If you've read the original The Fourth Turning, much of this book will be review. However, this book explains the Forth Turning framework more cogently and tightly than the original, so if you haven't read the original book, I recommend just reading this and skipping the original. You'll walk away with the same central ideas plus the author's additional new (and slightly-adjusted) conclusions.
The most profound takeaway from the overall Fourth Turning paradigm is that it teaches you to remember your place in the grand scheme of things. Sadly, modernity teaches the exact opposite: it persuades us to think we humans are bigger than history, that we can ignore it, be oblivious to it, and yet not repeat it. Worst of all, modernity teaches us to believe we've somehow managed to defeat history with our SOYANCE!!! and tEcHNologY--ironically none of which we can understand, replicate or repair. These "modren" beliefs, as arrogant and wrong as they are, conflict deeply with the ancients who, much wiser than we, recognized that history has cycles, and we are part of something much, much bigger than ourselves, than our generation, even our civilization.
Once you remember your place, once you realize you (and your society) are a lot smaller and a lot less powerful than you thought, you experience a sort of freeing humility. And this lets you learn an even more important maxim from the ancients: our role might be small, but we still must fulfill it with honor and dignity. Thinking this way lets you ignore all the fearporn and propaganda shoveled onto us every day, and understand what matters--what's in our circle of control and what isn't. It puts things in much-needed perspective.
One criticism. The author really wants to draw parallels between today and World War II. He argues that because the crisis of that era "galvanized" us and lifted us to new highs as a nation, the next crisis (the one we're in the middle of right now) will do the same. He could be right and I hope so. But it feels to me that what's different today--and the reason we're unable to galvanize ourselves--is that we can't see our enemy like we could in World War II. Today, the enemy is us, our own State, which divides us, censors us, represses us, inflates our money, surveils us and propagandizes us like never before.
Finally, this book also gives you a second-order benefit of learning historiography: the history of the study of history. The author explains different historical paradigms from different historians with depth and breadth. It sent me all the way back to learning about Herotodus![*] It's an excellent, unexpected side-benefit to the book.
[*] Yes, that's an affiliate link. It is a great, great course.
[As usual, please read no further unless your time is genuinely worthless to you. What follows are just my notes to the text.]
Notes:
Preface:
The author expects the next First Turning to be about a decade from now (thus the early 2030s, give or take); that we're about midway through our Fourth Turning right now [and note that the periodicity is off for this cycle if you look at a strict interpretation of the prior book: it should have already happened, or we should already be well into a First Turning by now].
Chapter 1: Winter Is Here
1 The financial crisis, the rise of populism, and the pandemic, all hitting at the same time; revealing that America is collapsing; note that a healthy democracy could have withstood all three of these [and the subtext being that our unhealthy democracy--if it can even be described that way--won't]. "...the recent collapse has exposed our aging republic's staggering incompetence at carrying out even basic tasks."
3 The rise of free-floating anger in public venues.
4ff "...younger workers are losing hope of upward generational mobility"; they seek security, they are "souring on democracy" and were "raised amid declining abundance."
6ff The balkanization of American culture into identity categories: gender, religion, education, political party, we now are "canceling or censoring outsiders." I don't think the author quite understands the monoparty system we have nowadays.
10 The pandemic as a dry run/roadtesting of many American government policies like universal basic income, freezing individual bank accounts, compelling firms to stay open or closed, even government censorship of social media.
11 "...the old America is disintegrating. But at the same time, America is moving into a phase transition... Welcome to the early and awkward emergence of the next American republic." The author claims that things will become more clear in the mid 2030s.
12-13 Review of the "Turnings": the First Turning is a High (strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, see post World War II USA); the Second Turning is an Awakening (spiritual upheaval, civic order comes under attack from a new values regime, see for example the consciousness revolution of the 1960s with campus revolts etc), the Third Turning is an Unraveling (strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, see the culture wars that began after the Reagan era), the Fourth Turning is Crisis (secular upheaval which propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one, see for example the great financial crisis of 2008 and what's happened since). Four "Turnings" make up a saeculum, roughly a century.
13ff On the author's taxonomy of generations: the Prophet generation (like the Boomers), the Nomad generation (Gen X), the Hero generation (the Millennials, supposedly), the Artist generation (Silents, or today, Gen Z).
15 On how generations surprise everybody: nobody expected a totally obedient Silent generation that worked within the system; nobody expected the completely unruly generation of the Boomers; then nobody expected Generation X to scorn the pretensions and be mercenaries in the labor market like they were; and then once the United States got used to edgy and self-reliant youth the Millennials came along with total normcore team-player behavior!
16ff Note the repeating cycles: 1840s-1850s: the post-Mexican war and pre-Civil War has similar patterns to the World War I/1920s era of consumerism and jazz age nihilism, replicated in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
18-19 Interesting to think of each Third Turning involving America triumphing over a long-standing global threat: New France after the French and Indian War; Spain/Mexico after the Mexican War; Germany after World War II; but then basically lost its natural cohesion and direction, see also the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. After this the culture wars began raging, civic life became more corrupted, and attitudes toward children became more protective.
22 The author cites the increasing authoritarianism in the 2010s.
22 "When people start taking on less risk as individuals, they start taking on more risk as groups." [Extremely useful idea right there, a kind of fragility we incur as we seek safety in numbers]
23ff Schema of a typical Fourth Turning: an early, catalyzing event, a loss of civic trust, galvanizing of partisanship, a rise of creedal passions, all this stuff is already happening... what comes next is some great national challenge or an urgent test or threat, usually a war either between America and foreign powers or a war within America.
25 The early or mid 2030s will be the beginning of the next First Turning, then by the 2050s there will be a summer season a Second Turning. "But all this takes us far ahead of the central focus of our story, which remains the outcome of winter."
26ff On the structure of the book:
* "Part One explores our cyclical perspective and explains our method and terminology." (I'm guessing this will be largely review for people who've read The Fourth Turning already)
* Chapter 2: we introduce readers to the modern cycle of seasonal history
* Chapter 3: we look at generations and generational archetypes
* Chapter 4: we delve into other long cycles uncovered by historians in politics, economics, population/demographics, etc
* Chapter 5: we examine the saeculum as a complex social system from the perspective of complexity theory
"Part Two covers what can be expected to happen over the next decade or so."
* Chapter 6: a survey of the history and chronology of earlier Fourth Turnings
* Chapter 7: we look at the current Fourth Turning, the Millennial Crisis
* Chapter 8: the dramatic changes in social mood and direction we are likely to see in the years to come
* Chapter 9: we view the decade through the eyes of each generation experiencing it, and which scripts are awaiting which generation by the late 2020s
"Part Three pushes further ahead in time, pass the winter and into the spring season of the saeculum."
* Chapter 10: speculates on how America will change during the first turning and how each generation will handle it,
* Epilogue: we reflect on basic lessons from the seasons of history.
27 On the flaws of looking at history and events in a unidirectional or "progressive" way (here meaning that history "progresses/improves" not "progressive" in the political ideology sense). Looking at history as cyclical has been more of a traditional way to look at history and also more predictive. "One important lesson we will draw from this recounting is that civilization began to behave in a recognizably cyclical pattern precisely when civilization began to assume that history should be understood as progressive." [Well put]
30ff Interesting thoughts here on the implications of these various ways of thinking about history and time: cyclical time implies that we won't have anything any better or different from our ancestors, it leaves "little room for what we think of as originality, creativity, and progress." Also: using a linear time or directional history lens, which began as an arcane idea in medieval Europe originally, then became widely spread during the Reformation and thereafter, culminating in 18th and 19th century beliefs in "indefinite scientific, economic, and political improvement," and then manifested in its apogee with the United States. "Along the way, linear time's signal achievement has been the suppression of cyclical time." [Basically we forgot our history, just like we forgot our true nature in the ayurvedic idea of presence and true awareness.]; See also parallels with Western Reformation preachers talking about "progress" from innocence to wickedness to redemption ultimately reaching an apocalypse; this parallels well with the 21st century where we talk about "the end of history," the singularity, transhumanism, all through lens of (allegedly) progress. [One could also argue that this is hubris, that it's a civilizational Tower of Babel]; Interesting idea here where the author talks about how "progress" simply generates a proliferation of entirely new cycles--like business cycles, news cycles, electoral cycles, fashion cycles, building cycles, crime cycles., where none of these things were known to the ancients. Also, the modern view of linear time causes us to abandon many habits of natural adjustment. For moderns "the concept of a long-term cycle of history is unfamiliar and exotic."
Part One: Seasons of History
Chapter 2: Seasons of Time
* Derivation of the word saeculum, a long human life of around 100 years, originally from Etruscan civilization, used by the Romans. The concept entered Western culture around the Renaissance and when Columbus was voyaging, basically the idea of a century.
45 See Quincy Wright, historian at the University of Chicago, who started to see recognizable patterns in history; see his book A Study of War, where he talks about war in 50-year oscillations. "The warrior does not wish to fight again himself and prejudices his son against war, but the grandsons are taught to think of war as romantic."
46 Corroborated also by Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, "best known for its grand theory of the rise and fall of civilizations." He saw cycles initiated by decisive conflicts of each century; Italian wars of 1494-1525, Philip II's imperial wars of 1568-1609: The War of Spanish Succession 1672-1713; French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars 1792-1815; and then World Wars 1 and II in 1914 and 1945. He also noted similar cycles in Chinese and Hellenistic history with a "surprising degree of coincidence" of 95-year cycles.
47 Toynbee also recognized that "grandsons forget": "The psychological resistance to any move toward the breaking of a peace that the living memory of a previous war has made so precious is likely to be prohibitively strong until the new generation that knows war only by hearsay has had time to grow up and to come into power."
47ff Other historians who worked on these cycle ideas: L.L. Farrar, Richard Rosencrance, Terrence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, George Modelski and William R Thompson, etc. (See photo)
57 Anglo American crises: "The Crisis ends one saeculum and launches the next."
* The War of the Roses 1455-1487 (England evolves from a medieval kingdom to a monarchical nation state as Henry Tudor defeated Richard III in battle)
* The Armada crisis 1569-1597 (England defeats Spain and emerges as a commercial power)
* The Glorious Revolution crisis 1675-1706 (the Colonies emerge as a cohesive society after the French and Indian War/9 Years War conflict between England and France)
* The American Revolution crisis 1773-1794 (conflict with England followed by gradual stability achieved in the United States with a new government)
* The Civil War crisis 1860-1865 (unifies--by force--the United States as an industrialized power)
* The Great Depression and World War II crisis 1929-1946 (the US emerges as a global superpower)
* The Millennial crisis 2008-2033?
60 Anglo American awakenings: The Awakening is the other side of the crisis, think of it like the marker of the midpoint of a cycle.
* The Reformation 1525-1551
* The Puritan era 1621-1649
* The Great Awakening 1727-1746 (Jonathan Edwards)
* The Transcendental Awakening 1822-1844 (Denmark Vesey's slave revolt, Nat Turner's rebellion, Jacksonian Democracy, Transcendentalism as well as a wide range of new religious sects: Mormons, Adventists, Christian Scientists, etc.)
* The Third Great Awakening 1886-1908 (student missionary movement, agrarian protests, Chicago Haymarket riot, William Jennings Bryant running for president, etc.)
* The Consciousness Revolution 1964-1984 (Boomers running amok, Vietnam protests, etc.)
Chapter 3: Seasons of Life
68 Ibn Khaldun, 15th century Muslim historian and traveler from Spain who wrote the Muqaddimah (Introduction to History) with an original and theory unifying politics, sociology, economics and history and noting the cyclicality of history. "The first generation founds and builds, the second generation imitates the elders and improves on their foundations, the third generation loses contact with the founders and the dynasty begins to decline, the fourth generation doesn't care about the dynasty and may even despise the founders. These are the destroyers who preside over the dynasty's collapse."
70ff On how different generations, people of different ages, will respond to the same phenomenon in different ways; the best example here is World War II and how it left a massive imprint on everyone, but people at different ages responded differently and played different roles, like "breeding caution and sensitivity" among Silent children, creating the GI Generation as leaders, the so-called "ask not" generation, etc.; and then generations born afterward had a symbolic memory of World War II "but with dampened echoes", gradually forgetting the "war-era sense of community."
74 On "great events": how they happen with a generational periodicity; every generation has either a Crisis or an Awakening and will encounter a Crisis and an Awakening at some point across its life cycle.
76 Each generation also reacts to the generations before and after, and this also shapes later history, while the generation itself is shaped by history at the same time.
78 In the modern era we celebrate endless generational novelty but reject the idea of a Wheel of Time; the former notion "indulges our expectation of unbounded progress" and the latter notion "undermines that illusion." "In the modern world, each generation of new leaders is trying to escape the imagined shadows of its own parents' errors. The last thing it expects, or wants, is for its own children to try to return to those shadows."
83 According to German literary historian Julius Peterson, "every generation includes what he called 'directive,' 'directed,' and 'suppressed' members." Directive people set the tone, directed people followed, and the suppressed either withdrew or attacked it.
86 On the "Homelander Generation" which this author names and dates differently from the term Generation Z: there'll be more on this in future chapters.
87 A 570 year, 24 generation panorama on page 87, across Anglo-American history:
93 See also how grandparent and grandchild generations have an affinity; just as there is tension between parent and child generations. "What these archetypal myths illustrate is this: 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. Or, put another way: archetypes do not create archetypes like themselves: instead, they create the shadows of archetypes like themselves."
98 On the four generation cycle:
Prophet generation: born in the secular spring, indulged as the opposed Crisis children, ages into detached visionary, elders presiding over the next Crisis
Nomad generation: underprotected children during an Awakening, comes of age as alienated young adults of a post Awakening world; become pragmatic midlife leaders during a Crisis and become tough post-Crisis elders
Hero generation: grows up as protected post-Awakening children, comes of age as teamworking achievers during a Crisis, demonstrates hubris as confident midlifers, ages into powerful elders presiding over the next Awakening
Artist generation: overprotected children during a Crisis, comes of age as sensitive young adults of a post-Crisis world, indecisive midlife leaders during an Awakening, ages into empathic post-Awakening elders
99ff Examples of these cycles in literature and history, see Exodus, the Iliad and Odyssey, see also the history of Polybius.
Chapter 4: Seasons of American History
105 Origins of the American cycle, beginning with Shakespeare's Elizabethan generation Heroes circa 1600; and the Puritan generation Prophets circa 1640; and the Glorious generation Heroes circa 1690 (which transformed the colonies into a stable society) then Jonathan Edwards' Awakening prophet generation, circa 1740; followed by Jefferson's Republican generation Heroes, circa 1790.
106 Note that the historical cyclicality of American history originated with its Anglo heritage, the ethnic diversity of the US is of more recent origin; note, however, that cycles of racial unrest have coincided with Awakenings and Prophet generations: see Nat Turner's rebellion of 1831, W.E.B du Bois and his resistance to Jim Crow in 1900, also the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.
108ff Archetypes in American history:
Prophet archetypes: Jonathan Edwards, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, William Jennings Bryan, Lincoln, FDR
Nomad archetypes: Stonewall Jackson, George Patton, George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, Ulysses S. Grant
Hero archetypes: Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan
Artist archetypes: Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Joe Biden
112 Turnings in American history: "Like the four seasons of nature, the four turnings of history are equally necessary. Awakenings and Crises are the saecular solstices; Highs and Unravelings are the secular equinoxes."
112 Good summary of the four turnings here: "When a society moves into an Awakening or Crisis, the new mood announces itself as an unexpected change in social direction. An Awakening begins when events trigger an upheaval in cultural life, a Crisis when the events trigger an upheaval in civic life. An Unraveling or High announces itself as a consolidation of a new direction. An Unraveling begins with the perception that the Awakening has been resolved, leaving a new cultural mindset firmly in place. A High begins when society perceives that the crisis has been resolved, leading a new civic regime firmly in place."
114: The four turnings as four cycles of growth, fulfillment, entropy, and death/rebirth:
* The High is like the Spring where a society fortifies into an era of promise
* The Awakening is like Summer, a type of euphoria
* The Unraveling is like an Autumn where it consumes itself in an era of unease
* The Crisis is the Winter where there's struggle and sacrifice in an era of survival.
"We keep forgetting that history, like nature, must turn."
114 First Turning: See the post-World War II American High as a good example of a First Turning: low crime, high national confidence, ordered communities, optimism about the future.
115 Second Turning: See the Awakening of the '60s and '70s; see the Jacksonian progressiveness (vs the elite favoring the then-Bank of America); see the religious Awakenings along the Erie Canal and during the 1835 era.
117 Third Turning: See the Unraveling of the culture wars during George W. Bush; see also the temperance and women's suffrage movements after World War I; see also the 80s-era dystopian media with culturally influential movies like Mad Max, Blade Runner, Terminator.
118 Fourth Turning: there's a sudden Crisis; some threat that is seen as dire, creating a mood of urgency. By the end of the Fourth Turning the mood shifts to exhaustion, relief and pride in what the nation has accomplished.
122ff Note other "cycle theories": See Arthur Schlessinger, Sr.'s cycle theory of American politics of liberal versus conservative errors, more fleshed out by his son Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. who relabel the errors as "public energy" versus "private interest."
123ff: See also the "party realignment cycle" seen by "a cluster of eminent political scientists" (includes Walter Dean Burnham) which corresponds better with the saeculum: every 40 years or so a new realigning election with a new political party system. See the 1788 Federalist Republican, 1828 Jacksonian Democrat, 1860 Lincoln Republican, 1896 McKinley Republican, 1932 New Deal Democrat, 1968-80 Nixon/Reagan Republican, etc. "...the birth of America's fourth Republic should coincide with the rise of America's seventh party system." [Note also Balaji Srinivasan and his discussion of political "flippenings" in his book The Network State.]
125 Foreign affairs: see Frank Klingberg's historical alternation of moods in American foreign policy, from introversion to extroversion; this matches roughly with the saeculum; during an Awakening or Crisis America becomes introverted; during a High or Unraveling America becomes extroverted. Note that the Civil War Reconstruction era was anomalous.
128ff Economic cycles, see the K-cycles of Nikolai Kondratieff: during a High, wage and productivity growth is typically smooth and rapid: during an Awakening a soaring economy hits at least one spectacular bust (e.g., the 1870s, mid 1890s, late 1830s) that is interpreted as a closing age of post-war growth; during an Unraveling economic activity again accelerates, but with more speculative booms and busts, and then a financial crash or a spiral of debt deleveraging that helps push the nation into Crisis, see 2008 or 1929.
130: On the highly anomalous and conspicuous decline of inequality from the 1930s to the 1970s across most of the western world; no also that Awakenings and Unravelings in the United States have been "eras of rising urbanization, commercialization, litigation, international commerce, and rent-seeking."
132ff: On community, see how social trust indicators peaked in 1962 (per sociologist Robert Putnam), and then by the 1970s everybody knew that this trend had reversed. "In a High, people want to belong; in an Awakening, to defy; in an Unraveling, to separate; in a Crisis, to gather."
136ff On family and gender: Prophet generations tend to have "norm-breaking women" whereas Hero generations reassert gender polarity; during a High child rearing becomes more indulgent, during an Awakening rules and rules of family and gender are attacked by the rising generation and child rearing becomes underprotective, note also that the terms "free love" and "open marriage" were not from the 1960s but from utopian communes of Upstate New York in the 1830s and 40s! "During an Unraveling the family feels endangered and child-rearing becomes more protective."
138 On demography: Fourth turnings are marked by a fall in the birth rate, Artist generations are typically baby bust generations: see for example today's Generation Z/Homelanders "who are the product of the lowest fertility rate in American history." Prophet generations are typically baby boom generations as every High has been marked by a rise in the birth rate.
139 On integration, which tends to climb in an Awakening, peak during an Unraveling, then fall during a Crisis; the Unraveling reversal is triggered often by a nativist backlash, see the 1850s, 1920s, 2000s.
140 On social disorder: crime rates rise during Awakenings, peak during Unravelings and fall during a Crisis.
142ff On religion and culture: oscillation between focus on inner spirit or faith (during an Awakening) and worldly uplift or works (during a Crisis). A metaphorical "shift from the inner to the outer." See also the founding of "countercultural utopian communes" typically in Awakening years, 1840, 1900, 1970; Awakening periods allow for cultural experiments, because the backdrop is sufficiently secure and prosperous; but see during the next Crisis how people migrate from "what does this art say to me?" to "whose side does this art say that I'm on?" Society becomes polarized and policed, see for example today with canceling and doxxing on social media.
147 "These parallel rhythms--in politics, society, culture--never stop beating. And, so long as we keep extrapolating along straight lines, they never stop taking us by surprise."
Chapter 5: Complexity, Anomalies, and Global History
148 "There are decades when nothing happens. And there are weeks when decades happen." --Lenin
148 On "fox thinking" versus "hedgehog thinking" per the famous quote "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing"; "Is it better to organize the world around one central idea? Or to remain open to a plurality of unrelated ideas? Is it better, like the hedgehog, to see all the links between things that seem different? Or, like the fox, to see each thing clearly for what it really is?"
149ff On free will and contingency: note that our behavior and that of people around us is more predictable than we might wish it to be, we all make predictions all the time. This "in no way nullifies anybody's freedom." Regarding contingency, note that history is always begetting random accidents and events, the author argues that what matters is not the accidents themselves but society's response to those accidents. See for example if the Depression happened in the 1970s, Boomers would not have "coped with economic depression by cheerfully donning uniforms"; "History always produces sparks. But some sparks flare briefly and then vanish, while others touch off firestorms out of any proportion to the sparks themselves." See for example the history of American reactions to foreign provocations; contrast World War I, which involved very long delays before our involvement versus World War II where the US declared war the next day after Pearl Harbor with only one dissenting vote [DK: this was Jeannette Rankin, congresswoman from Montana; she also voted against entry into WWI]. Note also that some eras feature maximum cooperation between generations (World War II), others feature maximum antagonism between generations (the Vietnam War era).
152 On technology, "Every new decade or generation shapes how that technology gets put to use." See the GI Generation with mainframes and centralized decision-making versus the Awakening era Boomers with distributed personal computers. See also how the internet became an instrument of individualization for Generation X but then became an instrument of collectivization, surveillance and orchestrated hysteria in recent years. In other words, technology is exogenous but it just "gives us what we want when we want it," it "tailors itself to the national mood."
154ff Seasonal history is as a complex system: on simple systems, complicated systems, complex systems, chaotic systems; the patterns and cycles of history are relatively stable and tend to show up regardless of exact starting conditions, like the study of natural cycles. "Even when winter arrives a bit early or late, it is still possible to foretell in what order the leaves will fall, the birds will migrate, and the streams will freeze." On looking at systems as having levels [or maybe the author should describe them as fractals], see for example cells and organs in a body; a society of animals that is self-adjusting or has some sort of self-organization. Likewise a historical saeculum has a balance between order and disorder which is dynamic and self-adjusts.
158 On modern ideologies of progress:
* The idealist tradition of Hegel which holds that historical processes including cycles of history are guided by God, leading eventually to salvation or perfection
* The materialist tradition, see Ray Kurzweil or [the eugenicist] Yuval Noah Harari, which sees a technocracy or society that remakes nature, even human nature, towards perfection
Note that these schools have similarities: both tend to use alarmism (we have to do something now, we're on the brink, if we do it right we'll be safe forever, etc.), but there are also big differences: one requires individual righteousness or worthiness, the other is collectivist; thus we see two of our generational archetypes here, the Prophet and the Hero, respectively. Note also that enthusiasm for the "inner world" definition of progress peaks at a Second Turning or Awakening, and enthusiasm for the "outer world" collectivist progress peaks at the end of a Fourth Turning or Crisis.
162ff Cycle length and anomalies: on the wavelength and periodicity of cycles: drivers here include level of living standards; age and nutrition driving puberty age; the 20th century development of the concept of adolescence; intriguingly, generational length shortened to 20 to 21 years in the 20th century down from about 25 years a century or two before; recently it has been expanding again in the last 50 years with a rising marriage age (now at a historic high of 29, gaining 8 years since the 1960s); likewise fertility rates and first childbirth ages are much higher as well. Children are not out-earning their parents and often are living at home, a delayed young adulthood. See also how our political leaders are older than ever, many well into their 80s, which is also unprecedented. Typically we think of history as accelerating but in reality the secular rhythm is actually decelerating.
166 Chapter 9 will explore late elderhood to show the growing influence of older people; Chapter 8 will explore how the generations and turnings will extend and expand.
168ff Conspicuous anomalies: the only huge anomaly is the US Civil War, which compressed both a Third and Fourth Turning into only 21 years: this is usually the length of one turning; also it lacked a Hero generation. Given that the three generations of that era, the Artist, Prophet and Nomad generations "comprised a dangerous constellation" accelerating the arrival of a Crisis, forcing it to a quick climax and the most apocalyptic conflict possible, but then Reconstruction collapsed by 1877 and the South entered a one-party government, the authors speculate that "no rising generation came forward to fill the hero role after the Civil War" because "the crisis congealed so early and so violently, most of this generation was still in childhood by the end of the war--and emerged more shell-shocked than empowered." Government emerged weaker than in other post-crisis eras.
171ff On how are seeing more and more generational patterns like the Anglo-American saeculum in many other countries around the world as well; a sort of "sympathetic resonance" of neighboring countries. See for example the European peace following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815; the Metternich peace in which "six subsequent European generations developed": the Artist generation born in the 1800s that came of age in the 1820s (with "gushy romantic poets" like John Keats as well as Victor Hugo, Franz Schubert), next was the Prophet generation that came of age around 1840: this was the utopian and radical generation that led to the riotous revolutions of 1848 against the Metternich controls of Europe, although they failed almost everywhere, they gave birth to dreams of utopianism, socialism and nationalism. Next was a Nomad archetype that came of age in 1860s: pragmatists and no-nonsense nationalists. Fourth was the Artist archetype coming of age in the 1880s, who professionalized governments, businesses and universities, and included Freud, Joseph Conrad and Oscar Wilde, the 19th century's "most sexually repressed generation" leading the Edwardian era and also leading Europe disastrously into World War I. Fifth was the Prophet archetype which came of age in the early 1900s, avant-garde, affluent, confident radical feminists as well as anarchists and their idealistic dreams were destroyed by the Great War and became the older generation in the 1920s and 1930s. Then the Nomad archetype came of age with World War I, the generation of 1914 or The Lost Generation. They were the disillusioned skeptics of the 20s and made skeptical of democracy itself by the Great Depression (see Kafka and Heidegger); note also here were midlife military officers who ultimately tore the world to pieces: Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, de Gaulle Tito, Mao, etc.
176ff On other parts of the world running in sync with the Anglo-American generations: see also certain parallels with the 1860 Meiji Restoration in Japan; the 1850s and 60s civil War in China; the Sepoy Mutiny in India of 1857; the war of the Triple Alliance in South America in the 1860s (this was between Brazil Argentina and Uruguay on one side in Paraguay on the other, "nearly exterminating the people of Paraguay" [I know literally nothing of this conflict!] and giving rise to decades of oligarchy in Brazil and Argentina with political stability and economic modernization.
178 Then a clear synchronization of most countries with the Great Depression and World War II. This Crisis area ended in the late 1940s "with a series of global and durable political settlements." With the exception of Russia (which had a 30-year crisis from 1917 on) this encompassed most of the world, synchronizing the generation clock. On schedule a second turning arrived between the 1960s and 1980s where idealistic youth attacked a repressive establishment; the 1960s youth protests in the United States had analogies elsewhere. Thus we have with minor differences in timing six global generations beginning in the early 1900s with the birth of the GI Generation (Hero), the Silent Generation (Artist) born from the 1920s to the 1940s, then the 1940s to 1960s global baby boom generation (Prophet), then the global Xer Generation (Nomad), born from the '60s to the 80s; and then a global Millennial generation, "possibly Hero" [--rather faint praise from the author here!] born from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s.
180 Note also that many Muslim-majority societies of Africa, Turkey, and the greater Middle East did not have the same cycles, and a Muslim Awakening exploded in 1979, raging well past the year 2000, spearheaded by a very young Prophet generation. More on global convergence in Chapter 7.
Part Two: Climax of Winter
Chapter 6: A Winter Chronology
185 On how World War II "galvanized" the United States. [Re my comments in the introductory essay to this post: it really feels like what's different today, and the reason we're unable to "galvanize," is that we can't really see our enemy like we could in World War II, or we don't want to see that the enemy is ourselves, the very State which we put into power, that is censoring us, repressing us, making us deal with government-created problems like inflation, medical tyranny, surveillance. Instead of galvanizing us against our common enemy: the monoparty administrative state, everyone in the country believes it's the other guy's party that's causing all the problems, and thus the monoparty system stays entrenched and keeps us all the more divided.]
186 The author notes that as much as everyone has warm memories of what we could do, Fourth Turnings are also a time of brutal and "lethal forms of social reconstruction." We have a fond and selective memory of what happened in past turnings like WWII.
186 "A Fourth Turning is a solstice era of maximum darkness, in which the supply of social order remains low--though the demand for order is now steeply rising. It is the saeculum's hibernal, its time of trial."
187-8 The ekpyrosis, "nature's fiery moment of death and discontinuity" the combustion of the old saeculum and the birth of the new. The destruction of old institutions, but giving birth to new ones, Vishnu yields to Shiva, this is how a society "reverses entropy."
188 We are now on the seventh of the Fourth Turnings, this is a typical chronology:
* A precursor event that temporarily galvanizes the society
* A catalyst: a watershed event that produces a sudden but lasting shift in the social mood
* Once catalyzed, a society experiences at least one "regeneracy" though there is usually more than one which reunifies the community
* The regenerated society reaches a "consolidation" when everyone realizes that this new community is struggling for survival
* The consolidated society propels toward a climax, a crucial moment confirming the death of the old order and triumph of the new
* The climax culminates in a resolution, a triumphant or a tragic conclusion, that separates winners from losers, resolves the big public questions, and establishes the new order
189 Usually it takes around 24 years on average between the starting catalyst and the ultimate resolution; the precursor event could be the 9/11 response, the catalyst could be the Great Financial Crisis.
193: On past Crisis eras, the author deals with Fourth Turnings in reverse order, working back from the most recent one:
The Great Depression/World War II Crisis (1929-1946); World War I was the "precursor" event; then came the Spanish influenza recessions, a Red scare, and then a consensus view that entering World War I was a "colossal blunder"; Warren Harding won by a landslide in 1920 promising "normalcy"; in the 1920s America felt wild, decadent; then the "catalyst" was the 1929 crash and aftermath; the "regeneracy" was FDR's inauguration address: "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; a second regeneracy happened in 1940 as FDR won a third term and America became "an arsenal of democracy"; the Lend-Lease Act, then the bombing of Pearl Harbor which was the "consolidation"; the "climax" was the turning of the war when the US destroyed Japan's last carriers in the Battle of the Philippines Sea and also completed the breakout from the D-Day landings (this was in June/July 1944) and the outcome of World War II became certain. The resolution was 1945-1946 as the US had its new dominant position in the world.
201 The Civil War Crisis (1860-1865); Precursor: the Mexican-American War (1846-1848); see also the tremendous polarization from the reactions to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, John Brown's raid in Harper's Ferry, also the schisms in the Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist churches, all of which split North/South, etc; the "catalyst" was the southern states' reaction to Lincoln's election: spontaneous secession. The "regeneracy" was the attack on Fort Sumter making war a fact; the "consolidation" was the Emancipation Proclamation; the "climax" was Sherman's March to the Sea and the final siege of Petersburg and Richmond, etc; the "resolution" was the ratification of the 13th Amendment and Lee's surrender at Appomattox.
207 The American Revolution Crisis (1773-1794): Precursor: the French and Indian War (1754-1763); this kindled a sense of pan-colonial unity. Catalyst: Parliament's 1774 Coercive Acts, which catalyzed the colonists' plan of Union; Regeneracy: open hostilities which started with the British raids on Concord and Lexington; Second Regeneracy: the Philadelphia Conference to create a new government to replace the failed Articles of Confederation; Consolidation: the new Constitution divided the United States into two camps those who approved and those who disapproved, consolidating the ultimate debate, Federalists versus Anti-Federalists. Climax: the 13 colonies finally ratify the Constitution in July 1788; Resolution: US prosperity returned with general warfare in Europe after the French post revolution terror.
213 Glorious Revolution Crisis (1675-1706): This conflict had no precursor and the catalyst and the first regeneracy arrived at almost the same time: Catalyst: King Philip's War (1675-76), which depopulated many towns in New England for more than 30 years, likewise a conflict between the people of Virginia and governor William Berkeley; Second regeneracy: James II succeeding to the English throne and the steward colonial governors of New England were going to strip the colonies of their traditional powers of self-government; Consolidation: Spring 1689 when King James II abdicated in favor of anti-Catholic William of Orange and his wife Mary; popular rebellions broke out in the colonies (a rebellion in Maryland "permanently unseated the unpopular Catholic elite which had dominated that colony since its founding.") Climax: 1691: when the British Crown permitted colonial self-government with limited British appointed governors. Resolution: the British victory at Blenheim and Ramillies (1704 and 1706 respectively) which defeated Louis XIV, thereafter the colonies were much more united and much more self-governing under a firmly Protestant British Empire.
217 Armada Crisis (1569-1597): Precursor: The five year reign of Mary I, Bloody Mary, a Catholic; Elizabeth succeeded Mary and was more of a compromise between Puritans and Catholics; Catalyst: Catholic uprising of the Duke of Norfolk plus the excommunication of Queen Elizabeth by the Pope, also a the Spanish assassination attempt, as well as other anti-Protestant actions (the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre for example) among others; Regeneracy: the unification of the English Parliament under the threat of the Spanish Catholic Empire, as well as assassination plots from Mary Queen of Scots who was next in line behind Elizabeth; Consolidation: England impounds Spanish ships in her ports, begins raiding the Spanish and sending troops to help the Dutch and Protestant French; also execution of Mary; they knew Spanish invasion was coming; Climax: the arrival and defeat of the Spanish Armada; Resolution: formal piece declared in 1604 between Spain and England after both Elizabeth and Philip II had died.
220 War of the Roses Crisis (1455-1487): England in these days was corrupt, divided and misruled by Henry VI who was periodically insane, conflict between the house of York (the "white rose") and the House of Lancaster (the "red rose"); Precursor: there was no precursor; Catalyst: open violence in 1455 with the Battle of St Albans, then battles over the next four years; Regeneracy: Lancaster's "Parliament of Devils" condemned the House of York leaders for treason in 1459; York leaders fled England and then returned in an all-out war for the Crown itself; see also the Battle of Towton where one out of every 50 English males between ages 15-50 were killed; also tremendous violence for some 20 years: judicial murder of nobles, expropriation of land, slaughter of royal family members, etc. Richard III declared himself King and then had his nephews (the sons of Edward IV) murdered. Consolidation: new entrance of Henry Tudor of the House of Lancaster who landed in England in 1845; Climax: Henry Tudor's defeat of Richard III at Bosworth Field, the crowning of Henry VII and the joining of the lineages; Resolution: 1487 when Henry the VII puts down the most serious rebellion against his rule, securing and stabilizing the new House of Tudor.
222 Note that Shakespeare wrote Richard III quite propagandistically, leaving out any of Henry's brutal measures: he was writing under Queen Elizabeth's reign during the secular winter of the Spanish Armada crisis and could not afford to be impartial. Henry the VII of course was Elizabeth's grandfather!
Chapter 7: The Millennial Crisis
225 Google Ngram searches; we tend to see the coalescing of tighter communities early in a crisis but this happens at the small "platoon level" initially; There is much less trust in "previously trusted" institutions;
226 "We find that America has already experienced the precursor, the catalyst, and the first regeneracy... we speculate on the various ways the Millennial Crisis may climax and resolve in the years to come."
227ff The Millennial Crisis: a potential roadmap:
Precursor: 9/11 followed by US retaliation
Catalyst: Great Financial Crisis, specifically the market crash of 2008-9
Regeneracy: Trump's election in 2016 against establishment liberal Hillary Clinton, resulting in tremendous partisanship not seen since the 1850s
Second regeneracy: unknown/has not happened yet
234 [Interesting insight here]: when there is extreme partisanship and gridlock, both sides will try to eke out economic and political gains with fiscal and monetary stimulus.
236ff "America is now moving into its seventh party system." On the realignment of the 2016 election, similar to the Nixon/Reagan elections from 1968-1980; also sorting of Americans in terms of where they live geographically, "the big sort" and the "de-purpling" of America. On second-order effects of these changes: they continue to reward more and more extreme views because officeholders know they won't be challenged by the other party, you get fewer moderates.
240 The author here does not understand what is happening in Ukraine: sadly he holds the "government approved" narrative of what's happening there.
242 "A new regeneracy does not require new leaders. It requires some important shift in issues along with a rearrangement of the constituencies arrayed on either side."
242 Universal pessimism about the nation's future [if this is the consensus view then it's time to lean the other way!]
245ff Interesting paradigm here where people are universally concerned about their standard of living declining and also concerned about international enemies like China and Russia, but at the same time they're happy about their home/family situation, even if it is more modest/less independent than prior eras ("record high satisfaction with how things are going in their personal lives"); supposedly, living together with grandparents, parents and adult children at higher rates than ever, and positive about the experience, and feeling good about their communities. Striking.
249: On the timing of the ekpyrosis: the consolidation, climax and resolution. The author offers a few ways to triangulate when the Crisis is likely to end. If it began in 2008, the average saeculum is 92 years (although closer to 80 years looking at the last three American saecula), so from the last crisis resolving in 1946 this means somewhere between 2026 and 2038, tightening it down to maybe 2032-2034 given the last couple generations have been longer in terms of life phases; the author predicts 2030 is the most likely year for the climax.
253ff: The author cites various examples of Americans massacring each other, having wars that are actually both internal/civil and external at the same time: see the patriots vs. loyalists during the American Revolution, the Civil War as the ultimate example of course; then going back to the "Anglo" part of the Anglo-American cycles, you can see the English Civil War as well as well as the sectarian problems throughout. [It really makes you think: we are generally a peaceful people--except when we're not; and when we're not, we're really not peaceful]
255ff On financial crises as a wild card: examples of prior market crashes, prior deflations and inflations, booms and busts that happened during the Revolution during the Civil War, during the 1930s; you can have one year where stimmies and tax cuts happen, rates are lowered money is created, etc... and then the next year there's price controls and property seizures. These are shocks that will be impossible to predict.
258 Financial crashes in the context of the ekpyrosis: note that we've had quite a lot of them lately: 2008 2020 and 2022; with a lot of fiscal and monetary stimulus and a tremendous increase in debt to GDP and a tremendous amount of growth in the money supply.
261ff Ekpyrosis and civil war? "The question must be taken seriously. Roughly half of all Americans think a civil war is likely." Note also Henry Adams comments in his memoirs: "Not one man in America wanted the Civil war, or expected or intended it... Not one, however clever or learned, guessed what happened." Nobody predicts civil wars, everyone is surprised by them. [I think you could flip this and presume that because so many are expecting it we probably will NOT have one]
264 Interesting thought here. "...civil wars (or, alternatively, 'revolutions') begin when one or both sides are persuaded of the irreversibility of future events once the other side gains further advantage.
265 Note also the second-order effects of a secession, and why no country ever will allow any breakaway movement: all it does is enable other factions to separate too, see for example Lincoln considering "letting the Confederacy secede peacefully, before quickly dismissing the idea basically for this reason."
266 [Not sure this author has looked at the Partition of India and what happened then to deal with the factional/sectarian issues between Hindu and Muslim peoples leading up to India's independence. Another interesting model would be the breakup of Yugoslavia into Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, and other breakaway nations over time.]
267ff Various speculations as to what a new civil war might look like in the United States: this is sort of a useless parlor game to be honest. Also guesstimates is what might happen globally when the United States with its role of global policeman breaks down during a civil war.
268ff A "great power" war scenario: the China Russia Iran North Korea bloc, [this author doesn't really think of it in terms of BRICS or "global south," he doesn't think of India or Brazil or Africa as major vectors, note that these guys are all "switching teams" away from the United States]
271 The author also has (probably) too much belief in the might of the American military right now as well.
272 The so-called "diversionary war": when leaders launch a war for the "purpose of distracting the public from domestic troubles." Note that Seward actually notoriously [!!] recommended starting a war with Britain, France or Spain to get the Union to rally around the flag and forget about Fort Sumter, this was in the spring of 1861 [!!!] [Of course as I'm writing this right now Israel under Netanyahu might very well have started its own diversionary war to get the Israeli peoples' eyes off Netanyahu's corruption.]
274 It's also interesting that the Ukraine-Russia conflict is already observably over when this book's ink is barely dry; the author talks about it as if the conflict is still in doubt.
Chapter 8: How Our Society Will Change
275ff See how in the 1770s American colonies were ungovernable, but by the 1790s were surprisingly unified and well organized, even to the point where the government was able to "levy nationwide taxes higher than its citizens had earlier paid as colonists." See also the 1850s, where the US was seething with discontent and division with physical violence on the floor of Congress. But a decade later it was a different country entirely: the Union was in command of the largest army and Navy in the world in the blink of an eye; finally, note the contrast between 1930s-era America and post World War II America.
278 On the paradox of having an end goal of a stronger community yet using conflict (often deadly organized conflict) as a means to that end. A "paradox of modernity"; an "order-disorder duality"... Larger states means bigger state armies means an "enforcement" of peace (via "internal pacification" in the phrase of sociologist Anthony Giddens) means slack swan wars started by the state that are tremendous in size and scope.
281 When it's a non-democratic conflict between regimes there are no rules. "Regimes can have lots of procedures, but there is no procedure for choosing between regimes. The essence is captured in the Butch Cassidy victim: when rival rulers choose to have a knife fight, there are no rules."
282ff A few other notable insights: on the evolutionary biology insight that warlikeness and in-grouping and "othering" outgroups is hardwired into humans; see also the paradox between selfishness and altruism, see the famous quote from David Sloan Wilson and E.O. Wilson "Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups." [!!!] Also the author considers the question "Is war somehow necessary in order to create community solidarity?" which is a question obviously separate from the morality of war. Note also the fascinating factoid that every slave family in America could have been emancipated, with land purchased for them, for a fraction of what both sides spent on the Civil War.
285ff On William James's interesting paradox of how we love the trials and rights of passage of our lives as well as on a societal basis, but only many years after. We don't want the trials while they're happening. Thus James had a thought experiment about whether we want the United States in his day without the Civil War having happened, but would we welcome another civil war like the one we had? The answer is yes to the first, but no to the second. It's quite interesting to think of war in terms of the tremendous benefits of organizing a community, of having an authoritatively governed team that has a certain permanence and stability, having institutions that have control, etc.
288ff On forcing the formation of community: the United States in 2008 (as well as 1929 and 1859) was a procedural "rights state" basically just setting ground rules for personal fulfillment, the result was a type of loneliness, isolation, alienation, low social cohesion; note how a major threat or a disaster produces solidarity in a previously disparate alienated group, it makes society tighter; likewise it forces a form of equality on everybody: mechanisms like conscription, rationing, inflation, etc., also the destruction or devaluation of financial assets that happens during a crisis. [Note that the genuinely wealthy aren't really subject to these things]. Either way you tend to have a new "civic compact" where the elites will grant the people more voice in governing; often this is to forestall or directly address insurrection or the threat of it; this kind of violence emerges with every Fourth Turning according to the author: see the deadly New York City draft riots during the Civil War, labor violence during the Great Depression; as a result, elites will "grow more attentive to popular grievances."
288ff Other equality factors: you don't necessarily need to buy things to attain status when you can do it with civic achievement in a crisis; social mobility increases during Crisis periods: geographic mobility surges with people moving with dislocation of wartime service, labor markets tighten thus employee earnings increase, standard social barriers tend to disappear as the society mobilizes all available people (see for example African-Americans during World War II and thereafter), etc.
297ff On authority, after a Fourth Turning a new regime is usually firmly established and political authority is taken for granted and therefore less noticed; during a Crisis, force is usually abundant, conspicuous and "often excessively applied." See the Revolutionary War leaders executing deserters, see Lincoln being persuaded to burn the South to the ground; the development of the doctrine of total war; see also World War II's internment of Japanese, firebombing of Germany and Japan, etc. [One could add the medical tyranny and censorship regimes of the modern era during this crisis era]
301ff On how permanence comes from the resolution of a Crisis; certain paradoxes also, like a country may make some of their more durable long-term future commitments when its near-term existence seems most in doubt; see certain examples done during the Great Depression like creating Social Security as a typical example. The country goes from buying off individual special interest groups and not solving any of the great big problems prior to the Crisis to actually having sort of a mandate to tackle major problems during and after the Crisis.
304 Note that certain generations get the shaft! See for example the Nomad generation usually gets skipped by things like Social Security and Medicare whereas the Artist generation gets these goodies because they follow (generationally speaking) the deeds of the young Hero generation which got these things done.
305ff On shifting norms during a Crisis and climax; celebrating sacrifice, codes of honor, heroism, propaganda machines producing pro-regime media, etc. Negative stigma for shirkers and rulebreakers, manners, traditional behavior is ritualized, etc.
309ff Washington Irving's story Rip Van Winkle is a metaphor for what happens across a Crisis era. You wake up and you hear everybody speaking a different language as if you're in a totally new country.
310 "This rebirth [that accompanies every Fourth Turning] unifies, integrates, and empowers society to a degree that people beforehand would have deemed unthinkable. It also pushes society through a relentless and deadly passage that people beforehand would have deemed unbearable. In this sense, the Fourth Turning is for a society what a right of passage is for an individual. No society ever voluntarily chooses to enter it. And yet, as [William] James conceded, no society ever wishes to reverse it once it is complete."
311 Note also as a society we doubt we can make it through this passage, in part because no one alive is left from the last time it happened four generations ago [!!]; see this quote from John Adams which communicates it perfectly, just as the American Revolution was beginning. "We have not been fit for the times. We are deficient in genious, education, and travel, fortune--in everything. I feel unutterable anxiety. God grant us wisdom and fortitude."
Chapter 9: How Our Lives Will Change
313ff "What will it feel like?" What will our personal experience be of what lies ahead? Returning to the concept of generational change; see also the Forth Turning generational constellation: elder Prophets, midlife Nomads, young-adult Heroes, and child Artists; "the archetypal lineup has been one of the great constants of the Anglo-American saeculum."
* The indulged Prophet children of the last High, born in the aftermath of the last Crisis, have always fomented the Crisis after entering elderhood. [Boomers]
* The abandoned Nomad children of an Awakening have always become the pragmatic midlife managers of the Crisis. [Gen X]
* The protected Hero children of an Unraveling have always furnished the powerful young adult team players of the Crisis. [Millennials, supposedly]
* The suffocated Artist children of the Crisis have always grown up as the empathic youth who will later come of age in the next High. [Gen Z/Homelanders]
[Basically Boomer Prophets take us into this thing; Gen X Nomads resolve to defend society as they die off, rising fiercely and sacrificially to the occasion; Millennial Heroes provide a fulcrum for the turning point and produce leaders through the crisis, like the GIs of World War II; Homelanders/Gen Z is supposed to be the compliant, well-behaved generation to stay out of harm's way]
318 "We proceed from the oldest living generation to the youngest--seven generations in all." Lost/Nomads, GIs/Heroes, Silents/Artists, then Boomers/Prophets, Gen X/Nomads, Millennials/Heroes, Homelanders/Artists. "These four fully active generations comprise the generational constellation of the Millennial Crisis."
319 Note that late elders are remaining in some meaningful leadership posts currently, like Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden, along with other important leadership posts in Congress and the Senate; the author calls this a "late elder" phase of life for a generation that has remained more active later in life (at least to some extent) compared to prior generations, this effect on the saeculum is not yet known.
320ff The Lost Generation, born 1883-1900: Hemingway, Eisenhower, conservative and careful in office; Ike, the last Lost Generation member in power, was replaced by a GI president, Kennedy, the Losts were like Generation X, they kind of got sandwiched, ignored, shuffled off the stage; they did with they had to do and made few demands on the generations before or after.
322ff The GI Generation, born 1901-1924: their last members are dying off as we speak; regular guys, effective teamwork, the people were "General Issue" just like the acronym GI; governments supported them significantly: helping them get jobs, homes, educations, paying pensions and healthcare etc., called "the greatest generation" by younger generations, who grew up in their shadow with deference, caution self-doubt; whereas they triggered in Boomers (who had no personal memory of World War II) a desire to smash and wreck all their institutions in the '60s and 70s. "By then, the nation seemed awash with rage, violence, drugs, eroticism, and the cult of self--everything that GIs considered hostile to their life mission of regularizing and homogenizing the world." By the '70s/80s they began retiring, enjoying generous benefits and keeping to themselves, turning over society to the Boomer generation.
325 The Silent Generation, born 1925-1942: "The fortunate generation" in the phrase of demographer Richard Easterlin, now in their 80s and 90s; sandwiched awkwardly between two far better known generations; too late to be World War II Heroes and too early to be Boomers, but they had a lifetime ride on the up escalator because of the success of the United States over that time. [As always, some generations get an easier ride than others through no fault or result of their own.] Kind of like a Lisa Simpson generation: they kept their heads down, were looking for good jobs and pensions, etc. They got to ride along with post-war boom, had much better starting wages and lived better than their retired elders, they saved for retirement during the 1980s boom. Note also the Silent Generation's belief in the system and belief in playing by the rules; sociologist Charles Tilley said of his generation "we are the last suckers" while Woody Allen's joke (that 80% of life is just showing up) "is a joke that leaves younger generations gasping with incomprehension." (!)
331 The three elder generations, Lost, GI, Silent form the connection between the last Crisis era and this one, and they match up to today's generations: Lost is Gen X; GI is the Millennials, Silent is Homelanders/Gen Z; Now to turn to the next constellation of generations.
332ff The Baby Boom generation ("Boomer elders"), born 1943-1960: mostly in their 60s and 70s today in 2023. Note also the census bureau considers the baby boom fertility bulge to be 1946-1964; this book thinks about age location in history so they date it slightly earlier. "No face of life really meant anything until they experienced it and could tell other generations all about it." [Holy cow that sure does describe their self-centeredness]; see also the expression from Todd Gitlin that the Boomers moved from "J'accuse to jacuzzi" [another good one]; on Boomers' individualism, their anti-institutionalism, their divorces, risk-taking, initiating the culture wars in the 1990s and 2000s.
338 Interesting metaphysical take on the Boomer generation, that in their escalation and hyperbole about everything they created their own social reality that "may as well be true." Note also the Boomers' derision of the culture of their forerunners: mocking Bob Hope and The Lawrence Welk Show, while there Millennial children "respectfully memorized" Boomer culture.
345ff Note that in 2005 Social Security and Federal health benefits spending was 7.8% of GDP, when the oldest Boomers were eligible for early retirement; by 2045 when the youngest Boomers will be in their mid-80s it will be 14.7% of GDP. The author believes that the Boomers in their elder years will make "large concessions" (raising retirement ages, taxing or reducing benefits, etc.) as "participation in a larger cause" [but holy cow I sure don't see that happening!] Ultimately the author believes that in their late years the great champion will "ride once more." [Some of the descriptors of the Boomer generation are so celebratory and so delusional, it's not a surprise that this author is himself a Boomer. No surprise that this also is by far the longest section.] The great champion can come from any generation but typically it comes from a Prophet archetype, thus it'll be a Boomer, and it will be a "practical necessity" during the Crisis consolidation phase in the late 2020s.
348 The author points out also that the "hell no we won't go" generation "could emerge as America's most martial elder generation since World War II." [It is quite frankly amazing how bellicose and warmongering the Boomer generation really is, especially over the past two decades.]
348ff The Generation X generation, born 1961-1981: 85 million adults now mostly in their 40s and 50s. This generation got its name from the novel by Doug Coupland, raised under conditions near neglect, no-fault divorce, a baby bust generation... "America was doing great until they came along" (a message the Generation X themselves internalized), but it produced a resilient, self-sufficient generation with survival instincts, a skill for not wasting energy on stuff that doesn't matter, and an ability "to distinguish reality from illusion"; later maturing into the most protective parental generation in recent memory, mocked as helicopter parents.
357 Note the grief that The Lost Generation both gave itself and also received from surrounding generations: the missionaries and the GI generation; see also what else happened with the Nomad archetype entering a Fourth Turning: The Lost Generation went on to administer and lead World War II and the aftermath, produced generals like Patton, Bradley and Eisenhower, leaders of World War II and directors of the GI generation; the analogy here would be that Generation X gets the same pushback from generations before and after them, but they also will have a second act, unlike the F. Scott Fitzgerald claim "a generation with no second acts" used to describe the Lost Generation.
359 Interesting war/hostility scenario here and a picture of Generation X stepping in after all these years of cynicism to do something about it.
362ff [Interesting to hear the author's characterizations of Xers as they move into power, I wonder if he'll be right]: "By the end of the [2020s] decade, Xers will constitute a decisive majority of governors and mayors, a growing share of whom will be former entrepreneurs, CEOs, and housewives who will brag about their political inexperience." "Their hand strengthened by the emergency, they will sweep aside procedural legalisms, much to the anguish of many older Boomers and Silents." "Many of the traits they will have heard criticized for decades--their toughness, realism, lack of affect--will now be recognized as vital national resources."
364ff The Millennial generation, born 1982-2005 [give or take]: "Millennial rising adults" make up 102 million people, mostly in their 20s and 30s; it's likely that the last birth cohort of the Millennial generation entered high school during the COVID pandemic and are now about to graduate. Note also what shaped them was a backlash against the social experiments of the Boomers, therefore they have a family values view and a "kids are special" view; child safety became an obsession: Amber alerts, Megan's Law, all kinds of adult vigilance for children, rubber-padded playgrounds, etc. The Millennial kids themselves "welcomed" the sheltering; never was a generation tested more than the Millennials, nor has any generation "trusted in the ethic of meritocracy so utterly." They stopped taking party drugs and started taking "smart" drugs; extracurricular activities "turned practically professional, draining families in both time and money." A "sunnier if blander" generation, embracing surveillance, social media, family-friendly entertainment, boy bands and Taylor Swift. But despite making themselves career-ready, their economic situations have lagged other generations at the same stage. "Sheer precarity has persuaded Millennials to defer or avoid rites of passage that earlier generations took for granted: moving, getting married, having children. Among young adults, rates for all these activities have sunk to historic lows." "Generalized anxiety disorder is by far the fastest-growing psychiatric complaint among both the men and women of this generation."
***[While reading through the section, you can't help but conclude that the surveillance state and the administrative state have just gotten started, it seems like the Millennials want it, they embrace it, they believe it makes them safer and happier, and we generation Xers just don't get it with our silly ideas about privacy and freedom. It's almost like they're a generation of Andrew Lo types (see the astoundingly naive chapter 12 of his book Adaptive Markets) who hope for some kind of Starfleet-based system that will just do everything for us, while not really thinking about the tyrannical nature inherent in the nuts and bolts of such a system. They haven't realized yet how wasteful and incompetent the system--and the bureaucracy that makes it up--will be. Again, I hope I'm wrong!]
373 Culturally, the Millennials get along great with their parents, they "shun risk and disorder" but yet they believe the system is fundamentally broken "and needs to be overhauled if not replaced."
374ff Millennials toward the climax; the Millennials have a parallel with their echo generation the GI Generation as they "had been fussed over by protective parents determined to raise up kids as good as the Lost Generation had been bad." During the Depression the GIs "came to regard federal authority as a trusted friend who would always be there to help them."
***[It's sobering to hear some of the GI-era standards contrasted to today's incompetence, where nothing works anymore: see for example the Seabees motto, while they built overnight airfields on Pacific Islands while defeating the Japanese: "The difficult we do at once. The impossible takes a little longer." Put that in context with for example Boston's Big Dig taking triple the time and triple the budget; the incompetence of the light rail plans for California; the multiple years it took to rebuild the World Trade Center... It's worth comparing us today a civilization that's not in decline: see where China can apparently build an entire subway station overnight, while New York City's once-great subway system burns $1.7 billion dollars on fire per kilometer and can't seem to do anything else right.]
378 The author posits a next-generation WPA-type project to build infrastructure, smart highways, transit loops, universal Wi-Fi, urban reconstruction, etc., with the Millennials doing the bulk of the work. [Again, the author, as a Boomer, doesn't fully understand the incompetence of the modern administrative state.] Per the author, the Millennials will be perfect for this mission as they grew up volunteering for public causes and designing communities in games like SimCity and Farmville. [??]
378 "The Millennial perspective on the Crisis era will be very different from that of older Americans. For Boomers, the Crisis will mark a transcendent culmination; for Xers, a brutal midlife course correction. But for Millennials, it will be a launching pad for adult lives that will still lie ahead of them." [Interesting quote here that brings to my mind parallels with how, during Germany's hyperinflation, different generations dealt with the challenges differently: some generations were totally crushed by it, others felt it was exciting and set the stage for something new.]
[I still struggle to believe this author and his belief in the Millennial generation's heroism and the incredible heights that they're going to drive themselves to when this crisis happens] admittedly, one of his most valid arguments is essentially a neuroplasticity argument: the older generations will be too set in their ways and too "bound by earlier habits of thought and behavior" whereas the millennial generation is young enough to adapt (some better than others of course) and even change radically because of the crisis itself.]
384 The author allows for the possibility that the Millennials, given their proclivity to follow orders, might throw their weight behind some dictator or demagogue.
384ff The Homelander generation, born 2006-?: Gen Z is 75 million children, starting with 2006; their oldest members are now in high school and they won't have a real agreed-upon name until their leading edge is nearing 30. On the etymology of the name Homelander: it was chosen by this author's readers on an online survey based on the decade of the 2000s: marked by 9/11 and the Department of Homeland Security, based on a sense that the "homeland" was no longer safe; also because of the protective child raising style of Gen X parents, this generation was kept more at home than earlier generations of kids. This generation is striking because there's nothing striking about them; they're agreeable, coachable, earnest, close to their parents, sheltered, risk-averse, compliant, basically maxing out on Millennial characteristics; They have no memory of a prosperous or confident America; note also the sheer reduction in their numbers: fertility rate keeps falling, the Gen X-er baby bust is no longer unprecedented because now the Homelander baby bust is even more pronounced. Gen X parents spend a lot more time with their kids compared to prior generations--exactly what they didn't have in their childhood; also divorce rates among Xers continue to decline; on X-er parents not trusting institutions, specifically schools, to look after their kids; on how Homelanders are highly medicated and counseled, the most watched generation in history.
394ff As the Homelanders head towards the climax, we can look to the Silent generation and their obedience, their good behavior (see Alfalfa and Shirley Temple as metaphors: minding their manners around adults and pulling the heartstrings of the most hard-bitten parent); during World War II, America had the best-behaved teenagers in its history.
396 Good quote here: "The Xer teens were lost and couldn't be found... The Homelander teens are found and can't be lost."
400 Note also the age cohort for the Homelander generation won't be known until after the crisis is over; just like we couldn't know the Silent generation's precise first birth year (1925) until it was clear who experienced active duty in World War II in 1944.
Part Three: Coming of Spring
Chapter 10: A New Saeculum Is Born
403ff Exploring what happens after the coming Crisis and the Fourth Turning, Again looking at the Silent and GI generations and what happened after World War II; note that just as the economy shut down its military production, millions of veterans came home looking for work; there was an expectation of class conflict and labor strife; GM faced an autoworker strike just a few months after VJ Day but it was quickly settled; there was a far more unity than anybody ever expected; people wanted to have kids, get married, buy homes, get good jobs, etc., and the economy boomed. Nobody expected it.
406ff Looking at prior First Turnings: Andy Griffith was the metaphor then, where there was no crime and the police traded folksy jokes; the birth of suburbia and Levittown, a middle-class miracle with planned orderliness after the disorder of World War II; mass productions helped standardize people's tastes and made things more affordable; political partisanship declined, see also the Organization Man by William H. Whyte on the obedient social ethic of that era. See Robert A. Nisbet's book The Quest for Community where the author was astonished by the post WWII era and "the obsessive craving of men for tranquility and belonging."
410 On the mind-numbing uniformity of post-World War II society; art critic Lewis Mumford despaired of the "multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers." [!!!] See also how this is rendered in the 1990s film "Pleasantville" about two Generation X teens who go back to the 1950s and introduce people of that era to full color lives. "...the nation is likely to enter a similar era in the not-so-distant future."
411 Six Anglo-American First Turning Highs:
1487-1525 The Tudor Renaissance
1597-1621 Merrie England
1706-1727 Augustine Age of Empire/Revolutionary Saeculum
1794-1822 Era of Good Feeling/Civil War Saeculum
1865-1886 Reconstruction and Gilded Age/Great Power Saeculum
1946-1964 American High/Millennial Saeculum
412 All six eras have been regarded as post-war; the Crisis has been settled and society gathers around a newfound sense of solidarity and direction; people want to gather, nest, procreate, and build; there's a trend toward greater order and cohesion. Greater national unity usually involving a single party to carry out "an ambitious agenda for national improvement"; "Political debate tends to be constructive and dispassionate--even decorous much of the time." "Highs are eras of robust economic and demographic expansion." "Fiscal and monetary policies are often explicitly disinflationary." [This is actually not accurate: after the 1945 crisis and follow-up period which was highly inflationary as the US needed to inflate away its WWII debt]; tremendous infrastructure projects, the Erie Canal, the railroad system after the Civil War, the highway system after World War II, etc. Inequality declines or isn't as bad, "people feel they have a 'fresh start' on more equal terms." Also more Victorian cultural behavior during these periods: see the Comstock laws after the Civil War, the 1950s culture, etc. Also enough collective pride to be lampooned or mocked, especially in the years afterward.
419ff Positive scenarios for the next First Turning: Early 2030s, say 2033, and ending say 2056; new global alliances, rebuilding; possible surveillance as part of greater "order"; A Salem witch trials/McCarthyism-type phase will happen too; eventually there will be growing confidence and optimism; much faster economic growth rates, recent negative productivity growth in education, healthcare, finance, etc., will revert; dramatically higher living standards; return of a social ethic; return to the family and "trad" roles and a likely postwar baby boom.
431ff Unfavorable scenarios: Note that Forth Turnings are at a minimum nation threatening: what if the challenge isn't successfully resolved? Examples would be nuclear war, or a non-nuclear outcome but one that resulted in the United States emerging as a damaged and diminished nation; see for example if it were clearly defeated in some great power conflict, or if it emerged from that conflict with a much more centralized authoritarian government.
435ff The generations in the next First Turning:
"One late elder generation will disappear, and another will emerge... The lineup will move forward one notch." The author starts with the late elder generations: GIs, Silents, Boomers. Note that by 2033 there will only be a few thousand GI generation left, they'll be in their 100s but we will salute their connection to the prior national trial just like we did the same with Civil War veterans after World War II, the last remaining Civil War veterans were frequently interviewed and talked about.
437 The Silent Generation will enter the next First Turning with about 3 million members remaining, there will be a comeback of some of the stylish aspects of that generation's culture. Also this generation will experience quite a bit of anguish because they spent their entire lives serving an old regime that no longer exists. Note also the next few generations might resist too much Boomer government, they probably will have an X-er for their leader (just like Truman prevailed against Missionary-era leaders during the prior American High, like Douglas MacArthur). Boomers will matter less and less with each passing year during the next High. "Let's take everything salient about the Boomers pure personality--their individualism, their crusading zeal, their obsession with values and culture, their otherworldliness--and then let's steadily subtract all of that from America's current social mood." [Good mental image of how to think about what will happen as that generation dies off.] "While most younger Americans will embrace the shift, most surviving Boomers won't." Note also the shock that comes to every generation when their symbols are turned into memes, their statues are "taken down" metaphorically and literally, etc.
437 The Boomers will still have 42 million in number by age 2033, they will continue to voice their convictions and be senior legislators, academics, media guest stars, etc., and will remain quotable and quick to take a stand, or as the author phrases is "always ready to take listeners on long and solipsistic voyages into their own heads." [!!!!]
439ff Generation X elders: Gen X will be age 52-72 during the next first turning, at 84 million members the second largest generation of adults. By the end of the First Turning in 2056, Gen X will be age 75-95 with perhaps 47 million; they will "comprise the era's dominant generation of senior national leaders" but it will be for a relatively brief time, partly because they are behind Boomers who are still in leadership and can't accept that the crisis is over, likewise they'll be eclipsed by younger Millennials who want to create their own Great Society; this generation will end ultimately experience the costs of a lot of these things with benefit cuts that they'll have to accept ownership of, savings that get inflated away, etc., just like the prior Lost Generation; the Nomads entering elderhood. "As seasoned Nomads replace prophets in elderhood, they slow the pace of social change, shunning the old crusades in favor of simplicity and survivalism."
441 Nomad generations have the "unhappy fate.. to be young in an era when age was respected, and old in a time when youth took the palm." See Washington's peers or John Adams, who knew for certain that "mausoleums, statues, monuments will never be erected to me."
441ff Millennials in midlife: Millennials will be age 28-51 in 2033, the largest generation at 113 million, and by the end of the First Turning in 2056 Millennials will be age 51-74 with still 107 million. They "will be the largest generation of voters and the dominant generation of midlife parents." Also just as we talked about the subtraction of Boomer traits steadily, consider the steady addition of Millennial traits over time, sociability, teamwork and consensus, trust in technology, etc. "The millennial influence will be rising just as its archetypal opposite, the Boomer influence, will be falling."
443 See Jefferson attacking John Adams in 1800 or John Kennedy attacking Dwight Eisenhower in 1960; the incoming Millennial political power will displace elder-generation incumbents and the younger generation will appear confident, rational, ambitious, while the older nomad generation will appear anxious, small-minded, and uncertain. "As confident Heroes replace Nomads in midlife, they establish an upbeat, constructive ethic of social discipline."
445ff Homelanders/Gen-Z in rising adulthood: In the first turning in 2033 Homelanders, age 4-27 will number about 99 million, most still children by the end of the First Turning. By 2056 they'll be ages 27-50 and will be the largest generation at 107 million; by the end they'll be the dominant generation of parents in K-12 schools. They're too young to be anything but bystanders early in the next First Turning. They will look like Silent Generation members, they won't call attention to themselves: conventional, mainstream model citizens, inoffensive. "As sensitive Artists replace Heroes in young adulthood, they become trusting helpmates, lending their expertise and cooperation to an era of growing social calm." "An Artist generation comes of age just as the post-Crisis social order is solidifying. With little room to maneuver, this 'inheritor generation' embarks early on approved life paths." See for example the gray flannel suits of the Silent Generation and how they proudly consider themselves technocrats and crowded into government and big corporations.
447 New Prophet Youth: The new Prophet generation born 2030-2052 are "a conjectural generation." Their first birth year should start about four years before the end of the Forth Turning, their last birth year about three years before the end of the next First Turning. By 2056 there will be 105 million of them ranging an age from 4-26, the post-Crisis generation of children half-parented by Millennials, half by Homelanders/Gen Z. This generation will be like the Boomers, they will have no memory of the prior Crisis, they'll be viewed as having limitless potential, raised to want for nothing, the world will be running well and their nation will be a great success for as long as they can remember, and they will follow the script for Prophets entering childhood. "As indulged Prophets replace Artists in childhood, they are nurtured with growing freedom in a fail-safe world designed by powerful adults."
450ff Finally note how the Prophet generation always shocks and surprises the generations before who expect them to grow up in an orderly fashion, following their footsteps. No one expected Jonathan Edwards to start his revolution or the Transcendentals to do theirs; they had no inkling that the Baby Boomers wouldn't want to just live in the same houses, drive bigger Pontiacs and work for the Pentagon, so the Second Turning will surprise the parents' generation and thus lead to a new Awakening in the late 2050s-2070s, another Second Turning, with a cultural awakening, protests, family arguments, youth rule-breaking utopian lifestyle experiments, and the Millennials and the Gen Z/Homelanders won't comprehend it. And then of course this will set up another Third Turning and Unraveling in the 2080s-2090s.
Epilogue
453 On the ritual and often curative four quadrant sand paintings done by the Navajos as well as Buddhist monks in Tibet. On the suffering, demoralization and confusion and disconnection of this era. On how we must conform to the season: if it's winter we should act like it's winter, knowing and acknowledging that winter has arrived allows us to see clearly and plan responsibly, as well as help those around us. Likewise given the archetypes of each generation, what is expected from our generation, what will the weaknesses be of our generation and how can we avoid them and as well harness our strengths?
[I like how this author is a classicist, he looks to the ancients and their understanding of cyclicality, and he's an anti-modernist, whereas the modernist thinks linearly rather than cyclically and everything is on an up-and-to-the-right path... this guy knows better]
457 On the Bhagavad Gita and its central message that no one should forsake his Dharma; one has to fulfill one's role, and one must do so with as much honor and proficiency and humanity as he can muster. One must live up to one's obligations.
458 Note also how modernity didn't allow us to escape the cycles of history: if anything it grooved them even more because we became unmindful of them and acted out our parts all the more automatically, it's quite ironic.
[Good quote here in the Acknowledgments on why it's a struggle for people to look at history in this way in the modern era but how useful it can be once you adopt the paradigm]. "Thinking about history archetypically, as the product of overlapping generational scripts, is an acquired taste, like the habit of closely observing how people dress or talk. It starts with a glance here and a comparison there, and then it draws you in, until you can't help but notice significant patterns in everything you see changing around you, from politics to pop culture."
To Read:
Quincy Wright: A Study of War
Leopold von Ranke: Civil Wars and Monarchy in France, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Leopold von Ranke: The Ottoman and the Spanish Empires, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Leopold von Ranke: History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, 1494–1514
David Halberstam: The Fifties
Abraham Lincoln: The "House Divided" speech
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl: Primitive Mentality
Ray Kurzweil: The Singularity Is Near
***Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: The Cycles of American History
Censorious: De Die Natale
George Modelski: Long Cycles in World Politics
Thomas Paine: The American Crisis (pamphlets)
***Ibn Khaldun: Muqaddimah (Introduction to History)
Erich Fromm: The Sane Society
Thomas Wolfe: You Can't Go Home Again
Lewis Mumford: The Brown Decades
Lewis Mumford: The City in History
***Henry Adams: The Education of Henry Adams
Anthony Giddens: The Nation-State and Violence
***Norbert Elias: The Civilizing Process
Mancur Olson: The Rise and Decline of Nations
William Dean Howells: The Rise of Silas Lapham
Eric Klinenberg: Going Solo
Craig S Karpel: The Retirement Myth: What You Must Know to Prosper in the Coming Meltdown
***Douglas Coupland: Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
Bruce Gibney: A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America
***William H. Whyte: The Organization Man