In modern usage, ‘passive’ tends to have a neutral to negative undertone. It has notes of weakness, of avoidance when one ought to confront. It has, in other words, a moral judgement baked into its usage. However, this moral failure is not present in the word’s roots, which makes it a compelling example of how cultural values transfigure the meaning of a word over a time. Let’s start, as always, at the beginning.
Passive comes from the Latin Pass, past participle stem of Pati, which means simply “to suffer.” This becomes passivus, meaning “capable of feeling or suffering.” It moves through Old French passif “suffering, undergoing hardship”, and by the 14th century has arrived at the English passif, which, when applied to matter means “capable of being acted upon,” and when applied to persons means “receptive.”
Generally, we don’t talk about suffering in terms of capability. We suffer when something bad happens to us. It’s a non consensual, reactive state. We might label someone as ‘good at suffering’ in a sardonic sense, essentially labelling them as someone who wallows in their own pain and enjoys a state of victimhood, but never as a compliment, never as a capacity. So what does it mean to be ‘capable of feeling or suffering’, or, in parallel, what does it mean to be incapable of feeling or suffering?
Presumably, the difference between capable and incapable here isn’t between literal presence or non-presence of feeling (one isn’t deemed passive simply through feeling anything at all, or suffering at all. If this were the case, if would be a very, very small slice of the human population this term wouldn’t apply to). So if not between presence and non presence, capacity must mean a kind of ability–how one suffers or feels. We have arrived, then, at an interpretation of the early usage of passive and its contrast to the modern sense of the word. On the one hand, passive is a quality of suffering, an ability to feel. On the other hand, passive is a kind of calcified state of receptivity, in which the subject fails to act.
The cultural interpretation of this in modern day America is a fairly obvious one, and one that we have likely all come across before. As a society, we have consistently repressed feeling or seen it as secondary, to the point where a word that initially attributed a kind of skill at feeling now has a sense of moral failure. In fact, if I were to ask you to give me examples of people you know who you think have ‘suffered well,’ there’s a high likelihood that the first examples you would think of would be people who suffer stoically, or who move through it quickly. In other words, to suffer well in the modern sense is to minimize suffering and its collateral damage. We don’t want to be confronted with it. We grudgingly accept it’s a part of life, but we avoid it as best we can and have limited patience with its presence in the lives of those we love.
What would the implications be if we were to open up the lens of how we judge feeling, and instead admire those who do it in a completely different way? What would it mean for ourselves to study, to admire, to get very close to the widow still grieving ten years in, to the friend who gets emotional reading the news, to the amputee training for some physical feat who cheerily narrates their set backs?
What if suffering isn’t something that happens to us, but a question?