Silence in Heaven

After this apocalyptic election, I don't want to hear any more pundits prattle. Give me some old-school Augustinian pessimism, and out of that I will fashion hope.

“And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.” – Revelation 8:1

About a half hour after the polls closed in Georgia on November 5 and the wonks began to crunch the numbers on those early returns, I felt the first little nips from that gnawing feeling of dread that would consume me utterly by the evening’s end. 

I am on California time, but even then I went to bed before the networks called it.  I knew.

I also knew that, in contrast to how I processed the election of 2016, I would not this time be bingeing any post-election analysis – not from cable news, not from New York Times columnists, not from the legions of armchair pundits I follow and am followed by on social media.  

I was – and remain – particularly determined not to participate in or even amplify the discourse on Twitter.  That platform is irredeemably compromised by the complete alignment of its malign owner with the vile victors of the electoral contest, and I will not feed its algorithms one more morsel of my unGrok’d mind. 

Still, I scrolled.  And some of the punditry seeped through.  And the analysis that made the most sense to me (and still does) was the grim unflinching read of Elie Mystal, who simply pointed out that in this contest of the very starkest contrasts, the electorate chose the candidate they preferred.  This was not due to some deficiency in the losing candidate’s platform or message; it is simply that what she offered was not what the voters wanted. 

In the wake of this collective expression of the public will, to even ask “How can our next candidate better appeal to voters who openly long for mass deportations, Muslim bans, persecution of trans people, and loyalty oaths to a misogynist racist demagogue” is to quite literally beg the question.  The answer’s right there in the asking; it’s a morally reprehensible answer to a morally reprehensible question.

And I won’t spend one moment of my life considering it.  I am in my late fifties, and I will not give over what time remains in these my shortening days to such conversations.  America never had a soul to save, but I do.

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This language of souls and morals is no departure from liberal politics—nor even from secular liberal modernity writ large.  It has had its champions, it has had its seasons, antedating secular liberal modernity itself.

Indeed, in the long contest between Pelagianism and Augustinianism, we are back in the world of Saint Augustine, if we ever left it.

So to tend to my soul and sharpen my mind and ready my hands for the work ahead, I plan to revisit a thinker who is now “discredited,” to the extent that liberalism is discredited in the eyes of the electorate on both the far right and the far left.  I plan to go back to Reinhold Niebuhr.

Over the next few weeks and months, I will be returning to three key texts, in order:  Moral Man and Immoral Society(1932), The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944), and The Irony of American History (1952).  I do not return to these texts because I think they are true, or correct, or without flaw, but because I think they are important, and – importantly – they are written in a mode that matches both the times and my temper.  This thinker and I may or may not reach the same conclusions, but we speak the same language, and that’s as good a place to start as any.

If you would like to join me in this read-through of these key texts, please let me know in the comments here or on Facebook if we are friends there or on BlueSky, where I now do all my doomscrolling and sh*tposting.  You can find me there under the usual handle:  https://bsky.app/profile/ldburnett.bsky.social

We can be a Niebuhr reading group if you like, but I’d rather just be a group of thoughtful and worried people who happen to be reading Niebuhr for the time being and talking about it.  And if nobody wishes to join me, I will do it on my own.  As I said, I’m in my late fifties, and I can follow my own moral compass with or without fellow travelers.

We can also do other quaintly outdated and discredited things, like publishing personal blogs.  That’s what this is, this thing you are reading now – a blog post.  They can call it a newsletter if they want, but it’s just a blog, and I am just a blogger.

I will get to that quaint outdated practice in due time.  First, though, it seems that the seventh seal has been broken, and there ought to be a solemn silence in heaven and on earth for at least a half an hour.

Stay tuned.