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.
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.
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