While it could be tightened considerably, this book offers readers a valuable paradigm: history seen as a consistently recurring pattern of four generational cycles or "turnings." Each generation has a role to play, often in reaction to the behavior and characteristics of the generations before and after.
There's also a (possibly reasonable) contra-argument for this book: that the authors force-fit their paradigm onto history and use cherry-picked historical examples to make their model appear both descriptive and predictive. Possible evidence of this comes from the fact that the predicted "Fourth Turning" of the current didn't arrive on schedule--or maybe it did, it just depends on how you tweak the theory (see notes 5, 12, 20 and 35 below). Note that this does not mean the author's cyclical paradigm isn't useful--it is useful; it just means that readers should never naively assume predictiveness in any model of history.
Finally, if you can recall the saying
Hard times make great men,
Great men make good times,
Good times make weak men,
Weak men make hard times.
... you will remember the central notion of this book.
Notes:
Chapter 1: Winter Comes Again
1) "We perceive no greatness in our leaders, a new meanness in ourselves."
2) There's a big difference between millions of self-actualized persons and a genuinely actualized society; for one thing the institutions of a fully actualized society function. Ours in our era are not functioning well.
3) A "turning" occurs is every two decades or so: "At the start of each turning people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future." Turnings come in cycles of four, each cycle spans the length of a human life, roughly 80 to 100 years (a "saeculum").
4) The first turning is a High
The second turning is an Awakening
The third turning is an Unraveling
The fourth turning is a Crisis
5) The most recent first turning was the American "High" of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy, World War II wound down and America became confident and "institutionally muscular."
* The second turning was the consciousness revolution 1960s to 1980s
* The third turning was the 1980s and thereafter: the culture wars
* The timing is a little off on the fourth turning and our emergence from it. It should have already happened... is it COVID authoritarianism or was it the great financial crisis?
6) Overcoming the post-enlightenment conception of linear time and historical "progress." Because Americans believe in linear time--and because we don't know our history--we are the most locked in to the cyclicality of these turnings.
7) "The farther backward you look, the farther forward you are likely to see." Churchill
8) Escaping the "linear prison" model of history and migrating to more of a cyclical pattern=based prism of history.
Chapter 2: Seasons of Time
9) Derivation of the word saeculum
10) This book is extremely long-winded so far, this chapter for example spends multiple pages discussing cycles and circles in different historical cultures: the first five pages of Chapter 2 could have been expressed in two paragraphs.
11) Cycles and saeculae of war and peace, cycles of Anglo-American history through various wars and recoveries, likewise religious Awakening cycles (examples: the Puritans, the USA's Great Awakening period, the Transcendental movement, etc., leading up to the 60s as a sort of countercultural Awakening, and this last one feels like it's force-fit into the author's model).
12) Note that the author's paradigm isn't holding together well as any kind of scientific hypothesis: the authors continually give examples of "epicycles" or exceptions to the expected pattern... if you are seeing frequent exceptions to a pattern, is that really a pattern then?
13) See the winter/crisis phase of the process as an opportunity: "a saecular winter is indeed an era of trial and suffering, though not necessarily of tragedy. Though it can produce destruction, you can also produce uncommon vision, heroism, and a sudden elevation of a human condition." This sounds a lot like the Buddhist concept of eras/ages that (in the present day) are culminating in the morally degenerate age of Kali, a period where, while collective morality may be at an all-time low, specific acts of morality carry much more value and weight during this periods, a paradox whereby your morality can carry more value and more power during the current trying times.
Chapter 3: Seasons of Life
14) "Metaphorically, everyone understands the connections between the seasons of the year and the seasons of the human life." Sociologist Daniel Levinson
15) Likewise different characteristics of different generations in a given saeculum. Recurring cycle of four archetypes.
16) Note that when a great event hits a society, it affects each of the generations (at their different ages) differently. Examples: If a great event happens and results in marking young adults as heroes collectively this generation likely will show greater hubris when it reaches midlife. Likewise the people who are children during the same great event might become more deferential in adulthood to the hero generation. World War II for example came to define several generational boundaries, including generations born afterward with the symbolic memory of the epic period, see the Baby Boomers for example.
17) The reader does not need an etymological explanation of the word generation. Nor do we need multiple paragraphs about the generation of theories about generations.
18) Note that some of these definitions are circular. For example: "There is no fixed formula for identifying the persona of a real life generation. But it helps to look for three attributes: first, a generation's common location in history; second, its common beliefs and behavior; and third, its perceived membership in a common generation." In other words, we're circularly identifying the persona of a generation by its own perceived membership in that same generation.
19) The recurring pattern: the first generation comes of age with an Awakening, the second generation has an Awakening childhood, the third comes of age with a Crisis, the fourth has a Crisis childhood. Thus the generational archetypes are (in order): Hero-->Artist-->Prophet-->
20) On backfitting or datamining history to find patterns, but then facing the problem that your patterns have so many epicycles that you can fit them to almost anything. Thus we will see to what extent this paradigm has been predictive since this book was published in 1998 (and makes statements about the years to follow), and we have more than 20 years of history since the book was published to see to what extent the book was predictive or not. At this point in the text I don't know what predictions they will make yet, but I'm guessing we will likely have to add more epicycles to fit what actually happened in the past 20 years to their expected pattern.
21) "Your generation isn't like the generation that shaped you, but it has much in common with the generation that shaped the generation that shaped you." An intergenerational reactance.
22) "When a child generation comes of age, it does so just as that older generation enters elderhood and gains control of the institutions surrounding the young adults' world. A younger generation reaches military age just as its cross-cycle shadow reaches its maximum power to declare war." These are intriguing thoughts for sure.
23) Exodus as a story of four generations:
* Moses and his peers
* The worshipers of the golden calf
* Joshua and his peers
* The original generation of judges
24) "Successor generations inhabited recurring fourfold cycles of complacency, prophecy, punishment, and deliverance."
25) Polybius noticing a pattern among Greco-Roman city-states, 2nd century BC: the first kings are powerful and good, but their children are weak and corrupt, such that an aristocratic rebellion eventually arises among the children's peers; then, the founding aristocrats govern well enough but their children sink into oligarchy, prompting a democratic rebellion among their peers; then, a generation after that those democrats' children sink into mob rule, leading to anarchy, and in due course a new king seizes control. And the cycle repeats.
26) Other historians who noted these types of cycles: Giuseppe Ferrari, Eduard Wechssler, Arnold Toynbee, Samuel Huntington, George Modelski.
Chapter 4: Cycles of History
27) The Renaissance and the Reformation; Hero vs Prophet generations; see also England, when Henry Tudor defeats Richard III, ending The War of the Roses and setting up the Tudor monarchy, followed 40 years later by Henry VIII creating the Church of England/England's own Reformation.
28) "A turning is an era with a characteristic social mood, a new twist on how people feel about themselves and their nation... A society enters a turning once every 20 years or so, when all living generations begin to enter their next phases of life."
29) Again:
The first turning is a high.
The second turning is an awakening.
The third turning is an unraveling.
The fourth turning is a crisis.
30) "When a society moves into an Awakening or Crisis, the new mood announces itself as a sudden turn in social direction. An Awakening begins when events trigger a revolution in the culture, a Crisis when events trigger an upheaval in public life. A High or Unraveling announces itself as a sudden consolidation of the new direction. A High begins when a society perceives that the basic issues of the prior Crisis have been resolved, leaving a new civic regime firmly in place. An Unraveling begins with the perception that the Awakening has been resolved, leaving a new cultural mindset in place."
31) [It would be fascinating to read this idea with more contextual focus on money and the cycle of trust-to-failure of fiat currencies, and what role that played in rise and fall of different civilizations. I suspect it would be a much more central component of the authors' paradigm than they might think. The book contains almost no discussion of money or monetary history, yet the debasement of money tends to be one of the most important sources of destabilization of societies. Perhaps economy-related stuff doesn't really fit so well with this paradigm.]
32) Cycles of multiculturalism: not addressed except in the context of immigration rates... But what about the maxi-multiculturalism/mass immigration of today's USA: what does this imply about these generational archetypes?
33) This is an Anglo-American-centric matrix, actually American-centric mostly, but you can make a case for parallelism across all countries since the First and Second World Wars in the 20th century.
34) There's a summary here of the various generations across Anglo-American history, putting the generations in parallel as they form with key historical events happening at the time:
35) It becomes a little hard to tell what really is happening in the period after the book was published: we have the 1984 to 2005 Awakening era, then the 2005-2026 era, which looks like a crisis era with multiple crises: 9/11, the great financial crisis, COVID/mass authoritarianism, etc.
Chapter 5: Gray Champions
36) Older leaders from higher generation showing up at moments of crisis, an elder prophet.
37) "Yet the more we balk at seasonality and the more we try to eradicate it, the more menacing we render our view of time--and of the future." See also the problem of Americans not knowing any history: it's hard for a people to "balk at seasonality" when as a people we don't even know there are seasons in the first place.
38) This book also helps you groove your history; for me it helps me assign the various places/events/wars I know of to their various places in the author's saeculum structure.
Chapter 6: The First Turning: American High (1946-1964)
39) Remembered as the period when large institutions were effective, governments were powerful, schools were good, careers were reliable, families were strong, crime was under control.
40) The crisis came and went and society finds a solidarity and direction, also people want to gather, nest, plan, and build.
41) See the Lost Generation (Truman, Eisenhower, Patton, Babe Ruth, etc.) that grew up during the 1920s-1930s, were forgotten or ignored, ended up fighting World War I and organizing the production and the management of World War II, and later they were mostly ignored by the generations that followed (the GI Generation and the Baby Boomers) The Lost Generation did not lobby on their own generation's behalf, essentially they built a system that would extract high taxes them themselves (while providing delicious benefits for generations to follow that the Lost Gen would not even be able to live to enjoy), etc. This is entirely analogous to Generation X by the way.
42) The GI generation as straight arrows, achievers, protected from the decadence of the 20s generation.
43) I don't have the contextual knowledge to judge this book's generalizations of 19th century (and much less the 18th, 17th and 16th century generational patterns), or what the characteristics were of a given generation, but I can actually match the author's generalizations about 20th century generations with my own knowledge of those generations. It seems to fit pretty well.
44) Silent Generation fighting the little war in Korea, tinkering with the systems put in place by the GI generation, becoming a generation of men in gray flannel suits (or Peggy Sue got marrieds), "a generation with strongly middle-aged values" to use the quote from the book Peggy Sue Got Married. The word "Silent" was actually a put-down from the GI generation. Popular children's books like The Little Engine That Could stressed helping others and dutiful behavior. A generation with low levels of adolescent pathologies like suicide, crime, illegitimacy, substance abuse.
45) Silents, when they were growing up, were constantly reminded of the sacrifices of the GI generation in school, their behavior was obedient as a result.
46) The Silent generation had larger draft calls as a percent of the eligible pool than Boomers faced even at the peak of the Vietnam War, and "yet hardly anybody protested." (!!!)
48) Boomers as the first generation specifically targeted by marketing, being the center of the world: "What other generations have thought privileges, boomers thought were rights." Landon Jones
49) Baby Boomers throughout the American High had very positive sentiments towards the adult world, period of high optimism in the 60s, such that Cal Berkeley's GI president Clark Kerr visited local high schools in the early 1960s, assuming that these students would be easy to handle and concluding "there aren't going to be any riots."
50) The authors don't seem to have sufficient command of history across prior centuries to engage the reader in a way comparable to how well they engage the reader in their discussion of 20th century history. You can see they have much more contextual knowledge about the modern era, so the book works much better and is a much more enjoyable read when they cover this period. In their discussion of prior centuries it's much more of a slog for the reader.
51) In the 1960s, Baby Boomers eventually bring about a disruption of the artificially stabilized, GI generation-directed society of the 1950s.
Chapter 7: The Second Turning: Consciousness Revolution (1964-1984)
52) "A rupture appeared between the mood of the people and the mood of their leaders."
53) It's ironic (and depressing) to read about Berkeley's free speech movement in the 1960s given that today's university environment features near-totalitarian censorship and thought control--and even the abrogation of students' bodily autonomy in the form of mandates of experimental mRNA vax products.
54) The '60s as a form of an Awakening, but not literally religious; more of a cultural awakening.
55) In the mid-1960s "social authority came at an unacceptable cost: corporations crushed the individual, police oppressed the poor, academe smothered creativity, and parents deformed the child's psyche." It's amazing how history rhymes, you could easily use that quote to describe today.
56) In the Second Turning there is an apex of social order and a beginning of disruption to that order. "People exalt rights over duties, self over society, ideals over institutions, creativity over conformism."
57) A Prophet Generation comes of age assaulting the institutions of the Hero Generation two generations before. "Nomad generations behind them have the misfortune to be children in an era when adults are persuading each other to shed social discipline... Struggling to cope with a harsh underside of cultural upheaval, Nomad children acquire a cynicism about moral crusades and a fatalism about weak adults apparently unable to make simple things work." Generation X is the Nomad Generation here, we came of age when order and institutional competence started breaking down.
58) Boomer resistance against the GI Generation started with the Vietnam War and the rebellion of the '60s, and then culminated in Nixon as a "scalp"; see also criticism of GI generation industrialists "accused of moral outrages against nature, women, minorities, the poor" etc.
59) Re the GI Generation: "never in living memory did America have an elder generation so politically and economically powerful--yet so invisible in the realm of culture and values.... Their formative impact on youth was nearly nil, seldom extending beyond replays of the past (like old Honeymooner reruns or monaural big band sounds on AM radio stations)."
60) 1960s as an Awakening era for Boomers, essentially mystical militants who neither built nor improved any institutions but rather purified them with righteous fire. "Where Silent beatniks had expressed angst in poetry, earnestly seeking audiences, Boomer hippies megaphoned their 'non-negotiable demands' without much caring who listened."
61) Generation X entering the stage in 1964 precisely when the fertility rate of the United States and the West plummeted, and at the beginning of "a new society-wide hostility toward children."
Chapter 8: The Third Turning (1984 to 2005)
62) I wonder to what extent readers looking at this book today in 2022 wonder if the real unraveling predicted during the '80s and '90s period is actually happening now. I certainly do.
63) It's hard not to be grossed out by the extractive behavior of older generations, beginning with the GI Generation (but at least they earned it to some extent with their WWII/post-WWII eucivic efforts). They and the generations that followed extracted significant transfer payments from workers behind them, culminating in the Baby Boomer generation's incredibly dyscivic extraction of almost all value from society in transfer payments, semi-ponzi pay-as-you-go systems like Social Security, Medicare, through home price appreciation (via deliberately created housing supply constraints), and via fiat money printing (since the 1971 loosing of the dollar from gold convertibility). It's not a coincidence that younger people today find life so incredibly difficult, find houses too expensive to buy, face significant inflation and a lower quality of life, etc.
64) The authors are making so many predictions about the Baby Boomers I guess they'll have to get some of them right.
65) On Gen X: "fatalism is a survival skill" and "never knowing anything except institutional decline" but then the authors offer another zillion predictions, some of which will be right just by luck.
66) This chapter is totally filled with predictions, so many predictions that the authors cannot be wrong: all they'll have to do is datamine the chapter to find those things that actually happened.
Chapter 9: Fourth Turnings in History
67) The Fourth Turning is a burning down of the prior order, a period of crisis, the giving birth of the new era, "a solstice era of maximum darkness, in which the supply of social order is still falling but the demand for order is now rising."
68) In reality, it feels like we're having a very extended unraveling, the Third Turning which supposedly began in 1984 seems to be still going on here in 2022 more than 38 years later. What would have been the crisis? 9/11? The 2008 financial crisis? Or the today's coronavirus pandemic and the authoritarianism accompanying it?
69) A morphology of crisis eras: catalyst, regeneracy, climax, resolution. It all happens during one turning, meaning 15 to 25 years elapsed between catalyst and resolution.
70) Interesting comments on leadership during a crisis, the public tends to be more willing to let leaders lead and will tolerate more authoritarianism, and "amid this civic solidarity, mediocre leaders can gain immense popular following" while during an Awakening, "by contrast, even the best leaders and plans can fail, and one misstep can destroy public confidence."
71) Society shows significantly more order, there's much more stigmatizing of self-oriented behavior, social mores are more strictly enforced.
72) The USA's Civil War Fourth Turning as an interesting exception where the Third and Fourth Turnings happen in just one in generation; also there was no Hero Generation archetype, the whole process came apart and resolved itself more quickly than would be normally expected, although very tragically.
73) Interesting also to hear about the 1676 generation: the first generation to colonize the New World, and the Crisis of that era which culminated in the Glorious Revolution of 1689. I have to read more about this era, I know literally nothing about it.
74) The standard Fourth Turning archetypal lineup, which the authors call "one of the great constants of Anglo-American history":
* "The indulged Prophet children of Highs, born in the aftermath of one Crisis, then foment the next Crisis upon entering adulthood.
* The abandoned Nomad children of Awakenings become the pragmatic midlife managers of a Crisis period.
* The protected Hero children of Unravelings provide the powerful young adult soldiers of Crisis.
* The suffocated children of Crises come of age afterward as Artist youths."
75) A very simple way to think about this is to remember the phrase "hard times make great men, great men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times."
76) It seems a bit of a stretch to assume the Millennial Generation will be this cycle's Heroes, although the central idea is that a Hero generation is obedient and can be easily organized on command, not that individuals of the generation are heroic in nature.
77) The book predicted a Fourth Turning/Crisis sometime around the year 2005, giving as expected a wide range of scenarios (almost certainly some of which will come true). Here's a good example: "America will become more isolationist than today in its unwillingness to coordinate its affairs with other countries but less isolationist in its insistence that vital national interests not be compromised." Many of the books predictions sound like this, structured as "on the one hand/on the other hand" statements that can be mined after the fact as correct in some way. This book would be more rigorous if the authors were less declarative in their predictions, and it would be a much more rigorous book if the authors gave more specific examples from history from which they draw their parallels and inferences, and more importantly why they chose these examples and what inferences they draw from them.
78) The Power Rangers as metaphor for Millennials, wholesome kid soldiers. Also: get a load of this one: Millennials "will delight employers with their skills, work habits, and institutional loyalties." Woo boy.
79) As soon as you recognize the pattern, the pattern ends or changes radically. Civilizations and cultures are recursive and reactant.
80) Is this book really predictive? I don't think so. It's explanatory for past cycles certainly, but it is not predictive, and if I had to make my own prediction I would say future cycles will not look like these.
Chapter 11: Preparing For the Fourth Turning
81) "If you expect acorns to fall in spring, or tulips to bloom in autumn, you condemn yourself to frustration. The same seasonal principle applies to the saeculum." In other words don't swim against the current: put the rhythms of history to use, accept them as best you can rather than embrace fatalism. Your efforts must be appropriate for your time/place in your cycle. "Move with, not against, the seasons."
82) Anticipating the needs and opportunities of each Turning, and ending habits that were appropriate for a prior Turning but are inappropriate for the coming one. Good advice here.
83) Also interesting examples of what happens when you act outside your season: "in the early 1970s Spiro Agnew's attacks on non-conformists only enhanced their careers and hastened the ruin of his." Or "when MacArthur wanted to cross the Yalu and widen the Korean war, the President and public wanted none of it, because the time for total war had passed." Or Bill and Hillary Clinton trying to pass a nationalized health care system when the LBJ era had long passed.
84) Interesting insight here about how organizations tend to fail to see seasons/Turnings and fail to adjust: "Single issue champions persistently demand unilinear progress toward a fixed programmatic goal. In a seasonal world, such efforts leave to inevitable self-deception and frustration. In some areas these causes take credit for progress that was mostly due to come anyway. In other eras they despair over backsliding which really isn't their fault, either." You have to know what season you're in and move accordingly, and if you move contra-seasonally or post-seasonally you're in for a lot of frustration and failure.
85) Also every turning has the traits it has, although aspects of it may be made better or worse. "Yet even with the altering we would only have experienced a better or worse 1960s, not a repeat of the 1950s or a hastening of the 1980s... The Awakening "did not require a Vietnam War or a Watergate but it did require a youth revolt and cultural experimentation. Today's unraveling does not require profane media or endless budget deficits, but it does require individualism and institutional decay."
86) All of this suggests to navigate reality effectively you want to remain flexible, be able to adapt to whatever season it happens to be, and to stay "preseasonal," meaning: be thinking about what season is to come and what this implies about how you want to handle things.
87) No also that whoever holds power when a Fourth Turning arrives may find itself out of power for a generation, key persons associated with it could find themselves ruined or worse. Interesting to think about the implications of this. What will happen to the Justin Trudeaus, the Jacinda Aderns, the Boris Johnsons, etc?
88) Very specific and useful preparatory advice for a Fourth Turning: make sure you have a community on which you can depend; make sure you manifest classic virtues of honor and integrity, be a team player, heed community norms. Stay diversified, prize diversified skills and generalized skills over highly specialized skills, get prepared for whatever crisis may come. The authors just left out buying Bitcoin.
To read:
Censorinus: De Die Natale
Quincy Wright: Study of War
Charles and Mary Beard: The Rise of American Civilization
Richard Hofstadter: Age of Reform
Polybius: Histories
Ibn Khaldun: Muqaddimah
David Halberstam: The Fifties
Alan Valentine: The Age of Conformity
Neil Postman: The Disappearance of Childhood
Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death
Frederick Lewis Allen: Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s
Kenneth M. Stampp: The Causes of the Civil War
Stephen Saunders Webb: 1676: The End of American Independence
Craig S. Karpel: The Retirement Myth
Reinhold Niebuhr: Moral Man in Immoral Society
Writings, Speeches of Cicero
Cato: The Sayings of Cato
Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Daniel Chapelle: Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis
Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West
