Against the Passive Voice

An interesting quote by Chesterton, taking up the "passive voice" in which events are reported. I don't think he is quite right; I don;t think it is a specially atheistical style, but a more common degredation of language (as Orwell noted in his Politics and the English Language). It is notable, however, that - as Mary Midgeley points out - Richard Dawkins in particular seems to avoid all talk of motivation. But Dawkins is not alone, all kinds of psychological explanations of people's actions have long tried to remove talk of motivation, and replace it with passive voice metaphorical constructs; these are slipped in as "scientific" because of the borrowing of the kind of terminology found in science.

The mark of the atheistic style is that it instinctively chooses the word which suggests that things are dead things; that things have no souls. Thus they will not speak of waging war, which means willing it; they speak of the "outbreak of war," as if all the guns blew up without the men touching them. Instead of saying that employers pay less wages, which might pin the employers to some moral responsibility, they insist on talking about the "rise and fall" of wages. They will not speak of reform, but of development. The atheist style in letters always avoids talking of love or lust, which are things alive, and calls marriage or concubinage "the relations of the sexes"; as if a man and a woman were two wooden objects standing in a certain angle and attitude to each other, like a table and a chair.("The Flying Authority" Eugenics and Other Evils)