{"id":1503,"date":"2009-06-12T11:47:54","date_gmt":"2009-06-12T15:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1503"},"modified":"2009-06-12T12:40:45","modified_gmt":"2009-06-12T16:40:45","slug":"he-doesnt-know-what-the-active-voice-is-either","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1503","title":{"rendered":"He doesn't know what the active voice is either"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Charles Krauthammer, \"Obama Hovers From on High<\/a>\", Washington Post 6\/12\/2009:<\/p>\n

On religious tolerance, [president Obama] gently referenced the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt, then lamented that the \"divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence\" (note the use of the passive voice<\/strong>). He then criticized (in the active voice<\/strong>) Western religious intolerance for regulating the wearing of the hijab — after citing America for making it difficult for Muslims to give to charity. [emphasis added]<\/span><\/em>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is a reference to two passages in Obama's recent Cairo speech<\/a>. The first one is this:<\/p>\n

Among some Muslims, there's a disturbing tendency to measure one's own faith by the rejection of somebody else's faith.\u00a0 The richness of religious diversity must be upheld — whether it is for Maronites in Lebanon or the Copts in Egypt.\u00a0 (Applause.)\u00a0 And if we are being honest, fault lines must be closed among Muslims, as well, as the divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence, particularly in Iraq.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Geoff Pullum just explained<\/a>, Mr. Krauthammer is apparently as confused as most others are, these days, about\u00a0 what the term \"passive voice<\/a>\" has meant for the past seven centuries<\/a> or so. The usual error is to interpret \"passive voice\" as something like \"insufficiently clear about agency\". Geoff suggests that\u00a0 perhaps in this case it really means something like \"insufficiently vigorous in assigning blame to people that I don't like\":<\/p>\n

Did you want him to stand there in Cairo and say, \"divisions between Sunni and Shia have led you dogma-crazed towelheads to unloose brutal violence and large-scale war on each other, killing millions of your own people, you insane bastards\"? Then just say so.<\/span><\/p>\n

But maybe for Krauthammer, at least in this passage, \"passive voice\" means \"not taking sides\". The cited passage certainly exemplifies the role that Krauthammer wants to tag the president with: the \"great transcender\", \"[hovering] above the fray\", since in this case, as an American and a non-Muslim, Obama really is above the Sunni-Shia fray.<\/p>\n

There's some evidence for this interpretation in the way Krauthammer uses the opposing category, \"active voice\" to describe the following passage, which immediately follows the just-quoted paragraph:<\/p>\n

Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together.\u00a0 We must always examine the ways in which we protect it.\u00a0 For instance, in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation.\u00a0 That's why I'm committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat. <\/span><\/p>\n

Likewise, it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit — for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear.\u00a0 We can't disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism. <\/span><\/p>\n

The phrase that Krauthammer references without quoting (\"it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens … by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear\") is of course\u00a0 in the active voice, in the traditional sense of that term, just as the phrase that he called \"passive voice\" was. But Obama's discussion of tolerance for religiously-associated clothing also shares the property of being very abstract and mostly impersonal — it evokes the controversy about headscarves in French schools, but doesn't explicitly say so. So isn't it therefore also \"passive\" in the same sense as the Sunni-Shia controversy phrase?<\/p>\n

What \"active voice\" means for Krauthammer in this case, I think, is that Obama takes sides, even if he does so in a rather vague way, without being explicit about the agents of the debate and their specific actions. Rather than simply noting the existence of a controversy, and implying that all parties should be more tolerant of the views of others, he says plainly that governments shouldn't \"dictate what clothes a Muslim woman should wear\", so that by implication, the French shouldn't forbid the wearing of head scarves in schools.<\/p>\n

Krauthammer makes this fit the \"great transcender\" theme in the following way:<\/p>\n

[…] it borders on the obscene to compare this mild preference for secularization (seen in Muslim Turkey as well) to the violence that has been visited upon Copts, Maronites, Bahais, Druze and other minorities in Muslim lands […]<\/span><\/p>\n

I'm not trying to make a political point here. As far as I can see, Krauthammer is correct about the relative intensity of current official and unofficial religious suppression in Islamic countries compared to those dominated by other religions. However, his attempt to turn the grammatical choices of Obama's speechwriters into an emblem of \"transcultural evenhandedness\" is both passively and actively confused.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Charles Krauthammer, \"Obama Hovers From on High\", Washington Post 6\/12\/2009: On religious tolerance, [president Obama] gently referenced the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt, then lamented that the \"divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence\" (note the use of the passive voice). He then criticized (in the active voice) Western religious intolerance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-politics","category-passives"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}