled. Typically in the early mornings on the bus bench kitty corner from Mc Donald’s on Crenshaw, there are usually two to four persons who by all appearances do not have regular access to a shower or clean clothes. Busses pass right by not bothering to stop. Even I can do little more than say hello on occasion as I continue passing on by them and their bus bench. Moishe de Beadle and Elie become close, and it is due to this that Elie has a more intimate relationship with Moishe. Moishe is expelled with the other foreign-born Jews, and by a miracle he returns to Sighet to tell the Jews that all those who were expelled have been killed, and he is treated as a raving mad-man, a more outward sign of the villagers denial and acclimation to evil.
Another way we see Elie Wiesel himself manifest denial in the book Night is demonstrated by the fact that he himself did not see the entire picture of not only was he Elie not completely seeing but also of all of the other groups additional to the Jews which Hitler and his accomplices waged war against. To quote the last paragraph (Wiesel viii), “It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.” The facts are that not only was the Holocaust the systematic, state sponsored persecution and murder of about six million Jews by Nazis and their collaborators, there were also at least five million other human beings who were also persecuted, killed, and deported. During the Holocaust era, the Nazis also went after others and among them were the Gypsies, the disabled, certain Slavic peoples, African Germans, the Communists, the Socialists, Jehova’s Witnesses, and homosexuals (Ushm.org). Soon after WWII officially began Sept 1 of 1939 with German planes bombing Warsaw, Poland surrendered, the troops then entered Warsaw September 28, 1939. A young Catholic social worker named Irena Sendler used her network of contacts
to sneak as many children and babies out of the Warsaw ghetto as she could (Rubin 3-13). This is evidence that so many persons of all types of backgrounds showed solidarity with the Jewish people in their fight to overcome the Nazi tyranny. It was indeed about his personal war as a member of the Jewish people against the Nazi regime, but at the same time I truly feel that Wiesel should have taken more page space to include the struggle of other human beings additional to the Jews against not only the Nazi regime but evil itself.
Not only do we see some evidence of Elie Wiesel’s denial, but we see this denial of what was in fact happening to all of the Jewish people in the form of groupthink, after all this process did not occur in just one moment or even in just one day, but transpired over a period of years with the cool and calculating manipulations of Hitler the puppet master. The voice of a man who survived as a child
violently torn from all he knew rearranges everything he ever thought he knew into the new truth of self and peers allowing evil to pervade their very homes and thoughts and to completely take over control of their lives is raised with the clarity of a bell in a clear and placid harbor. A great contributor to this groupthink of the Jewish people was the political structure not just of Hungary or Austria Hungary but the govorning, which was divided between democracy and constitutional authoritarianism where Wiesel and his people lived. Poland is where the Germans began bombing in 1939, and although industrialization had began there, the power structure was of the feudal houses, the middle class entrepeneurs who attempted to take over, and the authoritarian churches (Eschenburg 1). Hungary was considered part of the second zone where the heritage of absolutism survived. Elie Wiesel had met Moishe the Beadle in 1941 (Wiesel 3) which was when the place they were in was under the political power of Hungary which had been granted by Germany and Fascist Italy for political reasons (Encyclopedia Britanica Wikipedia.org). Moishe and all foreign Jews were expelled from Sighet, crammed into cattle cars by the Hungarian Police, and although they and the other Jews cried, I did not see evidence of anyone trying to stop the police. Moishe the Beadle made it back and tried so very desperately to warn all of the Jews of what he had seen, the young girl Malka, who lay dying for three days, the Jews were told to dig huge trenches and then shot by the Gestapo, infants were thrown into the air and used as target practice. Not one soul in the village believed Moishe, they thought he was a mad man or even trying to gain their sympathy. Another year passed and by Spring of 1944 the German troops came into Hungary, even with reports of anti- Semitic attacks taking place every day, the people talked about nothing but that, then went into denial again even as the German Army vehicles appeared in their very streets. As time progressed, the main character of the book, Elie Wiesel, realized in the retrospect and reflection of an older man who wrote again on this subject that so many around him have lost their faith and regressed on an increasingly deepening level to animalistic behavior. And to be sure some may have even thought the German army vehicles were there to take them to safer ground, the officers would eat cake with the Jewish families at dinner.
Those of us who have experienced large measures of dysfunction and denial in our own families and communities can both empathize and identify with the progression of denial, division, and evil creep starting with Elie Wiesel, his father, and the members of their entire Jewish community. All of us can find some circumstance or situation in our own lives during which we may have overlooked a certain amount of evil such as with me all of the times I looked the other way or did not take an honest look at the true effect narcotics abuse and use was having on both my own life and the people around me. I can see how denial and acclimation to evil masked by hiding behind computer programming and long hours of online gaming has effected the very life, health, and personality of my younger brother. Due to spending countless hours of laying in front of a computer and eating junk food and soda for years, compiled with not doing any type of physical work or exercise, he developed cancer and both he and my mother are not willing to admit that they both have a role in this. She even delayed treatment for several months in order to not incur the expense. Severe dysfunction and evil go hand in hand as more and more of our lives are overtaken by them and before we know it, we lose our freedom and health, sometimes even our very lives.
Now we are at a point in time when we must ask ourselves, what does all of this mean, what of this powerful lesson in human history which shows us what denial and acclimation to evil has done and how can it effect our very lives? The very world we live in, the way commerce occurs between persons and nations, our very core individual values have been shaped by the Holocaust, for it can never be undone. I do not claim to be an expert, but I will say that I have learned a little about reading human eyes, voice tones, and physical mannerisms. Once can see from old footage of Adolf Hitler that the volume of his voice, the physical mannerisms and gestures, and the very intensity of his visual fixation that he did not see the human beings he was talking to. I recall this from memories I have of television footage, dates and channels unknown. I also have experienced in business and religion persons with fixed unwavering viewpoints who will not hear that which others have to say. These are innate instincts and vibes and also knowledge which I have picked up on my path in life, and although I do not always catch it every single time a person or media ad is trying to sway or control my thoughts, I have learned to protect myself and family to a much greater degree. The question is, how do we the people learn to truly listen to and be aware of what the other human being is trying to tell us? Will we listen and think for ourselves or will we sell out and give up the very cherished freedoms which many have died for and allow armed goons or corporations to rob us of our property and free will?
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
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 ______________.
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?
Theodicy asks the question: How can God reconcile his assumed all-powerfulness or omnipotence with his assumed all-goodness or benevolence when there is so much evil and suffering in the world?
Why wouldn't a good God, who is all-powerful, intervene and stop evil and suffering from happening on the large scale that it does?
Some religious thinkers or theologians justify evil in this world, saying God is just in allowing it, by arguing that God must give us free will and use evil and suffering to "teach us lessons."
The implication is the following:
We incite our own suffering with our sinfulness. Therefore, our suffering is punishment from God.
We are innocent, but we must endure suffering because suffering is a tool toward gaining more wisdom.
Suffering is an opportunity to grow as a person; therefore, suffering is a gift (and punishment at the same time?) from God (for every example that evidences this, I can find an example that has the oppositive effect, namely, senseless suffering)
Criticism of Theodicy
Critics show that these arguments breakdown when we consider evil and suffering on such a massive scale that it would be cruel and unfair to say that people are being punished by earthquakes, tsunamis, genocide, etc. Not only are they not being punished for any "sins," there is no "lesson" to be learned. Their deaths are senseless.
Another Way of Looking at Theodicy Is Asking the Question: Can We Reconcile Suffering with a Belief in God?
Scholar Bart D. Ehrman tackles this question in his book God's Problem.
As he explored this question in his youth as a devout Christian, he gradually realized he could not answer the question to his satisfaction and he lost his faith, as does the boy in Night (though Wiesel is said to have recovered his faith in a different form).
God does not intervene to feed a hungry child, Ehrman writes. A child dies of starvation every 5 seconds. There is no lesson to be learned from this suffering, no theory of free will that justifies it. A starving child or baby is not being punished for sins. The child is innocent. Nor does a starving baby learn any lesson or wisdom from starvation. Theodicy is a failed and outrageous argument when placed against these examples.
More examples
God does not intervene to save the 11 million killed during the Holocaust. Many babies were thrown into burning ovens while they were still alive. God does not intervene.
God did not intervene when during American slavery when slaves were separated from loved ones, mother and child, wife and husband, and so on.
It would be obscene to say, as some theologians do, that God is using suffering to punish disobedient sinners. In fact, much human suffering is senseless and pointless.
We could could example after example of senseless suffering, the kind of cruel, pointless suffering that has no meaning and we could conclude from these examples that there is no way to reconcile a just, benevolent, all-powerful God with the amount of suffering in the world.
The Dangerous Implications of Failed Theodicy
If we agree that theodicy, the attempt to justify God in the face of suffering, is not convincing, where does that leave us? What are the implications?
If we reject God, we are deluded if we think we are going to reject religion. All of us are religious whether we know it or not.
Alfred North Whitehead defined religion as what you do in private. In other words, where your heart lies your religion lies also. Where your obsession lies, so does your religion.
There are many religions that belong to the self-described "non religious":
humanitarian
self-interested altruist
money
pleasure (hedonism)
nihilism, the belief in nothing
Me
conformity and obedience
mediocrity ("I'll just get by doing the bare minimum")
my favorite sports team
self-pity
victimization
revenge ("I don't get mad; I get even.")
consumer technology
Materialism is a religion:
Apple products
Mini Cooper
Prius
BMW
Mercedes
So Wiesel had to replace one religion for another:
His faith changed from unquestioning to questioning and angry. His anger doesn't show a rejection of God but a hunger for justice, which he believes comes from God.
For those in the concentration camps who lost faith in God, where did they go from there?
For some, having no faith in God meant "anything goes." The thinking is, "If there is no God, there's nothing for me to do but give in to my basest appetites, to indulge my whims and desires, to do whatever the hell I want, because life doesn't amount to a hill of beans."
For some, thinking the above thoughts appears liberating: "Lucky me, I just discovered that there are no rules, there is no morality, there's nothing I have to do. Therefore, I can do anything I want. I'm free. I have complete freedom."
But what is "freedom"?
And here lies the danger of rejecting God, according to some, because life experience teaches us that "freedom" is equivalent to self-indulgence and immorality and that the self-indulgent, those who live in accordance with there pleasures, are not free at all but slaves to the hedonic treadmill, the futile grasp of pleasure which becomes more and more elusive and numbing, resulting in despair, anguish, and nihilism.
Nihilism is living life as if there is no meaning, as if nothing matters, as if nothing is at stake. If nothing matters, just live life for pleasure till you die.
That is nihilism in a nutshell.
Wiesel saw what happened to people who embraced nihilism after they suffered living in the concentration camps and he saw that nihilism is not a viable response.
Nihilism is the rejection of morality and meaning often prompted by no longer believing in God. Wiesel was tempted to be a nihilist but he rejected nihilism. Why?
Seven problems with nihilism:
One. Just because we feel God is indifferent to suffering doesn't mean we should be indifferent to it. Our humanity depends on not being indifferent.
The problem with applying failed theodicy is faulty comparison. If we reject an all-powerful God who does not intervene in the world's suffering, we should not apply God's presumed indifference with our moral behavior because we're human; no one ever said we were all-powerful or that we were indifferent.
In fact, the purpose of life is struggle in the face of inexplicable evil and suffering. That is meaning. That is also Wiesel's message.
Two. We can look at the woeful consequences of nihilism and hedonism: numbing and despair. Self-centered pleasure seeking always puts us on the hedonic treadmill, meaning we soon become numb to the stimulation that used to give us pleasure. We increase the stimulation more and more but this proves feeble and self-destructive.
Three. We cannot be nihilists because we are equipped with sympathy and empathy.
Most of us, in fact, with the exception of sociopaths and clinical narcissists, have sympathy and empathy, and these qualities compel us to reach out toward the suffering. Societies that flourish are built on trust, which cannot exist without empathy.
Four. Nihilism leads to misery. In contrast, helping others, self-interested altruism, helps us attain more happiness than nihilism. In fact, people who help others rank highest on the Happiness Index. There is a certain "selfish altruism" or "self-interested altruism" in helping others.
Wise people know that helping others makes them happy.
Five. Happiness is increased, not from nihilism, a false freedom, but from social reciprocity ("You help me and I help you"). Cultures that flourish have high levels of social reciprocity and self-interested altruism. See Elizabeth S. Anderson essay on this topic. Here is another link to the same essay.
Six. Elie Wiesel's Night is implicitly anti-nihilist because in writing the book there is a message:
It is necessary to expose evil and to expose the truth. It is necessary to record an accurate version of history. There is real history and fake history. There is truth and falsehood, but the nihilist doesn't care. For the nihilist, there is no truth or falsehood. Everything is the same old B.S.
But there is truth and the truth matters. For example, in Wiesel's memoir Moishe the Beadle has seen the truth, the evil of the Nazis, and no one believes him. Their disbelief and denial comes at their own peril.
Likewise, Wiesel's memoir, an account of an evil that takes place, is ignored or denied at our own peril. Wiesel, who lost his faith in his childhood God, still believes in truth and in telling the truth. He is no nihilist.
Seven. If in losing your faith, you go the opposite direction, embracing nihilism, you are committing an either/or fallacy. "Either I embrace my definition of God and religion or I throw morals out the window." This is lame. You can lose your faith in a particular God or religion but maintain morals. Why would you abolish morals? Would you marry someone with no morals? Of course not. Morals are the foundation of trust.
How Would McMahon Write an Essay for Night If He Were an English 1A Student?
I would probably do one of these two strategies:
Thesis One:
While clearly the God of Wiesel's childhood failed him completely, his memoir Night is not a book of nihilism and despair. To the contrary, Night is a moral force evidenced in four powerful ways. First, as a powerful narrative, the memoir offers first-hand testimony, which is crucial for us to remember the Holocaust, an antidote to forgetting. Second, Wiesel's book evidences a desire to prevent us from being apathetic but to be vigilent about the possibility of this type of evil recurring. Third, Night contradicts those anti-Jewish Holocaust deniers who assert their pseudo-history on the world. And finally, Wiesel's book offers testimony that evil can exist on a grand scale that cannot be defined or explained away by psychology and science.
Thesis Two:
My research into the various explanations for the evil behind Hitler and Nazism has made me conclude that the use of science and psychology to explain evil in fact denies evil and as such is harmful for our understanding evil. The scientific and psychological explanations are wrong for several reasons, not the least of which are they are compelled by the fear to look at raw evil in the face; they are often influenced by the arrogance of science and psychology that thinks it can come up with an explanation for all things, including evil; they often resort to absurd over simplifications to come up with their explanations; and perhaps worst of all their explanations often implicitly excuse the evil behavior by, one, arguing that no behavior can be truly evil (but simply misguided) and that, two, this misguided behavior is born from victimization so that we portray the evil doers as victims of forces they cannot control.
Some Research Paper Reminders
1. Use the 80-20 Rule: Eighty percent of the essay should be written in your own voice; twenty percent should be quotations, paraphrases, and summaries of your research.
2. Use headers.
3. Use Times New Roman 12 font with black ink and double-space.
4. Do not 4-space between paragraphs.
5. Every new paragraph should have a five-space indent.
6. Your essay should be stapled in the upper left corner. Don't put your essay inside a plastic sheath or folder.
7. Use MLA Works Cited: Use the book, my blog, and 2 other sources of your choice.
8. Because the book is a memoir, you'll use the past tense when summarizing the narrative, but you'll use present tense when writing your argument:
In Night, Wiesel saw so much suffering he began to question his faith. We see that the loss of faith presents a meaning of life crisis. How can we replace the religion of our childhood with a new faith that fits our new vision of the world?
One. Using the Toulmin model, write an essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the assertion that the evil witnessed in Elie Wiesel's Night eradicates the philosophical notion of theodicy (the reconciliation of an all-loving, all-powerful God to the existence of evil).
For an argumentative paper such as this one, refer to the Chapters on writing arguments in How to Write Anything, pages 66-95.
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.
Four. In the context of Night, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the question if Hitler and his minions were crazy sociopaths or sane evil, manipulating agents. Or both. Explain.
It might help for you recognize that a sociopath is not delusional but does evil without any pangs of conscience while a psychopath is delusional. Must a person be one or the other? Can a person be both?
Five. Write a literary analysis of Night by showing how the book uses literary motifs (night or darkness, fire as hell, fear, and corpses as the walking dead) to develop the narrative structure. For help with this prompt, you might refer to the chapter on literary analysis in How to Write Anything on pages 184-212.
Is There Redemption in a Book That Shows So Much Evil?
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 and to insure accountability for those responsible. Otherwise, we will rewrite history and these revisionists histories are false.
Some however would argue that the evil evident in the book 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?
Evidence That Night Is Not Just Preaching the Gospel of Nihilism: It is a stunning achievement.
The book gives us a picture of unspeakable evil, a teenage boy’s firsthand account of the Holocaust, one that some people cannot comprehend or believe.
This is "evil off the grid" that cannot be explained with words or exposition. Rather, we need a narrative, a rendering, a showing of evil.
In other words, Wiesel has done the impossible: He's used words to describe the unspeakable.
Through this first-person narrative, we experience the horror of loss and evil as seen through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old boy, a boy who, before being taken away to a concentration camp, believes in the wisdom of his father and the justice of God.
These beliefs are challenged, or rather abolished, as Wiesel sees evil take over the world in the face of a silent God. He sees a world surrendering to evil as his father, an image of strength, can only watch on helplessly.
Another achievement of the book is the way it makes us examine the nature of evil. We often attempt to reduce evil to a theory to create the illusion of control but in reading Night we see that evil has an element of mystery that is unexplainable.
Many people want to explain evil, reduce it to a scientific explanation because they can't accept evil, they can't accept an evil force and because they want to further their own theory as part of their self-interest.
Night the memoir is not a theory about evil; it’s a boy’s experience of evil, an evil of such magnitude that his faith is changed forever. He recreates the ordeal of going through evil no one could have imagined and what this ordeal did to his faith.
Night Is a Necessary Book Because to This Day There Are Those Who Deny the Holocaust.
Book Consulted: Denying History by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman
One. The Doctrine of the Deniers
Six million Jews did not die.
The German state did not have a policy to exterminate Jews with the gas chambers
Legit, mainstream historians are “revisionists,” those who rewrite history to push an agenda, the “pro-Jew” agenda.
The Jews invented the lie of the Holocaust to use their victimization as a power play over others.
Two. Anticipating the Deniers
After World War II during the liberation of those imprisoned in the concentration camps General Dwight D. Eisenhower foresaw that people would deny or not believe the horrors of the Holocaust so he ordered a gathering of evidence and documentation in every conceivable way.
Eisenhower knew that cynics would dismiss the Holocaust in part by saying “the winners write history but it’s not an accurate history.”
Three. What Is History?
There are three types or “tiers” according to Michael Shermer.
First Tier: Historical Objectivity, let the facts speak for themselves and do no interject opinion. It consists of 7 principles:
History exists outside the minds of historians.
Historians discover the past as astronomers discover the cosmos.
Historians can know and describe the past.
Historians can be unbiased.
One historical event leads to another in a series of cause and effect.
Historians can discover this cause and effect objectively.
Historians must show the past “as it actually happened.”
According to Shermer, the problem with the first tier is it denies something called interpretation. You simply don’t just record events. You must interpret them. The first tier woefully ignores this fact. Because we are always interpreting events, the first tier DOES NOT EVEN EXIST. IT’S A MYTH.
The Second Tier: Historical Relativism, the Seven Principles
History only exists in the minds of historians.
Historians construct the past the way a sculptor constructs a figure out of marble.
Historians construct the past with partial documentation that always gives only a partial, incomplete, and therefore unreliable history.
Historians can never purge themselves of bias, unconscious or otherwise.
There is no logical cause and effect between contingent historical events.
Historians impose their own causal structure on history to give themselves the illusion of order.
Historians cannot show history; only one flawed interpretation of it. Therefore, one version of history is just as valid as the next one. All versions of history are valid, which means none are.
Problems with the Historical Relativism Approach.
If relativism is true, we can know nothing, and if we can know nothing, then communication is stupid, feeble, and not worth trying.
If nothing can be known, then there is no meaning, only nihilism, the belief that our existence amounts to nothing.
The historical relativist suffers a paradox: As soon as he “makes history,” he contradicts his belief that there can be no real history. He has in effect admitted the futility of his own mission.
The Third Tier: Historical Science, the Seven Principles
History exists both outside and inside the heads of historians.
Historians both discover and describe the past the way a natural scientist discovers and describes natural phenomena.
Historians can discover and describe a defined portion of the past through the available data.
Since historians will always be partly biased, the real question is the quality and degree of the bias. By what methods and with what evidence do scientists arrive at a particular conclusion? And in what cultural context? And with whose funds?
The past does have a causal structure that we can see with scientific evidence.
Recognizing the objective nature of discovery and the subjective nature of description, historians can discover and describe the causal structure.
Historians’ job is to present this past as provisional interpretation of “what actually happened” based on current available evidence , much as natural scientists do with evidence from the natural world.
It is only this final tier, the historical one, according to Shermer, that is legit and without contradictions.
Using Historical Science to Authenticate the Holocaust
We have a “convergence of evidence” that shows the Holocaust really did exist. This evidence includes:
Written documents.
Eyewitness testimony
Photographs
The camps themselves
Inferential evidence: population demographics, for example.
The Conditions That Pointed to the Extermination Camps Many Years Before
Nazis developed sterilization and euthenasia programs in the 1930 targeting undesirables. They also used secret murder and deportation as tools to get rid of undesirables.
One. Using the Toulmin model, write an essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the assertion that the evil witnessed in Elie Wiesel's Night eradicates the philosophical notion of theodicy (the reconciliation of an all-loving, all-powerful God to the existence of evil).
For an argumentative paper such as this one, refer to the Chapters on writing arguments in How to Write Anything, pages 66-95.
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 and to insure accountability for those responsible. Otherwise, we will rewrite history and these revisionists histories are false.
Some however would argue that the evil evident in the book 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.
Four. In the context of Night, develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the question if Hitler and his minions were crazy sociopaths or sane evil, manipulating agents. Or both. Explain.
It might help for you recognize that a sociopath is not delusional but does evil without any pangs of conscience while a psychopath is delusional. Must a person be one or the other? Can a person be both?
Five. Write a literary analysis of Night by showing how the book uses literary motifs (night or darkness, fire as hell, fear, and corpses as the walking dead) to develop the narrative structure. For help with this prompt, you might refer to the chapter on literary analysis in How to Write Anything on pages 184-212.
Your guidelines for your essay are as follows:
This research paper should present a thesis that is specific, manageable, provable, and contestable—in other words, the thesis should offer a clear position, stand, or opinion that will be proven with research.
You should analyze and prove your thesis using examples and quotes from a variety of sources.
You need to research and cite from at least five sources. You must use at least 3 different types of sources.
At least one source must be from an ECC library database.
At least one source must be a book, anthology or textbook.
At least one source must be from a credible website, appropriate for academic use.
The paper should not over-rely on one main source for most of the information. Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.
This paper will be approximately 1,000 words in length (about 4 typed, double-spaced pages), not including the Works Cited page, which is also required. The Works Cited page does NOT count towards length requirement.
You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.
You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Your paper must be logically organized and focused.
Theme in Night: Denial and Acclimation to Evil
1. Denial and acclimation to evil; as we get comfortable with a certain level of evil, it creeps toward us in greater and greater amounts slowly robbing us of our freedom.
This process creates the term "evil creep"; we acclimate to evil as it rises (creeping) slowly and slowly until it's too late; humans tend toward denial because reality is too inconvenient to deal with.
Here are examples of denials that "speak" inside people's heads:
I don't need to work on my relationship even though my girlfriend and I barely speak anymore. That's normal.
I don't need a colonoscopy even though there's a family history of colon cancer. I'll accept fate for what it is.
I'm not fat. I've got reserves in case I get sick in the hospital. See the 1,200-pound man on Oprah.
I don't have a spending problem. I need my new car and iPhone payments; otherwise, I won't be able to find a girlfriend.
I study too hard. I need more balance in my life. I need to go out and play more often.
I know my husband beats me once a week, but at least he doesn't beat me every day like some women I know.
Silence and Indifference Empower Evil
Danger of silence; silence makes us complicit in evil; we tend to keep our mouth shut because we fear we'll get into trouble or people will say we're crazy for speaking out or both.
Another danger of silence and apathy is "Evil Creep."We see this evil creep when Moshe the Beadle tries to warn his friends of the coming evil but he's dismissed as a madman.
What is it about the human tendency toward denial and acclimation to evil, AKA "Evil Creep"?
The short answer is that we don't want to be inconvenienced by the truth. We love our delusions too much and often at our own peril.
Silence as a theological event in an article by Naomi Seidman. God must now be questioned in the face of the Holocaust in new ways. And in doing so, we don't necessarily lose our faith; we reconstruct it in light of the Holocaust.
Theodicy:
The problem of reconciling evil to an all-powerful, all-loving God. There are many parallels to Job, which is a book that struggles with theodicy.
Theodicy asks:
How can God stand silent in the face of evil?
How do we say God is all-powerful and all-loving when time and time again he does not intervene in horrific acts of cruelty from man or nature against man?
Every few seconds a child somewhere in the world dies of starvation and God does nothing. During the Holocaust live babies were thrown into flickering ovens and God did nothing. As you can see, theodicy is a very emotional subject.
What is the struggle between nihilism and meaning, faith and theodicy?
An essay that addresses theodicy could be divided into two parts: How theodicy fails in the context of the book, but how we cannot look at failed theodicy as a justification for hedonism and nihilism in the context of Night.
Even if we can no longer believe in an all-powerful God, we have to ask ourselves what is the option to losing belief? Is it nihilism (nothing matters), hedonism (the relentless pursuit of pleasure because it's seen as the highest good)?
Enduring suffering is comparable to Job; how do we react to the suffering; do we become bitter and imitate our oppressors or do we find purpose from our suffering? This theme is rendered with brilliance in an Anthony Payne film starring George Clooney called The Descendants.
Memory
An important theme in Night is remembering what happened and keeping vigilant; we must take responsibility for our apathy and indifference to what happened in the past or the past will repeat itself.
Those who write history, those who portray the mainstream version of history to others, are the ones who have the power.
For example, some people honor the "history" that champions the values of the Confederate Flag; others have contempt for the Confederate history because the "values" embody the diseased religion of White Supremacy, a time of aggrandizing one race and exploiting another.
Which "history" we believe in affects our values and the leaders we choose to champion our values.
There are many "histories" but some versions are more credible than others.
Dehumanization and scapegoating throughout history.
Since the Inquisition, those in power gain more power by demonizing the helpless or some bogus "enemy." Demonizing and scapegoating the innocent has been an evil tool to gain power used since the beginning of time.
There is also self-imposed dehumanization: What is the dehumanization process? The loss of will: From the Japanese series Fist of the North Star: "A man who gives up the will is not a human being anymore." Wiesel saw many in the camps who lost their will long before they physically died.
Loss of innocence:
You lose your faith in the world as you once knew it. God will not or cannot protect you from evil. Nor can your parents. Before his experience in the concentration camp, Elie assumed these two propositions were true.
You lose your orientation to the world as you once knew it. The boundaries of common decency that keep evil in check do not exist.
You lose the image of yourself you once valued. You no longer believe in the common decency of humanity and recognizing the human capacity for evil you change so radically that you can not even recognize your old self.
You are overcome with the fear that God does not exist and fear that without a god anything--no matter how vile--is permissible. "If God doesn't exist, then everything is permitted," is taken from the Brothers Karmazov by Dostoyevsky.
Are People Evil Or Crazy Or Both?
Is there real evil in the world or are people crazy and as a result are misguided in their beliefs such as the belief that the world would be a better place if we exterminated the Jews?
Can evil be explained by science and sociology or is it part of a more inexplicable, spiritual realm? Consult Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum.
How do civilized, decent people become complicit with evil and engage in blind obedience?
Major Theme from First 3 Chapters: Denial and Acclimation to Evil (pertains to prompts 2 and 3)
As Elie Wiesel, just a 12-year-old boy, gets off the train and watches babies and others thrown alive into furnaces of fire, he is overcome with the question:
How could this be happening and how could the whole world be silent in the face of this evil?
In fact, genocide, the killing of masses of people based on their religion or ethnicity, had happened before in history. Just about 30 years earlier, the world was silent when from 1915-1923, the Turks killed 1.5 to 2 million Armenians, a fact that the Turkish government still denies today.
Hitler said he was emboldened by the world's indifference of the Armenian genocide to commit the same atrocity against the Jews.
So the question remains, why is the human beast prone to denial of evil even in the face of overwhelming evidence that evil is coming right at us?
Why Do We Deny Evil?
1. Laziness is partly true, but it's an oversimplification. We are addicted to our routines and we don't want to change. We are hard-wired to inertia. So when the Jews in Elie's village hear about the Nazis rounding up their people and all the other bad things, the townspeople don't want to be disturbed.
2. Often evil is beyond the imagination of the innocent and the good. In other words, good people cannot believe or even comprehend that the kind of evil described in Night could exist.
Some have said, that we weren't prepared for 9/11 in spite of evidence that it was going to happen because of a failure of the imagination.
3. We often don't trust the messenger, especially when we don't like the message. For example, the beloved Moshe the Beadle is taken away as a "foreigner" and survives a slaughter and comes back to town to warn his friends, but people dismiss him as a madman.
Study the Templates of Argumentation
While the author’s arguments for meaning are convincing, she fails to consider . . .
While the authors' supports make convincing arguments, they must also consider . . .
These arguments, rather than being convincing, instead prove . . .
While these authors agree with Writer A on point X, in my opinion . . .
Although it is often true that . . .
While I concede that my opponents make a compelling case for point X, their main argument collapses underneath a barrage of . . .
While I see many good points in my opponent’s essay, I am underwhelmed by his . . .
While my opponent makes some cogent points regarding A, B, and C, his overall argument fails to convince when we consider X, Y, and Z.
My opponent makes many provocative and intriguing points. However, his arguments must be dismissed as fallacious when we take into account W, X, Y, and Z.
While the author’s points first appear glib and fatuous, a closer look at his polemic reveals a convincing argument that . . .
Qualities of an Effective Thesis
A good thesis is a complete sentence that defines your argument.
A good thesis addresses your opponents’ views in a concession clause.
A good thesis often has mapping components or mapping statements that outline your body paragraphs.
A good thesis avoids the obvious and instead struggles to grapple with difficult and complex ideas.
A good thesis embraces complexity and sophistication but is expressed with clarity.
A good thesis is a demonstrable opinion or argument about a topic; it is not a statement of fact.
Sample Thesis Statements: Evaluate How Effective the Following Theses Are and Explain
Night is about the loss of innocence.
Night is about dehumanization.
Night helps us realize how important it is to remember the Holocaust.
Night makes us focus on the the problems of faith in the context of theodicy.
Night is a warning about being silent in the face of evil.
Night is about the dangers of acclimating to evil.
Improved Thesis Statements
Night delves into the darkness of the human heart but in the end is a life-affirming memoir because it __________, _________, ___________, and ______________.
While Elie Wiesel struggles with nihilism and the ultimate rejection of God, his book struggles to achieve, successfully, a moral force for good. This goodness is born from the book's warning that we must never forget the evil of the Holocaust; that we must condemn the oppressors and the indifferent alike; that we must be warned of the dangers of acclimating to evil; that we must be warned of the dangers of cowardice and that dehumanization that results.
Elie Wiesel's struggle to recover his faith in both God and humanity and God has many parallels with Job, which affirms a Moral Code in the face of nihilism. These parallels include _________________, ______________, ____________________, and _____________________.
While McMahon tries to salvage some meaning and goodness from Night, I'm sorry to say that this masterful memoir provides us with overwhelming evidence for converting to atheism and nihilism. The most compelling reasons for rejecting God and meaning as a farce are contained in this gem of a book and these compelling reasons include ____________________, _________________, __________________, and ___________________.
The above writer's contention that we should reject God and become nihilists performs a mockery of Elie Wiesel's masterpiece. In truth, the problem of nihilism is a very tempting one for Wiesel, but we see that he rejects nihilism in favor of a strong moral code evidenced by __________________, ___________________, ___________________, and ___________________.
Hitler and his Nazi minions cannot be called crazy because such a label absolves them of their guilt. In fact, a close examination of Hitler and his close assistants give us a remarkable window into pure evil evidenced by ___________, ____________, _____________, and _______________.
Night is compelling evidence that theodicy, the attempt to reconcile an all loving, all powerful God with the world's evil, is a flimsy philosophy that cannot support any meaningful belief in God. In fact, a close look at Night is a refutation of theodicy evidenced by ____________, ____________, _____________, and ________________.
Study Questions
1. What does no one want to hear about?
According to Robert McAfee Brown, who writes the Preface to the book for the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition, no one wants to confront the fact that a “cultured people,” the Germans, turned to genocide, as a “solution” to their problems while the rest of the world remained silent in the face of this genocide. This means anyone can turn to evil; anyone can join an "Inquisition" in whatever form it takes place.
In a similar fashion, people are less disturbed when Islamic extremists are illiterate and from the underclass. But what of those who are educated and become radicalized? There is the terrifying truth few want to face.
2. What is the greatest indignity we can inflict upon those who suffered the Holocaust?
To tell the victims and their families that their suffering was not real but the product of their illusions or "exaggerations." These people are called Holocaust deniers and history revisionists. Related to the above, are those who either forget or are indifferent to such suffering.
3. What are Wiesel’s motives for telling this true story?
To make people believe what happened and to make people care about what happened so the Holocaust will never happen again. In other words, to bear witness to evil and hold those accountable for their crimes against humanity.
4. Why is Night confused with fiction when in fact it is a work of nonfiction?
Because it has a narrative that is so compelling that people think they are reading a novel but in fact they are reading an autobiography. Also Wiesel wrote the memoir twice, first in an angry tone, then in a melancholy, sad one.
5. What significance is it that the narrator describes his father as having high esteem in the community?
Loss of innocence entails seeing your great father figure reduced to helplessness. Early in the book Wiesel sees his father weep for the first time ever. He also sees his father beaten in the camps for asking to use the bathroom. The humiliation is worse than the blow itself. Some say the loss of his physical father parallels the loss of his spiritual father, his Patriarchal God.
6. How does the narrator introduce the sigh of resignation when Moshe is taken away?And what does this sigh signify?
People spin badness into a better reality because they don’t want to make the necessary changes to adapt to evil.
7. What has happened to Moshe that has changed him forever?
8. How do the townspeople react to Moshe’s witness to the atrocities he saw and suffered?
Get away. You’re disturbing and inconveniencing me. Many don’t believe Moshe, including the narrator. No one listens to him, at their peril. And they ignore the rumors that Hitler wants to kill the Jews in mass, that is commit genocide against them. They keep intoxicating themselves with misguided optimism.
9. How does misguided optimism meet every turn of worse news?
The Germans invade Hungary. Jews are beaten. Jewish shops closed. Nazis occupy Jewish homes. Synagogues close. Leaders of Jewish community are arrested. Jews can’t leave their homes or they’ll be shot. Jews are forced to hand their valuables to Hungarian police. Jews must wear a yellow star on their sleeve. Jews forced to move to ghettos. “It will be okay. The war will be over. The Red Army will arrive and we will be free and everything will be like it was once before.” The human capacity for denial and self-delusion is infinite. But wait. More bad news. Deportation. Trains. Stuffed in them like cattle. Why are we going? It’s a secret. Apparently it’s to get farther away from the front lines of the war. Another delusion. And once they start moving on the trains yet another delusion. Nothing can be worse than being packed in the trains and thirsty and overheated. An illusion. About 12 stages of delusions.
10. What is the point of no return?
By the time they understand they are in the clutches of evil, it’s too late. As we read in the untitled Chapter 1, “We were on our way.” And in the second chapter, “Our eyes were opened, but too late.”
11. What vision afflicts Madame Schachter and how does her situation parallel Moshe the Beadle’s?
After trying to ignore here repeatedly, the train stops to the smell of burning bodies, a “foul odor.” Dead bodies will be thrown into a fiery crematorium but also, we shall find in Chapter 3, will be live babies tossed into the flames.
12. Why do the experienced prisoners spit so much venomous hatred toward the new prisoners at the start of Chapter 3?
They resent their willed ignorance in part and also they have become snarling animals having lost a large part of their humanity as they now exist in “survival mode.” To become mean and heartless becomes a way to numb ourselves from the horrors.
13. What is Wiesel’s “nightmare” in Chapter 3?
Not just the evil, but that the evil, burning adults and children, was ignored and that people were also ignorant of it; in some cases people were willfully ignorant, that is, silent about abominations taking place.
14. How is the theme of nihilism introduced in Chapter 3? No more humanity. “Today anything is possible, even those crematories.” There is a famous quote by Dostoevski: "If God does not exist, everything is permitted."
15. Why does Elie question prayer in Chapter 3?
God was silent in the face of the Holocaust. His God was murdered and so was his desire to live. He would never forget (page 32, my edition). Perhaps the only spark that kept him alive was his desire to bear truth to the evil he witnessed.
16. What is the process of dehumanization in Chapter 3?
See the Stanford Study, discussed in Chocolate War lectures. In many studies, we find that the oppressor begins to see the captives as subhuman and the abuses grow worse and worse over time.
17. How does Elie Wiesel relate to Job in Chapter 3?
He does not question God's existence or power, but he questions God's justice. Someone says God is testing them with this trial as an act of love. Page 42, my version.
Theodicy Introduction
Theodicy is the belief that we can have faith in an all-good, all-powerful God in the presence of the world's evil.
That God appears to intervene is some instances and not others is an impediment for many.
Defenders of theodicy often argue that God has to allow evil to happen because God gave us free will. If no evil existed, the argument goes, we would be robots.
Many, like Bart Ehrman cannot believe in theodicy and such an inability results in the loss of Ehrman's faith.
One. Wiesel’s motives, to tell the truth about something so evil no one would believe it. People would deny evil with tragic consequences. Talk about denial, acclimation, consequences, Holocaust deniers, the importance of witnessing and the tragedy of commoditization of the Holocaust satirized in a novel. Talk about the denial of the Holocaust in Turkey against the Armenians.
Two. Talk about Wiesel’s pre-Holocaust faith in justice and his idea of a god rooted in innocence. Write about the loss of innocence as a turning point that often results in one extreme or another, bitterness or growth. You might also talk about theodicy.
Three. Write about nihilism, Bart Ehrman’s God’s Problem, Job, and the problem of evil, suffering and the belief in divine omnipotence. What do you do when the god you believed in no longer exists? Where do you go when your whole belief system is stripped from you? Talk about Dostoevsky who said that if God does not exist then all is permitted. Can we have values without God? Bring in that essay by Elizabeth Anderson (name?) from Hitchens anthology and the book by Sam Harris.
Four. Argue that Wiesel, by the very act of writing Night, is not a nihilist, that bearing witness to evil is part of his struggle to fight against evil. Wiesel believes in struggling to be your best in a world of evil and to warn us about the dangers of evil when we live in a false innocence of denial. You should bring in Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
Five. Writing Assignments
One. In a 5-page essay, compare Wiesel’s ordeal with that of Job’s, especially in the context of theodicy.
Two. In a 5-page essay, argue whether or not Wiesel has salvaged a moral code from his ordeal or has succumbed to nihilism.
