Agency and sentence structure

The Official Style mucks up the issue of who did what. When writers do this accidentally, it's because they aren't thinking clearly or looking at what they've written from the reader's point of view. But when they do it intentionally, it's because they are trying to avoid having to flat-out admit who did what—what we refer to as agency. People faced with explaining mistakes frequently duck the question of agency, especially if they're the one at fault.

　　Here's a good example taken from an insurance report. A policy-holder had had a one-car accident, so no other person could possibly take the blame. But that didn't stop him, in his written explanation, from trying to shift responsibility away from himself:

　　The telephone pole was approaching. I was attempting to swerve out of its way, when it struck my front end.

　　In the way the story is told, the telephone pole takes on a life of its own. Nice try to avoid a hike in premiums.

　　An ancient example of trying to avoid responsibility by ducking the question of agency occurs in the Bible. Moses, bearing the Ten Commandments, has just returned to the Israelites from his forty days on the mountaintop. But in his absence all hell has broken loose. The Israelites have made a new idol, a golden calf, and have started worshipping it and running around naked. Moses turns to his brother, Aaron, who was supposed to be in charge. What happened, he wants to know? Where on earth did the statue of the calf come from?

　　Aaron's probably afraid of Moses, who's irascible and has a habit of killing people who cross him. Aaron doesn't flat-out lie, but he does what he can to minimize his own role in the debacle:

　　And I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf. （Exod. 32:23）

　　I've always wondered what look Moses gave Aaron when he heard this. There came out this calf. Uh-huh.

　　A recent example of using language to duck questions of agency—and thus of responsibility—comes from Kosovo, 1999. A young Serbian man said this to an American reporter:

　　We have to accept the facts. Very bad things happened in Kosovo, and we are going to pay for that.　　William Booth,"Collective Conscience." Washington Post （August 22, 1999）. B1.

　　The quotation starts off with the strong we have to accept the facts, a seemingly forthright acceptance of responsibility. But the blurry next sentence is the real heart of the message. Do you notice its careful lack of agency in very bad things happened? Rhetorically separating out the bad things that happened from we, the sentence subtly calls into question the legitimacy of holding the particular we—Serbians, presumably—responsible. In fact by the end it has rhetorically set up Serbs as victims, not aggressors.

　　Politics is full of such obfuscation. For instance, according to western journalists and human-rights organizations, Chinese commonly torture suspects during interrogation sessions—and not surprisingly they don't like to admit this. Thus official Chinese transcripts of interrogation sessions use an antiseptic formula to cloak the action:

　　Education takes place.　　Elisabeth Rosenthal,"In China's Legal Evolution, the Lawyers Are Handcuffed." New York Times （January 6, 2000）. A1.

　　Education takes place. That chillingly bland statement could be Exhibit 1 in how to duck moral responsibility for one's actions. For a classic essay on this tendency in modern writing, see George Orwell's"Politics and the English Language."

Agency and sentence structure