I have been struck by the word “reckoning” lately. In August, I listened to an NPR series in which “America reckons with racial injustice,” part of the “Summer of Racial Reckoning.” This, it seemed to me, was strange verbiage. Did it mean we were becoming more aware of a problem, forcing others into an awareness of a problem we had already understood, combating the problem with concrete action, calling it out, beginning to think it through, or what? And “reckon,” to me, had previously been a word one didn’t hear so much. Yet now, I was hearing it everywhere. Was I just falling victim to some sort of confirmatory cognitive bias once I started thinking about it? And why does the word stick out?
Here, in a November video announcing and explaining his reasons for writing his latest memoir, is former President Barack Obama: “What I hope to accomplish is, I want to give an honest reckoning of my time as president, the events and people that shaped those eight years, and give people some insight into the decision-making process that we went through.” Here is the Old Testament: “The days of punishment are coming; the days of reckoning are at hand. Let Israel know this. Because your sins are so many and your hostility so great, the prophet is considered a fool, the inspired person a maniac.”
According to Google Trends, interest and use of the word “reckoning” has indeed been on the overall rise over the past half-decade. But to use a word I might need to define, its rise has been a stochastic (having a randomness in a pattern or process, from the Greek for “guess”) one, not a smooth and steady one. The chart of interest in the term spikes here and there, especially around May and June of this year. It’s leveled out, it seems, well below its mid-2020 spike but still above its 2019 average.
There are two distinct things I think of when I hear “reckoning,” and they track what the word means. When “to reckon” just means to believe, to have a view, to figure, it has a naive and Southern feel. It’s not a fancy word. You can hear it with that drawling, marbles-in-the-mouth accent in your head, I reckon. And then, as we saw above, there’s the more Biblical and more frightening and more formal reckoning, in which it means something that happens at death or in the apocalypse, a final moral accounting by a final moral arbiter.
Like with judgment, or the settling of accounts, the stakes are higher when it’s being done by God, who doesn’t have to be mentioned to be brought to mind by the word. And so, we get the shared reference of Day of Reckoning, the book by Pat Buchanan, and “Reckoning Day,” the song by Megadeth.
It is no great cultural discovery to find in America ways of communicating a somewhat Puritan mode of thinking floating tacitly behind how we think and talk. But for me, it seems apt and illustrative that one of the words finding its way into more than usually popular use this last while would be a word that flips ambiguously back and forth between meanings of simple opinion and claims of cosmic justice. The public, even the more culturally secular of us, are apt to think we have God on our side. It’s our intellectual inheritance as a historical culture, and it’s something to reckon with.
—By Nicholas Clairmont
