The Rhetoric of Sacrificing [Grandma] for the Greater Good
About three weeks ago, archetypal vanilla milkshake, Tom Cotton (R.-Ark), introduced a bill in the Senate to prohibit federal funds from going to support the teaching of the “1619 Project” in public schools. If you haven’t seen it, the 1619 Project is a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles, poems, photographs, fiction, and more published in the New York Times, which connects the founding of the U.S. with the arrival of the first slave ships in the Virginia Colony more than a century and a half before the Declaration of Independence was written.
Cotton — the Senator, not the cash crop around which so much Southern slavery revolved — is not a big fan of the 1619 Project. In an unintentionally absurdist interview that would have made Andy Kaufman blush, he was kind enough to explain.
“The entire premise of the New York Times’ factually, historically flawed 1619 Project…is that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable,” he bleated mewlingly. “I reject that root and branch. America is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal. We have always struggled to live up to that promise, but no country has ever done more to achieve it.”
It’s certainly possible to take issue with the 1619 Project’s historical and analytical claims. Intelligent people have. Cotton took a different route. He (inevitably) picked the most ridiculous grounds on which to stake his claim. After all, factually and historically “all mankind” literally didn’t include most people in America — you know, Black people, women, Native Americans, and lots of other people. When a bunch of slave owners (and some other non-slave-owning dudes) wrote “all mankind was created equal” into the country’s founding documents, they didn’t actually mean the “all” part.
That’s not in dispute. We fought a war over it. It was kind of a big deal.
My goal is not to prove King Cotton wrong. He doesn’t need my help for that (and other smart people have done it better than I would anyway). But I was struck, as were other people, by one of the justifications he gave for his pitiful, petty, snowflakey bill — specifically, that slavery was a “necessary evil upon which the union was built.” Le sigh.
See, Cotton doesn’t want anyone to think he’s pro-slavery, no sir. He definitely (probably) thinks it’s yucky. But, he’s also not exactly anti-slavery, either, at least in the olden times. Let’s be generous and presume he thinks we don’t need slavery anymore. But he’s so imagination-deficient that he can’t fathom America as a “great and noble country” without that necessary evil. What if we never had slavery and only ended up mediocre?!? Or worse, socialist! I guess we owe slavery a debt of gratitude.
Sometimes people make arguments that need to be engaged on their own terms because they may influence our thought and action about pressing issues. Other times, people’s arguments are really bad on their own terms and deserve to be mocked.
Cotton’s “necessary evil” is the latter sort. One way to tell is that it actually contradicts his argument for his own bill. “Necessary evil” basically reaffirms the 1619 Project’s point that slavery and white supremacy were this country’s organizing principles from the beginning. It’s summed up in the word “necessary,” as in “we needed the evil to get where we are today.”
Cotton beat himself in a battle of wits.
On its own terms, we can only look at Cotton’s argument and shake our heads in shame. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless to us non-lost causes. To the contrary, Cotton’s calamity deserves our attention because it’s so much more than just an abject failure.
Whether good or bad, all arguments incorporate what rhetoric scholars call tropes — recurring themes, devices, words, or phrases — that are widely shared within particular communities. People who study rhetoric, as I do, often look for the tropes that people use in their arguments because if you learn to understand tropes, you can understand people’s assumptions, values, and beliefs. And understanding people’s assumptions, values, and beliefs is a key to persuasion.
Once we get past the farce of Cotton’s “necessary evil” argument, it’s possible to think of it as a trope that points us to some commonly shared assumptions in American culture. I’ll name the specific trope below, but maybe you can suss it out if I give another example.
In March, Lt. Governor of Texas and all-around numpty, Dan Patrick, gave an interview to Confederacy fanboy Tucker Carlson about re-opening Texas’s economy.
“I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this country like me — I have six grandchildren — that’s what we all care about….I want to live smart and see through [the pandemic], but I don’t want the whole country to be sacrificed.” Sacrifice granny to spare the economy!
Did you figure out the trope? Let me relieve your eager anticipation.
The trope that ties these examples together is a variation of “we must be willing to sacrifice for the greater good.” The shared assumption that underlies this trope is that sacrifice is righteous, and we should not fear sacrifice if can result in a better outcome for all.
Versions of this sacrificial trope are widespread throughout American culture and around the world. In TV and film, for example, it goes by the short hand, “You Can’t Make an Omelette”, as in “You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.” Here’s another version from presidential politics: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” How about one from civil rights: “History records nothing more majestic and sublime than the determined courage of a people willing to suffer and sacrifice for the cause of freedom.” One more, this time from the King James Bible: “And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant. Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:27–28). I could do this all day and still barely scratch the surface.
These examples come from very different cultural and historical circumstances, but they all construct sacrifice as a virtue. And it certainly can be a sign of care, generosity, and decency to sacrifice of yourself to help others.
The “sacrifice for the greater good” trope is so thoroughly understood, and the assumptions so widely-shared, that it rarely needs explicit explanation. And because we rarely think about the underlying assumptions, it can also be used in other ways without drawing our attention, which brings us back around to Parricidal Crypt-Keeper Patrick and Despotism Enthusiast Cotton.
If the basic trope is “we must be willing to sacrifice for the greater good,” Patrick and Cotton have adopted a variation that quietly inserts “the weak” halfway through the sentence: “we must be willing to sacrifice [the weak] for the greater good.” So some slaves died. Necessary evil! So grandma might have to die. Onward for the economy! I’m sure she’d be thrilled for the chance. As Sean O’Neal put it in his Texas Monthly article about the kerfuffle, Patrick must have figured that “‘lots of grandparents’ would be willing to die for the economy out of patriotic duty and the grim acceptance that their lives were nearly over anyway.”
My point is that Cotton and Patrick have shrewdly shifted the meaning of “sacrifice for the greater good” from self-sacrifice to other-sacrifice. And such a shift easily can be (and is) used to justify the rich, powerful, and privileged wanting to shed the “dead weight” of the poor, powerless, and needy.
To be sure, Patrick and Cotton aren’t likely to cop to this ploy. It’s even likely it wasn’t conscious or intentional. When tropes circulate as widely as “sacrifice for the greater good” does, they pick up lots of variations, including variations that reverse the meaning altogether.
But even when they’ve been changed, popular tropes keep circulating in ways that disguise the variations. Like all tropes, “sacrifice for the greater good” actually invites us not to look too closely at the arguments being waged in its name. Tropes act like shorthand, and we need them to communicate, especially in communities where we communicate a lot. They help structure our shared knowledge so we don’t have to start from first premises every time we strike up a conversation.
But tropes also convey deeply-embedded cultural values and beliefs that sometimes need our explicit attention, especially in times of turmoil or crisis. And that’s where we are. Even if we restrict ourselves solely to the worldwide pandemic (and ignore, say, the Grifter-in-Chief or the redolent authoritarianism in the air), we’re all in times of turmoil, and lots of us are in serious crisis.
Our inclination might be to ignore silly little things like tropes, but crises are actually when we need to pay the most attention to the clues of our deeply-embedded cultural values and beliefs. Because they get used by decision-makers — including us — to determine how we’ll think and act in the moment. They structure our thinking about what is possible and desirable. And when tough decisions need to be made, we want to make sure we’re working from the right assumptions.
