On linguistic structures, authority and recycling
I. Get When I worked at
USP, someone taught me that in working with youth, I shouldn't phrase requests as questions. For example, "Can you shut the door?" is a less effective way of saying "Please shut the door," or "I need you to shut the door." The reason is that it's ultimately misleading -- what I am trying to communicate is not a question. I know before asking it that only one answer is acceptable. So I've put this into practice, and it works. I feel more genuine about my requests, and I get a more positive response. The change doesn't seem at first glance to be more than mere semantics, without real significance to our experience. But this is precisely wrong -- semantics is never "mere," and often has a profound effect on our experience as agents of change in the world.
As another example of this, we might say that our consumerist attitude towards the world is based in part on linguistic structures. The subject-verb-object form of English sentences, in conjunction with an overabundance of uses for the word "get" makes all of the following structurally equivalent statements: "get a cookie," "get an education," "get punished," "get some sleep," "get married." These are distinct enough statements -- if a friend tells me she "got some sleep," I probably won't misconstrue her meaning and imagine her eating a cookie -- but their difference is in content only. The underlying structure of the phrases is the same in all of them, describing the same
type of experience, but varying
instances of it. The type of experience they describe is, of course, one of acquisition. As a result, we organize our lives into processes or serial acquisition, and model the human-to-world relationship as consumer-to-resource, rather than, say, participant-to-community.
In fairness, such language probably doesn't necessitate a consumerist attitute towards one's world, but it does permit it. It is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition; in other words, language shapes, but does not determine, experience.
II. Can & May Remember middle school? Remember teachers being cruel to kids with bursting bladders, confounded colons or just a desperate desire to duck out for a sec? When we asked "Can I go to the bathroom?" they said, "You can. But you may not." And the rest of the class laughed and laughed... and we became angrier and angrier. They were correct, of course, those teachers, even if there was nothing right about their behavior.
I recently asked a cashier at Fordham's campus deli where the recycling bins were. She said, "Oh, you can just put it in the trash." Let's become, for sake of experiment, our own middle-school teachers and rephrase her statement. It becomes "You may put your empty water bottle in the trash."
Also for the sake of experiment, let's change some parameters. Let's say I run into the same place, only instead of holding an empty water bottle, I am clutching my stomach. I ask the cashier, "Is there a restroom around here?" And she says, "Oh, you can just poo in the corner," and I mentally rephrase her statement to match the above, coming up with "You may poo in the corner of the deli."
So our cashier has described a
possible course of action in her "can" statements, which we translated into statements of
permissible courses of action with our "may"s. And, at least in the second example, I hope we all agree that the action is nevertheless impermissible. Well, why?
III. Ought Who has the authority to set limits on my behavior? One might be tempted to say here, "I and only I have that authority." But this way of looking at it -- we might call it the radical individualist position -- ignores our existence in the midst of, and in inevitable interrelationship with our communities. It is "behaving as if we have no relations." In fact, our relationships with the world determine the framework within which we operate, within which we make choices. We consider it more fully human to have concepts like "must" and "ought" in addition to "want" and "need." We accept externally-sourced limitations on our behavior as enrichments in life insofar as they permit us a better coexistence with others.
For this reason, even if it physically possible (can) and there is no law against it, or we know with certainty we won't be caught (may), we would still think that pooing in the deli is a kind of sociopathic behavior. We
ought not do it. We have a firm limitation on our behavior that will not be lifted by others. "Ought" overrides "may." I am not going to poo in the corner not because I might be caught and punished, but because it hurts my community.
IV. And So does not recycling.
