As our lives succumb to increasing numbers of invasive algorithms and AI systems, we might stop to ask about what and who we are. Are we, for example, analogous to mathematical functions? Or are we something else, something defined if not positively then at least negatively as “not a function”?
 
A common analog of math functions is a vending machine of any kind, from one that dispenses snacks or drinks to one that dispenses cars from Carvana. We put money into the machine; the machine spits out a product, and always the same amount of money produces an equivalent product: Potato chips for $0.50 every time, a bag per half dollar. Input yields output. The vending machine is the function; the vending machine functions as long as the single input produces a single output. When two bags of chips fall to the collecting tray, we say, “Hey, look at this!” We know something went wrong. The machine didn’t function as it was intended to function.
 
Those who work with AI and algorithms would prefer we humans were much like functions. They who input expect us to put out, usually with rather singular results. You buy online seeds to plant catnip to chase away mosquitoes from your deck, and you are suddenly bombarded with commercials or ads for seeds and plants. You must be, the algorithm says, one of those gardener types. Your function is to buy seeds. Isn’t that why you ordered Nepeta cataria? 
 
Of course, the algorithm-writers know that you buy other products, but they frame you a certain way, so ads for garden tools, Wellingtons, and gloves also appear on your monitor. And the pressure to frame you according to dictates of algorithms will increase. Talk about real profiling! Each aspect of your life as seen through the lenses of algorithms will become more singular, since math functions always produce a single output for a particular input. As a member of one economic class, you will be expected to produce an output that a member of another economic class would not produce. As a parent in monogamous relationship, you will produce a different quantified product from a parent in a divorced relationship. Singles are different functionally from the married. 
 
Businesses, political parties, social institutions, all of them: Don’t their leaders want you to be a predictable function? How else to be sure of an outcome with a given input? 
 
And this is the heart of a problem every individual in any society faces. Do you recognize yourself as a function? Are you that predictable vending machine into which the algorithm-writer, the leader, or even the group can input a stimulus from which the expected output always emerges? 
 
You aren’t, are you? And you’ll do just about anything to prove that you aren’t. Well, not just about everything. You aren’t Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the guy who, to simplify the plot, knew that killing was forbidden but who killed the old woman pawnbroker and her sister in spite of that knowledge. He killed because he could and because it served his, and not his society’s, purpose. Raskolnikov wasn’t a good vending machine. Society had put its mores into him, but his output differed from the expected. 
 
I’m guessing there are certain behaviors that no number of prevailing algorithms can elicit from you, murder being one of them. But buying other seeds for your garden? Well, there’s a good potential sale there. In that, you might be predictable; in that you might be the human vending machine; and in that AI might see you correctly, label you, and control or at least influence you.
 
You don’t have to be a Raskolnikov to demonstrate you are not a function, but your biases might mark you at times as an analog of algebraic functions. Say you are an open or secret member of some group. It can be any group, a group of Episcopalians, for example, Hasidic Jews, or even the KKK. Say, also, that you have a business and are hiring or that you are a teacher reading student essays. An Episcopalian, Hasidic Jew, or KKK member all seek a job with you or submit an essay. Now what? Similar inputs, but what’s your output?
 
I realize that such an example pushes the idea to the extreme, but on any scale such an example holds: A favored or unfavored family member, an associate or team member, a stranger on the street. How does the human vending machine react to the beggar who asks for money to buy a burger vs the beggar who asks for a million-dollar contribution to support a museum or charity? How does the teacher view the work of a troubled child vs the work of the model student? How does the politician respond to the needs of one segment of constituency over another segment? How do any of us respond to those we deem “different” regardless of a similar input? But even in our biased decisions, there is variability. Human vending machines aren't very consistent.  
 
Human vending machine? I think not. Algebraic function? Not that either. But algorithm-writers and AI developers will continue to operate as though all of us are such vending machines, even though in their personal lives they cannot see themselves as such. It might be in human nature to see other humans as analogs of functions regardless of human history that demonstrates people are rarely simple examples of “f of x equals” some output. 
 
Sometimes the vending machine spits out two bags of chips. Sometimes it just keeps the money and gives no chips.   

Break it down, this life thing that absorbs us. What’s important? First, energy. Nothing gets done without it, not even lifting the proverbial little finger. So, yes, food is part of that. We are all solar powered either by consuming the plants that convert sunlight into food or by consuming critters that eat plants. And all those other energy requirements, like powering cars, mean nothing without our meeting that first energy requirement. All our machines use energy from various sources and in various forms in service to us, the conscious Prime Movers, so to speak. 
 
What’s important? Second, peace. Without it nothing positive gets done by energized humans. Without peace, destruction from various sources and in various forms with varying results occurs. Think petty arguments, broken relationships between two and among many, and world wars.  
 
Energy and peace. That’s how I break down this life thing that absorbs us. 

In Season 3, Episode 1 of Star Trek, Spock loses his brain, well, not exactly. He doesn’t misplace it. Someone steals his brain. So, for most of the episode, Captain Kirk and crew have to search for it. You can’t expect Spock to do the looking, can you? If you lost your brain, would you know you lost it? I mean, that’s bigger than misplacing your keys or glasses, but in losing either of those, you at least have a brain to recognize the loss. Anyway, by the end of the episode as you might well guess, Spock gets back his brain, and all is well. In another episode of the series, the crew meet up with disembodied minds. Now, there’s a step beyond losing Spock’s brain. These guys have lost their bodies, making the antithesis of the expression, “I’m losing my mind!”
 
But what about losing one’s body while keeping the head? First thing that comes to mind is one of those tabloids I once saw in the checkout line at the grocery store: “First Head Transplant.” Made me wonder who profited. Was it the body that lost and then gained a head, or the head that lost and then gained a body? The imagination expands like the universe, but the mind becomes a fog of unresolved questions. 
 
A headless body seems the same as a bodiless head, but not so fast. Take into account the ability of the kleptoplastic sea slug Elysia cf. marginata, a sacoglossan capable of severing its own body from head, an autotomy that results in a living head capable of regenerating a new body, yes, a completely new body. The head moves on its own, senses its environment, and responds. * Kleptoplactic, marginata’s head appears to survive on food from the photosynthetic symbionts which it incorporates in its tissues. Bodiless head, disembodied head, headless body, whatever, this is weird, isn’t it? Same goes for the brainless Spock. 
 
But bodiless heads and headless bodies seem to me to be rather common in human history. No, not individual humans, but rather in the analog of leaders and followers, governments and people. And there appears to be a severing of head from body in one particular circumstance that from ancient world to modern one has led to a bodiless head: The unrestricted burgeoning of government, that is, the proliferation not only of agencies, but also of members within agencies. Big Government in any era has been, is now, and will be always top heavy. The head, like some sacoglossan, continues to move around, continues to administer, issuing reports and regulations to foster a relevance recognizable only by the head. Governments do two things above all others: Grow and find a way to survive independently.
 
Maybe Pennsylvania’s higher education system serves as a model. Originally, the 14 state colleges were supervised by the PA Department of Education. They had some autonomy, each having its own president and board of trustees. Then the system became a state university system, severing itself from one head, that in the Department of Education while growing another, that which became a university chancellor’s office, the Chancellor, of course, serving as head. Now, of course, one person can’t run an entire system of a 100,000-plus students and thousands of professors and local administrators. So, you guessed it, the Chancellor had to have a staff, and from that the hierarchy of administrators formed: Heads within head. ** The new head grew larger, much of its new tissues operating symbiotically to support the Head-Head. Vice-chancellors of various kinds, assistants to them, directors, and secretaries for all, and even the eager student intern, all with an obligation to demonstrate their relevance. And how do the members of such agencies demonstrate their relevance? Why, by issuing calls for reports, by receiving those reports, and by handing them up the line of heads, hoping to reach the Head-Head. In the meantime, the growing head, now on auto-drive toward seemingly never-ending expansion, reduces the body to a mere source of food. Regardless of the vicissitudes of student enrollment, the head maintains its size or even grows.
 
So, bureaucracies tend to grow, and grow and grow, and grow. They take on a life of their own as disembodied heads that, if they so desire, can produce new bodies or discard them as they wish. The head, however, continues on regardless of being embodied or disembodied. Such is the sacoglossan-like life of Big Government. The United States is the prime example. The government employs more than 2,000,000 people, including, of course, the necessary military personnel, *** but also including 31,734 Park Service, Fish and Wildlife rangers, 12,612 Patent and Trademark people, 78,071 IRS agents (Ouch! That’s one that directly affects every member of the body), 14,416 people in energy who don’t actually produce any energy, 14,761 permanent census employees even though the census is a once-a-decade process, 93,964 people in agriculture who don’t farm, and almost 4,000 people in the Department of Education who don’t teach. There are thousands of others, of course, all summing up to that count of two million Federal employees. Remember that the Federal government is a head among heads, also. Every state has its own Department of Education, its own Environmental Protection Agency, and, heck, a mirror agency for every Federal agency.
 
Seems that if we consider humanity as an organism, humans aren’t much different from sea slugs whose heads have a life of their own. 
 
 
 
Notes: 
 
*Cell Press. 8 Mar 2021. These sea slugs sever their own heads and regenerate brand-new bodies. Phys.org. online at https://phys.org/news/2021-03-sea-slugs-sever-regenerate-brand-new.html   Accessed March 8, 2021. Original article at: Sayaka Mitoh and Yoichi Yusa. Extreme autotomy and regeneration of the whole body in photosynthetic sea slugs. Current Biology. Volume 31, Issue 5. Pr233-R234. March 8, 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.01.012 Link Online at  https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00047-6
 
**Not taking into account the many secretaries and understaff, I find four people listed under Academic and Student Affairs, including the Vice Chancellor and CAO, 18 people under Administration and Finance, 2 more Vice Chancellors, a deputy Vice Chancellor, an advisor and coordinator listed under the “Chancellor’s Office, two in the CIO’s Office, four in the Gear Up Grant, 17 in the Legal Department, four in Public Affairs, 15 in the Advanced Data Analytics Shared Service, two in the Facilities Shared Service, four in the Finance Shared Service, sis in the HR Shared Service, 28 in the IT Shared Service, six in labor Relations Shared Service, Three in Payroll Shared Service, and three in Procurement Shared Service. Those numbers include “directors,” “assistants,” “developers,” and “managers” of all kinds and their associates in those eight “departments.”  
 
***https://fortune.com/longform/government-employee-count-2019/

The genius of Gary Larsen lies in his ability to turn the ordinary into some twisted form of the obvious, yielding a subtle insight in almost every cartoon panel. Among his many brilliant interpretations of life is a panel with cows. One cow says to others, “Hey, wait a minute! This is grass! We’ve been eating grass!” There’s a lesson in cows’ not recognizing the nature of their steady diet. We could, of course, apply the cow’s observation to almost every intellectual diet.
 
I cannot envision, for example, my eating a fertilized egg in the Philippines, fried tarantulas in Cambodia or maggot cheese in Sardinia. Squeamish? Okay, call me so, but I assume that what I choose to eat might be as equally repulsive to someone from another culture. Taste is acquired. And acquired taste is habitual. 
 
“Food for thought” is the analog of food for cows. 
 
It’s very difficult for any of us to have the insight to say, “Hey, wait a minute! This is grass. We’ve been eating grass!”   

I hesitate in these times of tweeted aphorisms to write a reductionist essay. In a complex universe where answers, even to physical questions like “What is matter?” are often sketchy metaphors or analogs, we tend toward simplification. There is apparently just too much to know, too many changes to track, and far too many perspectives to reconcile, and without question far too many uncertainties. We can’t even agree on a common interpretation of the past, even though it’s come and gone and locked in immutability. In the midst of such complexity and uncertainty, nothing seems more mysterious than emotions and behavior, regardless of stereotypes we impose and progress psychologists and neuroscientists make in their research. But in a world filled with dangers and, as pop culture likes to label them, existential threats, we should not stop trying to pin down an answer to the question “Why do we engage in risky behavior?” So, here’s my first reduction: There are two kinds of risky behaviors: 1) Active and 2) Passive.
 
Among the former behaviors, I place addictions to drugs and alcohol because they involve an active pursuit. Addicts initiate their addictions and consciously continue them. True, once hooked on drugs or alcohol, addicts fall increasingly more to control by their biochemical drivers. But obtaining both drugs and alcohol requires a conscious and active effort.  
 
Addictions to drugs and alcohol are well known risks that the non-addicted have difficulty understanding because of an underlying assumption that “just don’t do it” solutions work. That is, people believe the mind can unfailingly control the body and that reason can prevail over physiological responses to chemicals and emotions run awry. If they did not so believe, then there would be no AAA and no rehabilitation programs.
 
Yes, there is some connection between mind and body, no thanks to Mr. Descartes, but not enough to prevent an abrasion from a fall on gravel. Does the mind’s inability to effect some cures beg this question: Are there addictions other than those connected to biochemistry that yield to the power of mind and reason? What of risks that are without question a matter of mind, risks for which there are avoidances lying within the grasp of reason? Do we tend to live with risk we can avoid but don’t avoid because, as Johnathan Swift is credited with writing, “Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion which by Reasoning he never acquired.” Paraphrased by others, Swift’s statement simply implies that one cannot reason someone out of something he hasn’t been reasoned into.
 
We might argue that boarding a rocket with 30,000 gallons or about 125 tons of highly flammable rocket propellant is “reasonable,” but the underlying assumption that the goal to reach orbit is worth the risk is never derived from reason alone. Going into the dangers of outer space was initially a matter of desire. Remember Kennedy’s 1961 speech in Rice Stadium?
 
            “We choose to go to the Moon…We choose to go to the Moon in this decade…not because [it] is easy, but because [it is] hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win….”
 
Sure, once we mastered the process and lost nearly three dozen astronaut and cosmonaut lives to accidents, we established a “reasonable” level of risk and a need for reaching orbit that was generated by advancing military and communications technologies. But initially we actively risked the lives of astronauts only to fulfill a desire with an unsure prospect of success.  
 
But remember that I said there was another kind of addiction, a passive one. What about the widespread addiction of millions of people to living in places that pose risks, say, for example, at the base of an active volcano?
 
Take two of the three active volcanoes in Italy for example. Granted, the deadly eruption of Vesuvius in 79 that destroyed Pompei was a long time ago. No one is around to tell stories of surviving that eruption; we have to rely on Pliny’s accounts. But who reads Pliny? Really. When’s the last time you picked up a Latin text to read first-hand descriptions of events that occurred a couple of millennia ago? So, can we fault today’s residents of Naples and its suburbs for living where they live? Sure, they’ve taken a drive to see the ruins of Pompei, and they look daily at the nearby imposing mountain. Do they really sense a danger; do they believe Pompei’s ancient fate is their own? The famous volcano’s last significant eruption occurred during World War II, now going on eight decades in the past. Or can we fault today’s Sicilians for living in the shadow of Mount Etna, where their parents, their grandparents, their great grandparents going back even more generations decided to build their towns at the base of an active volcano?
 
On March 1, 2021, Mt. Etna erupted with a consequent rain of small volcanic pellets hitting the nearby communities. * Fortunately, nobody was hurt. Etna isn’t known as a monstrous killer, but it has killed. In fact, over the past two millennia the number of deaths associated with Etna’s eruptions is an unknown, but an earthquake no doubt caused by the same tectonic forces that created the volcano killed an estimated 20,000 in the seventeenth century, and others have died by being in the wrong place during an eruption. The March 1 eruption appears to have been just a spectacular nuisance for residents of Catania and other nearby communities.
 
Thousands of miles away another volcano, Volcán de Fuego in Guatemala not far from beautiful city of Antigua Guatemala, erupted in February this year. Two other Guatemalan volcanoes erupted about the same time. On March 3, Pacaya, another volcano close to Antigua and not far from Guatemala City, also erupted. ** Fuego killed hundreds in 2018, so it obviously poses a danger. *** Today, some 180,000 people still live in the vicinity of that volcano and a couple of million in the vicinity of Pacaya. Why don’t they move? At a minimum, two reasons. Poverty plays its role in their immobility, and long-held family traditions and close ties pin them to their hometowns and farms and coffee plantations to which they also have an emotional attachment. I argue that their choice to stay where they are is an example of a passive addiction and that the attachment to home is stronger than the desire or reason to leave.
 
Of course, one could probably apply such an attachment to home to the people in Tornado Alley as readily as to those in a volcanic region, to Californians in fault zones, and to people on coastal plains, where hurricanes pose annual threats. Once fixed in place, we rarely move simply because there’s a potential threat. We move because something somewhere else draws us or because life in the old homestead becomes untenable; we move for commitments made to others, for new lifestyles, or for a new job. I suppose we could also say that some leave their long-standing residences because they convince themselves that their ties to a place have been severed by changing circumstances.
 
What keeps one in a village at the base of a volcano? Fuego and Etna are stratovolcanoes, potentially the deadliest kind because of their thousand-plus degree pyroclastic flows, associated earthquakes, volcanic bombs, and lavas, all capable of destroying and killing. So, why do people still live near them? Would you? Do you?
 
Why we don’t learn that we, like our predecessors, can suffer a catastrophic event isn’t a big mystery. Unless dangers are immediate, we tend to ask ourselves, “What are the chances?” “We’ll have time to escape,” we say. “The danger is remote.” Even if an eruption, earthquake, tornado, flood, or hurricane hits the region, we stand a good chance of being elsewhere at the time. We believe statistics are on our side. If, for example, on the day of a picnic there is a 30% chance of precipitation, we can be pretty sure we won’t need an umbrella. We know by experience that if only a third of the region will likely see rain or snow, two-thirds probably won’t see rain. If the chance of an eruption in our lifetime is 10%, we stay. Our math supports our emotions, reasoning, and conclusions that are satisfying until they aren’t.
 
We don’t learn the lessons of the past because such lessons are essentially meaningless to us. I’ll reiterate what I have said: What isn’t personal is meaningless; or, mirrored, what is personal is meaningful. Those who have never had their lives disrupted during an eruption continue living in the shadow of Vesuvius, Etna, Vulcan Fuego, Pinatubo, Sinabung, and other stratovolcanoes. Potential danger is to them no danger. What isn’t personal is meaningless. So, they stay. They reside in their passive addiction.
 
But lest you think I’m a hypocrite, I readily admit that I live in an area known for mine subsidence, floods, and landslides. The local river, the Monongahela, gets its name from a Unami word that, according to several sources, means “falling in banks,” “sliding banks,” or just “falling banks.” You get the idea. Landslides are so common that even in pre-Colonial times the locals noted their frequency in northwestern West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. And although I don’t live directly on one of the river’s banks, which can stand 300 feet or more above the incised Monongahela, I do know that any hillside in the region of sedimentary rock layers can yield to the force of gravity at any time—though particularly more often after spring snow melts and April rains. So, here I am, in a house perched on a knoll, knowing that there is a landslide potential throughout the region and yet remaining affixed like a picture hanging on a frayed cord over a broken nail. You might ask, “What’s wrong with you?”
 
In addition, I can’t say that I wouldn’t have lived in a zone with other dangers had I sought in my youth to work elsewhere. What if, I might ask myself, I had sought and acquired a job at the University of Memphis whose property overlies the New Madrid Seismic Zone. The earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 in that fault were in the neighborhood of 7.2 to 8.4 on the Richter Scale. Not many earthquakes are more powerful. Would I have accepted and kept a job where the potential for seismic destruction is so great? If I say “No,” am I just guessing from my temporal vantage point that ascribes more wisdom than I actually had? Am I just ascribing to myself the insight, foresight, and logic that I say others don’t have because they live with higher risks? Am I rewriting a personal history? You know the answer from what I just said: I have remained in the region of “falling in banks.” So, yes, had I gotten a job at the University of Memphis, I might have lived in the shadow of Graceland, hoping for some continuing grace to protect my area and my life from seismic activity. Fortunately, neither subsidence nor landslide has disrupted my life in western Pennsylvania, but I remain in place with no plans, not even an inkling of desire, to move to The Villages in Florida, which by the way, is land not only fraught with the dangers of lightning strikes and hurricanes, but also with the dangers of unexpected sinkholes.
 
Is complacency the reason some of us remain where we have lived for years? Isn’t complacency just the euphemism for a human weakness? Is all human behavior reducible to one or more of the Seven Deadly Sins? Then one reason we stay where we are, regardless of danger, is Sloth. Picking up and moving requires a big effort. But what if we think positively instead of negatively  because we are happy with our lives? What if our current circumstances provide us in situ with all the comforts we desire that satisfy our addiction to place. Or, is another Deadly Sin, Avarice, the reason for staying? How about the ultimate Deadly Sin: Do we stay where we are because of Pride? Moving might be equivalent to admitting we made a big mistake in our choice of location. To acknowledge a need to move is a blot on esteem, an embarrassment for us in the community, and, of course, a matter of pride.  
 
You might argue that happiness for some people is rooted in stability. Those who live in the shadow of a beautiful conical mountain with fertile soils to cultivate are happiness incarnate. “If you’re happy and you know it, stay where you are,” the lyrics might go. Why move when no immediate risks threaten? Life is good until it isn’t.  
 
Even when effort and costs associated with moving are insignificant, we can fall back on the statistics of disasters. Let’s see. San Francisco was hit hard in 1906 and again in 1989. That’s 83 years between major earthquakes, and the average lifespan nowadays is in the neighborhood of 70 years. This is 2021, that’s only 32 years since the last big one. What are the chances?
 
Obviously, Vulcan de Fuego’s eruptions pose a seemingly more frequent danger than San Andreas’s earthquakes. In the last 100 years it has erupted nine times (1932, 1974, 2004, 2007, 2012, 2015, 2018, and this past week, February, 2021). Mount Etna has been active in every decade since World War II. Back in 1669 it obliterated 15 villages and part of Catania. Yet, people stay.
 
I stay. And maybe you stay. Comfortable until we aren’t. Is it Sloth, Avarice, Pride, or just the simple passivity of our mindset that keeps us where we are or others where they are? If you are saying, “None of this applies to me,” you might be right, or you might be drawing on the same passivity that has kept so many affixed to the foothills of an active volcano.    
 
Notes:
 
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I10Y-NbaXW8    and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofGBwLPtnjc  Accessed March 2, 2021).
 
**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxOD6nMsuJs    Accessed March 3, 2021.  
 
**Vulcan Fuego’s most recent eruption (as of this writing):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1KnE57VVyA  Accessed March 2, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck6j_MEyH48  Accessed March 2, 2021.
See also the March 2, 2021, eruption of Mount Sinabung at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiaME3aM7Nw  Accessed March 2, 2021. Interestingly, in the video one can hear laughter, maybe an indication that only that which is personal is meaningful.

There are two ways that John Bradford’s “There but for the grace of God go I” fits into the current woke and cancel culture. One good; the other bad. Let’s look at the former first. 
 
That some people have become aware of detrimental and inhibitory circumstances under which others live is a tribute to the human capacity for empathy. Yes, not everyone lives a wonderful life, thank you, Philip van Doren Stern, author of the story that was to become It’s a Wonderful Life, the movie starring Jimmy Stewart. As in the film, many people actually do live lives that force them to a bridge to contemplate, attempt, and succeed in ending their lives, as the lead character in the movie does before he says to Clarence the angel, “I wish I’d never been born.” Movie plot aside, the point is that some people seem to have grown up unaware until recently that others live in despair because they are destitute, persecuted, or otherwise prevented from fulfilling their sundry potentials. Those people who have acquired a newfound empathetic awareness during these early twenty-first century years have become, as some label their awareness, “woke social justice warriors.” 
 
Empathy is a foundation of compassion. If we feel each other’s pain, we can act compassionately to alleviate that pain or to comfort the hurting. Empathy recognizes a different status. There but for the grace of God, right? We’re all just a neighborhood away from hurting; some are born on the wrong street. In the sense of becoming aware of the suffering of others, becoming “woke” is a positive human characteristic, a humane property. That’s the good side of awakening to the plight of others. 
 
There is, however, that other side of being “woke.” And that side entails cancelling. That’s the bad side of cancel culture, censorship, persecution, and wokeness. It is an ironic result in that those who claim to have found empathy and wokeness subvert their compassion by turning to persecution, as though punishing others will somehow fill the world with butterflies and flowers. As just a little review of this century reveals, any persecution of a group, even of a group deemed to be persecutors themselves, leads to bitterness and counter cancellation. Wrongs rarely if ever get righted by other wrongs, and those who would cancel and censor today risk finding themselves cancelled and censored tomorrow. 
 
Attributed to Bradford, the usual version about not having to suffer the fate of others is a paraphrase, with Bradford’s original being: “But for the grace of God goes John Bradford.” He made the statement in reference to those he witnessed being sent to the gallows, ironically a fate close to his eventual own, for John was burned at the stake. Seems that even the grace of God can be degraded by those living in the grace of sixteenth-century England’s powerful Queen Mary I, aka Bloody Mary or Mary Tudor. Those were the days when cancellation was physically brutal, terminal in fact, and not merely verbal. And as happened throughout history, those who persecuted others with whom they disagree found themselves in the very condition to which they subjected others. Mary was herself cancelled, an example and foreshadowing that reveals how today’s canceller can be subjected to tomorrow’s canceller. “Beware,” the lesson should resound, “beware of cancelling lest you be cancelled.” The grace that keeps anyone safe today is subject to degradation. Bradford learned that in 1555. In what year will the current generation discover the principle? Over and over, generation after generation, people learn the hard way that the universe in which we live is entropic. The order of today will become tomorrow’s disorder.   
 
When I see those who promulgate the Orwellian milieu of cancel culture and safe-space censorship, I find an inordinate number in higher education and entertainment, two societal segments occasionally associated with free thought and avant-garde. Those segments are two subcultures that depend upon and flourish in times of relative affluence and stability. Both can find their origins in Greece during its golden Periclean Age and in Europe during the Renaissance. In contrast to times of relative ease, times of hardship generate their own priorities and concerns. When life is all toil for survival, no one has much time for learning or play. A society in comfort can think and laugh, scheme and satirize, censor and condemn. A society in comfort can also make the proverbial mole hills of trivial concerns undergo a cultural orogeny.  
 
Failing to realize that their own protected culture will, like any culture of the past, undergo its own degradation, cancellers and censors live in the comfort of a system created by a society steeped in self-esteem garnered from an ease of life, not hardship or the threat of it. But history tells us that what happened to Bradford and Queen Mary can happen to anyone in any milieu, and no amount of assumed security or self-esteem can ward off the eventual entropic decline of present-day order. Disorder hits everyone and everything eventually. Grace degrades. The immolators themselves burn figuratively or actually. 
 
Those born into or elevated into a safe, affluent and comfortable life of grace might profit psychologically from a trip to live among those born into the dire conditions of Third World poverty. It’s easy to focus on what psychologically offends self-esteem when one has food on the table and a supporting society. On the other end of the social and economic scales are the poor. Trivial offenses mean nothing to those rummaging through garbage for food in places where even the smallest charity relieves suffering. There but for the grace of God….
 
A member of my family tells this story: In India for business on different occasions, he and a business associate observed extreme poverty. Next to the hotel where they stayed two nights on one trip, they saw from their second-floor room a destitute woman and a child outside the property’s enclosing wall. Noting to his colleague that they were returning to the United States and that they had a pocketful of Indian rupees and paise, they put the money in a bag and cast it over the wall toward the woman. She could not see her benefactors, but they could from their vantage see her. Seeing the money in the bag, she knelt and put up her hands in a gesture of thanksgiving. As they left the hotel in a taxi an hour later, the two passed by the wall, where the woman was still on her knees trying to give thanks to her unseen benefactors. They could not have anticipated that their small act would have such an effect or that they would become a medium of grace. Empathy often surprises the empathizer.  
 
But grace is never permanent, as John Bradford’s and Queen Mary’s lives exemplify, and eventually, the woman would spend the money to survive and once again fall from the grace that temporarily gave her a better life in an entropic Cosmos. There but for the grace of God…. 
 
Weighing the Indian woman’s plight against the conditions of a complaining and politically correct cancel culture emphasizes the trivial nature that is the human downside of affluence and security. That so many in developed countries are seemingly obsessed with tweets or social media postings with which they disagree versus a woman trying to keep her child alive in the midst of poverty is like putting a feather on one side of the balance and a bag with a few rupees and paise on the other side. Though not very heavy, that small bag of money outweighs the feather and makes the difference between living another day and starving to death. The feather makes apparent the pettiness of safe spaces and verbal offenses. It reveals as petty the bad side of woke culture, that is, the side that seeks to cancel, usually over mole hills raised to mountains. There but for the affluence of a society into which one is born by chance go all of us. 
 
Both Bradford and Mary fell from grace, and their fall foreshadows the eventual destiny of any who assume the world will continue as is. Today’s Orwellian restrictions imposed on thought and language by the current generation of cancellers and censors makes Bradford’s fall from grace an appropriate model for out times, just as Mary’s beheading foreshadows the potential fate of those who deem themselves to be part of a protected, self-righteous class. The cancellers will eventually succumb to cancellation by others or to a cancelling cannibalism. One need only look to the recent politics and social wars to see that those once imbued with favored status can become the unfavored and abandoned.
 
While grace is present, life is personally good. When empathy leads to compassion, life is even better, at least for a short time. But empathy that emanates from its usefulness for persecution, censorship, and cancellation buys no one a respite from ultimate disordering. Those who use their own state of grace as a weapon wielded against others will find that like all weapons, their grace will rust and decay. Living in the grace of God in an entropic universe is a temporary condition at best.