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Grammar and the Passive American
Our difficulties as Americans and as human beings do not stem from the government. They stem, instead, from the words and concepts and ideas that take root and grow in our minds – from the ways in which, as one word and one thought connects and relates to the next to create meaning, we conceptualize ourselves and our lives. The
Greeks and Romans lived in the same material world we live in.
But we have computers and automobiles and televisions – things
they could not have imagined. And,
simply put, we have them because we conceptualize the world differently
than they did. They looked
at a beach and saw sand. We
look at it and see computer chips. People
once conceptualized lightning as a punishment from God, and as a result
of that conception, they believed that obedience to God would make them
less susceptible to being hit. Doctors
once believed that too much blood in your body caused fevers, and as a
result of that conception, they bled people to reduce their fevers.
In 1799, doctors bled George Washington so much that he cooled
off rather permanently. We
now conceptualize these things differently, and as a result of these
conceptions, we take different preventative and remedial steps. If
we conceptualize alcoholism as a “weakness of the spirit,” we seek a
spiritual healer, like a minister. If
we conceptualize it as a “physical disease,” we seek a physical
healer, like a doctor. If we
conceptualize it as a “mental disease,” we seek a mental healer,
like a psychiatrist. If
we want to find the possible defects in our thoughts, then, that lead us
into difficulties, we need to discover how we conceptualize the world.
Theodore Dalrymple’s recent book Life
at the Bottom: the Worldview That Makes the Underclass is an
excellent examination of how a person’s conceptualization of himself,
his life, and his world – the words and ideas and concepts in his head
– can, essentially, destroy him. One
way an individual can begin looking at and examining the thoughts and
concepts in his own head is to look at them grammatically.
After all, before we can think about individual thoughts, it only
stands to reason that we must first consider the matter of thoughts and
thinking in general. Now,
certainly many people shudder and even shut down mentally when the term
“grammar” is brought up. But
that’s not surprising when you conceive of modern American
“education” as government indoctrination – when you conceive of
modern American culture and schooling as ways of keeping the populace
dull, stupid, and illiterate. After
all, as Hannah Arendt said in her essay Ideology
and Terror: A Novel Form of Government, “The aim of totalitarian
education has never been to instill convictions, but to destroy the
capacity to form any.” A
simple understanding of basic grammar gives an individual the ability to
consciously understand how he constructs sentences – how he connects
words one to another to establish relationships and thus constructs his
thoughts. Language is our
way of translating and reconstructing the world in the mind, and grammar
is simply the way in which we do that. Any
sentence, for example, has at least one independent clause, and that
clause contains two things: a subject and a verb.
After all, the world, physically speaking, is made of two things:
matter and energy (quantum physics says these are just different
manifestations of the same thing). We
call words that refer to matter, to things, “nouns,” and we call
words that refer to energy, to actions, “verbs.”
Combine matter and energy, and you have the beginnings of
reality. Combine nouns and
verbs, and you have the beginnings of thought. Verbs
sit between the nouns, between the subject and the object of an action,
at the center of thought. English
has, basically, three of them: to do, to have, and to be.
Most English verbs concern doing because, of course, so many
things can happen. You can
walk, or run, or think, or eat. All
four of those verbs are things you can do.
They all involve action, energy, and in a basic English sentence,
that energy moves from the subject to the object.
We say that such a clause uses “active voice” because the
subject is active – he is performing the action in that clause.
If I say, for example, that “Reggie hit the ball,” I’m
using active voice. The
action, “hitting,” moves from its subject, its originator
(“Reggie”) to the object, or recipient (“ball”).
Likewise, if “I love you,” love moves from me to you. However, although we have in English thousands of action verbs, the verb most favored and most used by the writing students with whom I have worked is not an action at all: it’s “to be.” In fact, in their initial essays, almost all students use some form of being at least 75% of the time, if not more. And when I point this out to them, when I explain the dangers of such heavy reliance on this verb and ask them to rethink what they’ve written, almost all of them have a very difficult time of it, as if they literally cannot think except in terms of being: as if they live mentally in a world in which things don’t happen, they just are. Their world then becomes static, unchanging, and even empty. In
such a sentence, you no longer have a flow of action from subject to
object because you no longer have action.
“Being” works, in most cases, like an equal sign (=) in math,
indicating that the things on either side of it are the same.
And since you have no action, you have no one responsible for it,
and it becomes easy to assign an empty subject to this lack of movement,
resulting in such constructions as “it is” or “there are.” While
both these examples do comprise independent clauses, neither of them
have any information content at all, thus allowing you to say or think
something without saying or thinking anything. Without
action at the center of thought, a person becomes unable to think deeply
into things and see the relationships of and connections between one
thing to another. And that,
of course, is bad enough. But
it leads to related and even more dangerous way of conceptualizing the
world: it leads to passive thinking. While
in active voice the subject of the clause performs the action, in
passive voice it does not. Instead
of acting, it is acted upon. In
passive voice, “Reggie hit the ball” becomes “the ball was hit by
Reggie.” And if you want,
you don’t need to mention Reggie at all.
Where once he was the first thing mentioned, now he’s so
irrelevant you don’t even need to mention him.
And what used to be the verb has now been reduced to an
adjective, to just another quality: the ball was round, scuffed, white,
hit, lost. When you speak or
think in passive voice, nothing happens and no one need have
responsibility for anything – least of all yourself. Consider,
for example, a sentence probably everyone has either said or heard at
one time or another: “something should be done about that.”
People who say that “think,” though it’s really no more
than a vague impression, that they have thus expressed themselves, made
their wishes known. But what
have they really said? “Something”
(I don’t know what) “should be done” (again, I don’t know what,
nor do I know who should do it) “about that” (whatever “that”
is). Translated into active
voice, this could become anything from “you should mow the lawn today,
Jim” to “the military just should kill them all and let God sort
them out.” Either way,
something is being done about that; the latter, though, may be a little
more than you had in mind. And
it’s just this kind of sloppy, vague, imprecise thinking, multiplied
in each individual mind and then multiplied again by the sheer number of
individuals, that has led us to this dangerous point in history.
Our vague, passive thinking has made us a vague, passive people,
unwilling and often unable to take responsibility and act because we not
only can’t conceive of what to do, we can’t even conceive of doing.
So many of us live, like my students, in a conceptual world in
which nothing happens and everything simply is. Our difficulties do not stem from the government; the government stems from our difficulties. And if we truly want to end this fast-creeping fascist takeover, each of us needs to begin, as silly and useless and insignificant as it might sound, by beginning to understand the grammar of our language and, through it, the way our minds work, the ways in which we construct our conceptual world, and how these concepts affect and determine our actions. As Orwell wrote, “one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.” |
