Erasure and Anti-Grace

When asking philosphers of history “What is Modernity?”, probably one of the few agreed-upon answers is that modernity seeks above all to conquer and dominate nature, to bend it to human will. This tendency can even be seen before the Industrial Revolution, with the Scientific Revolution making evident this cupidity at the heart of modern man, as Francis Bacon declared that nature had to be put on the rack, and her “secrets tortured out of her.” It was not enough that nature be exploited and despoiled, an attitude wildly out of harmony with virtually all human cultures which had come before. As modernity marched forward with mechanization, we learned how to make a multitude of products with a minimum of variance; we assembly lines now for everything from pharmaceuticals to politicians.

Although most of us would prefer antibiotics and modern sewage treatment to easy septicemia and backbreaking labor, there has been an undeniable toll on nature and humanity, which, lest we forget, is part of nature. In tandem with modernity’s Faustian bargain, we are now confronting what is perhaps the truest confluence of the rape of nature and the long-prophecied “Abolition of Man”; that of the apparent disappearance of grace from human affairs.

It strikes me with sour irony to hear many liberal voices in recent years adopt the term “erasure” to describe the self-perceived destruction of their sense of identity and dignity. I say sour irony, because although I believe their ire is misplaced, I do not believe it is totally unmerited. There is an erasure going on across much the modern world, and it is taking place in a far more insidious and universal way than most political partisans can fathom. People, especially younger people, have picked up on this, with the popular “NPC” (Non-Player Character) meme which took wings, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. These caricatures of the Fifth Estate, with their droning, endless fearmongering about “preserving our democracy”, along with their widespread supinity before government and big business, have brought upon us, and upon young people, a tyranny of noise, which makes them unable to distinguish fact from fiction, but also their inner thoughts, from outer propaganda.

The phenomenon of ‘erasure’ struck again with the recent campus protests across the nation, which, to the surprise of no one, were clearly not entirely organized by students themselves. It was not surprising to discover that among those arrested were ‘professional protestors’ and agitators. I understand that many people have very deeply held opinions about the conflict in Israel/Palestine right now. It has been that way since 1947. Yet what should alarm all people of good will is the appalling ignorance, willful or not, which flows out of the vacuous statements of the protestors themselves. Especially when we consider that many of these young people at elite universities may very well be our future ‘upper crust’, this reality is truly depressing.

To be more specific, one common statement made is that the conflict in the Gaza Strip is being prosecuted by a “Fascist State” (O, Irony of Ironies!) which is committing “genocide” against an entire population. Such imprecision in language will never lead to any satisfactory road to peace, and perhaps that is the point. The cultural left has infamously never been able to define ‘fascism’ since 1945, and it is perhaps the biggest political psyop in Western History to describe anything as ‘far-right’ which is slightly more conservative than the policies of Angela Merkel or Bill Clinton. Another imprecision, this time mostly from the American Right, is to equate Jews or Judaism with Modern Zionism, which are not identical. Most Evangelicals seem puzzled as to why Ultra-Orthodox Jews and others who are more religious are so seemingly at odds with their own government. It boils down to one fundamental question: if you were a practicing Jew living in Judea today, would you believe that the long promised Messianic Kingdom, ruled a promised Davidic King, is the secular state currently governed by Bibi Netanyahu?

‘Erasure’, then, does not just apply to peoples or to individuals: it first applies to ideas and to concepts. Calling the state of Israel a literal fascist state, knowing its etiology, is beyond ironic, if one even has a cursory knowledge of history, when a literally fascist regime was on a campaign of literal genocide to annihilate a race (the definition of “geno” in “genocide”), among other ‘undesireables’ from the face of the earth. Applying Just War Theory to the current conflict, I do not believe it is disputable that the State of Israel had a right to defend itself after the attacks of October 7, 2023, to secure its territory and redeem its hostages. It even arguably possesses a right to destroy the government which executed the attack in the first place. Yet, having been to the Gaza Strip myself, when speaking of proportionality and proportional responses, the Gaza Strip quite literally is urban guerilla warfare, from which two million non-combatants cannot find any sort of safe refuge. The Gaza Strip, in its human and natural geography, combines the worst of Fallujah and Vietnam, with the same greying of the distinction between combatant and non-combatant, legitimate target and illegitimate target. Nuance is the death of fanaticisms, but it is also the door to equity. Pro-Zionists are unwilling to see beyond the horrific attack of October 7th, and come to terms with the historical hostility of the Israeli government toward the Palestinian population. Pro-Palestinians are unwilling to see beyond the reality that killing innocent people only gives more justification to the Israeli government to harden themselves in their paranoia, which, in a hostile neighborhood, seems at least understandable. Neither hardened points of view are helpful, if any peace is to be achieved without further great human suffering.

The fact is that the phenomenon of ‘erasure’, the forgetfulness of history and the complications inherent in conflicts and human relations, is one which has always existed. We have always had our damnatio memoriae; we know that the most permanent death blow we can give to our enemies is to ensure that their memory perishes from the earth. Yet this is why I don’t believe in tearing down monuments, anymore than I believe in forgetting personal failures: because the memory of weakness, failure and sin is that which makes the entry of grace possible. Yes, there is a sense in which there is grace in an unallen world, because even ‘to be’ is a grace, a gift from God. But in the sense of supernatural life, of experiencing superabundant mercy and reconciliation, these things are not possible in a world without sin.

Some more secular readers may balk at this assertion, but it is my opinion that the strategem to erase sin from from the world, and reduce all things to victim/victimizer, class conflict and politics, irrespective of history, morality and human nature, is ultimately an anti-theological movement. And many people, from many different directions, knowingly or unknowingly, are espousing a world without grace. What is more disturbing than that is that our cultural brahmins are instead promoting something which is in effect an anti-grace, an attempt to denude the world of anything but the mechanized, the predictable, the conditioned, and indeed, the consumed. This is one reason why I ventured into current affairs in some detail to explain what I mean: in the 1960s, what would become the post-Christian world was fresh from the memory of the Two World Wars, and the horrors of war and nuclear conflagration were never far from the psyches of those generations. Yet at the same time, there was still a residue of Christianity in our culture, a sense that, apart from the sheer horror and lethal efficiency of modern warfare, to kill was something we ought not to do without just and grave cause.

I think it merits our attention again to notice that what has literally occupied our college campuses are not peace protests, but partisan gatherings: in essence, proxy war camps. It was amusing to see young men and women wear Palestinian headgear and shout “glory to the martyrs” as they tuck-tailed and ran at the first sign of police confrontation. It was not amusing to see how easily incited they were by a conflict whose history they know so little about. As Scripture proclaims, “zeal without knowledge is not wise” (Proverbs 15:1) and while circumspection may not seem glorious, it is, as the old saying goes, the better part of valor.

The educational-entertainment complex is mass-producing malleable young minds who seem to have no stated purpose but to consume and to be consumed, whether by business, the state, or some obscene amalgamation of the two. They are the product in the post-modern world, many of them offered up from birth to impersonal screens and algorithm which will tag and serve them up to whatever their masters dictate is worthy of their attention. Meanwhile, those of us who remember life before the digitalization of everything, may have noticed that several things have conveniently ceased to exist, or at least, are no longer easily accessible. Any book, any movie, any public speaker can be removed, or at least, made so obscure from a public search that they might as well be invisible. It is no mistake that this process has occurred simultaneously with the commercialization of everything: so many things we once enjoyed for free, now comes with a fee. You must subscribe to a service for several products which you can no longer outright own. All this is falls in line with the medieval Benedictine maxim on greed and materialism: habere, haberi. “To have, is to be had.” In other words, unless one knows how to counter the desire to possess, one will become possessed, one will become dehumanized. As the ancient Greeks said, humans become like the objects of their love. Our loves ennoble or degrade us. It is crucially important that men and women of good will attempt to rediscover the beauty of nature, the power of supernature, and the order of grace. The latter is especially important, as Christians.

There are plenty of people in the world, thankfully, that are speaking about the importance of respect for nature, without deifying nature, or turning it into a merely political or economic exercise. Yet Christians I think are suspiciously, horrifically quiet on grace in the post-modern world, and it is grace which transforms the cosmos, and the human person. Grace for humanity was purchased at the price of Christ’s blood, and many people experience it without knowing what to call it. Grace in many cases is the introduction of many individuals into the supernatural world, and even though the supernatural world is all around us, it becomes obscured from us because of human sinfulness and stupidity. The first erasure in human history was when the devil tried to make our first parents forget the exact words of God to them in paradise, to misrepresent his intentions. By erasing the memory of God’s words, the devil wished to erase the image and likeness from man’s nature. He failed, yet he did succeed in marring such a marvellous similitude. Grace promises to restore us to an even greater level than that which we lost, yet like so much in prayer and mysticism, that requires the practice of recollection, that habit by which we regularly return to innermost selves, where God may be found in the seat of the soul.

To close, I would like to propose, ike the ancients, a sort of praeparatio Evangelica, a “preparation for the Gospel”, a practice used to identify trends prevalent in a culture to introduce people to God and to the Good News. It would be prudent for us firstly to use those salutary reactions in our culture to human exploitation, from human trafficing to the techno-oligarchy. Promoting the dignity of human nature, and practicing it like we mean it, will automatically make us stand out from other people. It is important that we not get imbroiled in controversies of our times according to the logic or spirit of our times, but to interpret the times according to eternal criteria. At the very least, it is important to take the advice of Saint James, to be slow to speak, slow to wrath, and quick to listen. We also should be serious students of history. History may be a subject that some find boring, but I always find it incredible how much that attitude changes when someone finds a historical subject that someone loves, or if it is presented in an engaging way.

Erasure is also something that I think needs to be countered by one other Christian conviction, closely aligned with human dignity: the Immortality of the Soul. So much fear I think that people have regarding the loss of a sense of self and identity that they don’t really believe in the permanence of their being. Eternal Life shows how death does not erase us or our lives. Death, to be sure, is frightening. However, the fear of death, if not balanced by something else, makes cowards and lunatics of us all. Eternal Life is not just the infinite extension of mortal life, but something altogether of a higher quality, beyond human comprehension and even mere mortal human delight. Practicing a definitive detachment from material goods and an attachment to immaterial goods, indeed, to the immaterial world, will more readily manifest that world around us.

In the meantime, our challenge always remains that of Saint Paul to the Romans, as it is to us today: “Do not conform yourselves to the spirit of this age, but be transformed according to the renewal of your mind.” (Romans 12:1)