Piling Deferents upon Epicycles upon Saecula.
We'll close this year of reading with Neil Howe's The Fourth Turning is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End. We're all the way to Book Review No. 16 and I really should rethink how much energy to devote to what areas of venting and ranting I engage in in 2024.
If popular books were presented and sold like college textbooks, The Fourth Turning is Here would more likely be presented as Generations 3e, with some acknowledgement of the passing of coauthor William Strauss since the publication of Generations 2e, er, The Fourth Turning.
In like manner, I could keep this book review short by reissuing that review of Generations. "Generations prefigures The Fourth Turning (the churlish will note that many of the most colorful passages in Turning are lifted verbatim from Generations) but it also suggest that generation-naming, and epoch-naming, are ad hoc at best, and as a theory of social development, it might work best retrospectively." And so it is, unto the third Generations, many of those pet passages from the first edition recur.
In that first edition, the early years of the 21st century promised to be interesting, but saecular upheaval was only a possibility.Those events included the hung election of 2000, the September 11 terrorist attacks, the collapse of exotic finance commencing in 2007, and the unraveling of the European monetary union. Generations anticipates a secular crisis commencing around 2010 (a little late) with a resolution in the late 2020s. The public response has been a mix of internal dissension (characteristic of the 1960s), deferral and calls for compromise (characteristic of the early 1990s), and exaggeration of the threat and calls for consensus (worked after Pearl Harbor, not at all characteristic of the early 2000s).
Since then, there have been more redefinitions of saecular boundaries than there have been revisions of the Biden era employment figures. Was the hung Florida election of 2000 the trigger for a Fourth Turning? The terrorist attacks in September 2001? In The Third Edition, the trigger is the collapse of the overleveraged financial sector in 2008. Deferents upon epicycles.
I complained about the ad-hoc nature of those turnings years ago.The generational analysis in Fourth Turning breaks down, just a bit. There is a coalition of Silents and hippies (the latter being older Baby Boomers) insisting on talk, talk, talk, wait, wait, wait. There is a coalition of yuppies and preppies (younger Baby Boomers and older Thirteeners) posting most of the bellicose weblogs.
Thanks to modern medicine, many of those squawkers, twenty years older, are still with us. Because more people are living longer and deteriorating less rapidly in old age, each of the traditional generations lives longer, and at any time, there might be five, rather than four, birth cohorts in positions of authority (look no further than Washington, D.C. for what modern medicine can do) and the transitions from controlling to rising generations breaks down. That leads to all sorts of intellectual gymnastics. Consider this passage from page 249.
[T]he early 2030s appear to be the most likely years for the resolution of the Millennial Crisis and the opening of the First Turning of the next saeculum. Working backward from there, the most likely year for the climax would perhaps be around 2030.
Such dates of course must be regarded as probability epicenters. The resolution could arrive earlier by three or four years. Or it could arrive later - though here the margin of error is larger since we may be underestimating the dilation of turning length. Beyond these margins of error, however, we risk encountering an anomaly. If the Millennial Crisis were to end before 2029 or after 2038, the next turning would arrive either too early or too late for the phase-of-life transitions of today's living generations. In this case, we would conclude that history had broken away from the seasonal pattern.
Could the Millennial Crisis become such an anomaly? Perhaps. The historical track record is too brief to rule anything out.
Compared with such wisdom, the climate extrapolation models and the coronavirus contagion models are paradigms of precision. Now turn to page 399 on the forging of the Hero archetype.These coming-of-age youth won't have any advance knowledge of who exactly will be asked to serve in the Millennial Crisis climax. Nor do we. This is why we must await the outcome of particular events before we can determine for certain the birth year boundary between Millennials and Homelanders [also known as Zoomers or Generation Woke - Ed.] Two questions will be critical. First, at what age will Americans be asked to serve in the conflict? Second, when will the Crisis climax occur?
All of the above offered without apology or explanation from one of the authors of Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. Back of the bus, Millies.
The appeal of generational analysis rests in an observation of long standing: Strong people create good times. Good times create weak people. Weak people create hard times. Hard times create strong people. To an extent, that observation parallels the evolution of the Great Power Saeculum and the Millennial Crisis.Reactives directing Civics during hard times.
Civics directing Adaptives creating the good times.
Adaptives directing Idealists during the good times.
Idealists directing the next cohort of Reactives creating the hard times.
It's the Reactives and Adaptives that are the drivers.
I deliberately used the language of Generations rather than the more recent Nomad, Hero, Artist, Prophet, and in my formulations the "recessive" generations, the Reactives and the Adaptives play a more important role than in most popular formulations, in which the Heroes and the Prophets are the leading actors. There's grudging recognition of that reality at page 304. "Only with the passage of decades does the nation succeed into the hands of those who don't recall the starving winter." With longevity, that institutional memory persists, but eventually only those who have known only relatively good times assume they will go on forever, and they squander the victory dividend. Later on that page we readIf the pattern repeats, we can expect the next tilt toward the rising generation will be toward Millennials and perhaps by extension to the Homelanders as well.
Which archetype benefits the most from this rhythm? The Artist, who comes of age early in the saeculum-when the deeds of the rewarded young Hero are still fresh in memory, when economic equality is high and rising, and when the nation is busy investing in its future. Which archetype is penalized the most? The Nomad, who comes of age late in the saeculum-when the deeds of the rewarded elderly Hero are largely forgotten, when economic equality is low and falling, and when the nation is busy mortgaging its future.
Again, look no further than Washington, D.C. and those superannuated Adaptives mortgaging the future. That's not original with me, here's Outside the Beltway's James Joyner, a year ago, with "The Silents and Boomers have been in charge too long." He, too, sees post-seasonal behavior among all the canonical generations, which is what you expect when the elders get to stay hale and hearty in greater numbers for more years.Modern protest movements, whether Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter, do seem to be aping the civil rights era. I’m not sure that’s the problem, though. Rather, the frustrations being voiced now are more diffuse and the solutions less clear. Removing legal barriers to Blacks voting, attending school, and otherwise participating in society is simply easier to understand and achieve than unfocused angst over income inequality or even more discrete outrage over police brutality. But Occupy, in particular, did seem rooted in a sense that going to college no longer magically puts one on a road to the upper-middle class.
There are still unresolved policy challenges from the American Founding and from the institution of the rules-based international order. Maybe, though, each reset of the values regime builds on the successes of the previous values regimes and there's less to reset.
This time, Neil Howe admits of the possibility that the new values regime will be emergent, subject to false starts and errors along the way, and whatever implants will sow the seeds of its own destruction. Although commencing at page 421 he anticipates broad consensus on the goals and policies of that new values regime (think "rules-based international order" as established in 1945) at page 423 he notes, "Just as strength of community loyalty reaches its saecular flood tide, the reach of community authority surges over its usual boundaries." And thus does the push-back begin. There's an instructive Sasha Stone essay offering a two-stroke cycle of history as an alternative to the four-stroke cycle of Generations that offers, "Humans always take a good thing too far, creating enough misery for the pendulum to swing again." Thus does civil rights become the diversity bureaucracies, for instance.
Another possibility, as Joy Pullmann of the Federalist suggests, is that there is more than one way to conduct a "regeneracy" as the institutions break down. Fourth Turning focuses on governmental efforts, including (sadly) asset relief and social distancing as trials of new methods of governing. The small platoons might have a say.In our time, the failures of our ruling class to effectively govern are sorting people into harmonized communities that solve their own problems. People are now moving states and cities to get away from the incapacity of elites in both parties to address basic human needs like sanitation, evenly applied rule of law, good employment, education, reasonable living costs, and keeping the roads maintained.
People who are paying attention are starting new publishing houses, experimenting with new artistic outlets, finding doctors who align with their values, and developing parallel networks of educating and caring for the sick outside of the utterly broken systems that elites directly control. People are questioning conventional, Big Pharma “health” prescriptions, and taking charge of their own health.
Or, perhaps, the secular focus on the saeculum is looking in the wrong place. The crisis might be spiritual. "No civilized man, no philosopher, no historian, no artist, no student of political things can avert his eyes from the problem of spiritual collapse." I'll let Tablet contributor Liel Leibovitz offer the benediction.Observe the history of every other nation, more or less, and, at some point, the social contract theory creeps in. The idea behind it is simple: Human beings, each an atomized individual, band together and trade away some of their liberties in return for collective security. I will allow the state to collect taxes and set rules, and the state, in turn, will protect me from my neighbor should he rise up to smite me. It’s a fine idea, except, you know, being all wrong: As one famous French philosopher quipped, the social contract theory was composed either by men who had no children or who had forgotten their own childhoods. Because look at a child, any child, and you realize that we’re not merely atomized individuals, unrooted in family or faith or community. And you realize, too, that a contract is terrible precisely because it offers no theory of change and growth: Sign on the dotted line, and you have no choice but to follow the precise same contours for ever and ever.
A covenant is a very different beast. A covenant makes you sign first and then, God willing, grow up and prove yourself worthy of your word. Abraham, the ur-covenanter, strikes his deal with God and is then tested again and again and again until he evolves to become the man God always knew he could be. A covenant is another way of saying, “I believe in you, so please don’t prove me wrong.”
It’s no coincidence that the Hebrew name for the United States is Artzot Ha’Brit, the lands of the covenant. Every century or so, America renews its covenant with its creator, and no renewal looks like another. We entered this covenant first in 1776, proclaiming liberty throughout all the land. We renewed it in 1861, fighting a bitter war to erase the stain of slavery. And in 1964, we rose again to make sure we don’t slide into bigotry and bile. Do the math, and you realize we’re due to have another renewal pretty soon.
What would it look like? There’s no real way of telling, not without risking prophecy’s sweet intoxication that turns prudent people into prattling morons. It would likely be jagged, and maybe even violent. But the renewal itself doesn’t matter much; what counts is what comes next, which, traditionally, is a century or so of American flourishing. Our goodness and our greatness are intertwined; reaffirm one, and the other will follow.
And everywhere I travel in America these days, I see Americans reaffirming goodness.
Renewing the covenant includes rewriting the social contract. Stephen "Vodka Pundit" Green notes that reaffirming goodness includes ... being delivered from evil. "The elites who manage America’s statecraft don’t like America very much or understand her at all, so it should come as no surprise that they consistently fail to promote or protect her interests." God will help those who help themselves.
Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.
If popular books were presented and sold like college textbooks, The Fourth Turning is Here would more likely be presented as Generations 3e, with some acknowledgement of the passing of coauthor William Strauss since the publication of Generations 2e, er, The Fourth Turning.
In like manner, I could keep this book review short by reissuing that review of Generations. "Generations prefigures The Fourth Turning (the churlish will note that many of the most colorful passages in Turning are lifted verbatim from Generations) but it also suggest that generation-naming, and epoch-naming, are ad hoc at best, and as a theory of social development, it might work best retrospectively." And so it is, unto the third Generations, many of those pet passages from the first edition recur.
In that first edition, the early years of the 21st century promised to be interesting, but saecular upheaval was only a possibility.Those events included the hung election of 2000, the September 11 terrorist attacks, the collapse of exotic finance commencing in 2007, and the unraveling of the European monetary union. Generations anticipates a secular crisis commencing around 2010 (a little late) with a resolution in the late 2020s. The public response has been a mix of internal dissension (characteristic of the 1960s), deferral and calls for compromise (characteristic of the early 1990s), and exaggeration of the threat and calls for consensus (worked after Pearl Harbor, not at all characteristic of the early 2000s).
Since then, there have been more redefinitions of saecular boundaries than there have been revisions of the Biden era employment figures. Was the hung Florida election of 2000 the trigger for a Fourth Turning? The terrorist attacks in September 2001? In The Third Edition, the trigger is the collapse of the overleveraged financial sector in 2008. Deferents upon epicycles.
I complained about the ad-hoc nature of those turnings years ago.The generational analysis in Fourth Turning breaks down, just a bit. There is a coalition of Silents and hippies (the latter being older Baby Boomers) insisting on talk, talk, talk, wait, wait, wait. There is a coalition of yuppies and preppies (younger Baby Boomers and older Thirteeners) posting most of the bellicose weblogs.
Thanks to modern medicine, many of those squawkers, twenty years older, are still with us. Because more people are living longer and deteriorating less rapidly in old age, each of the traditional generations lives longer, and at any time, there might be five, rather than four, birth cohorts in positions of authority (look no further than Washington, D.C. for what modern medicine can do) and the transitions from controlling to rising generations breaks down. That leads to all sorts of intellectual gymnastics. Consider this passage from page 249.
[T]he early 2030s appear to be the most likely years for the resolution of the Millennial Crisis and the opening of the First Turning of the next saeculum. Working backward from there, the most likely year for the climax would perhaps be around 2030.
Such dates of course must be regarded as probability epicenters. The resolution could arrive earlier by three or four years. Or it could arrive later - though here the margin of error is larger since we may be underestimating the dilation of turning length. Beyond these margins of error, however, we risk encountering an anomaly. If the Millennial Crisis were to end before 2029 or after 2038, the next turning would arrive either too early or too late for the phase-of-life transitions of today's living generations. In this case, we would conclude that history had broken away from the seasonal pattern.
Could the Millennial Crisis become such an anomaly? Perhaps. The historical track record is too brief to rule anything out.
Compared with such wisdom, the climate extrapolation models and the coronavirus contagion models are paradigms of precision. Now turn to page 399 on the forging of the Hero archetype.These coming-of-age youth won't have any advance knowledge of who exactly will be asked to serve in the Millennial Crisis climax. Nor do we. This is why we must await the outcome of particular events before we can determine for certain the birth year boundary between Millennials and Homelanders [also known as Zoomers or Generation Woke - Ed.] Two questions will be critical. First, at what age will Americans be asked to serve in the conflict? Second, when will the Crisis climax occur?
All of the above offered without apology or explanation from one of the authors of Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. Back of the bus, Millies.
The appeal of generational analysis rests in an observation of long standing: Strong people create good times. Good times create weak people. Weak people create hard times. Hard times create strong people. To an extent, that observation parallels the evolution of the Great Power Saeculum and the Millennial Crisis.Reactives directing Civics during hard times.
Civics directing Adaptives creating the good times.
Adaptives directing Idealists during the good times.
Idealists directing the next cohort of Reactives creating the hard times.
It's the Reactives and Adaptives that are the drivers.
I deliberately used the language of Generations rather than the more recent Nomad, Hero, Artist, Prophet, and in my formulations the "recessive" generations, the Reactives and the Adaptives play a more important role than in most popular formulations, in which the Heroes and the Prophets are the leading actors. There's grudging recognition of that reality at page 304. "Only with the passage of decades does the nation succeed into the hands of those who don't recall the starving winter." With longevity, that institutional memory persists, but eventually only those who have known only relatively good times assume they will go on forever, and they squander the victory dividend. Later on that page we readIf the pattern repeats, we can expect the next tilt toward the rising generation will be toward Millennials and perhaps by extension to the Homelanders as well.
Which archetype benefits the most from this rhythm? The Artist, who comes of age early in the saeculum-when the deeds of the rewarded young Hero are still fresh in memory, when economic equality is high and rising, and when the nation is busy investing in its future. Which archetype is penalized the most? The Nomad, who comes of age late in the saeculum-when the deeds of the rewarded elderly Hero are largely forgotten, when economic equality is low and falling, and when the nation is busy mortgaging its future.
Again, look no further than Washington, D.C. and those superannuated Adaptives mortgaging the future. That's not original with me, here's Outside the Beltway's James Joyner, a year ago, with "The Silents and Boomers have been in charge too long." He, too, sees post-seasonal behavior among all the canonical generations, which is what you expect when the elders get to stay hale and hearty in greater numbers for more years.Modern protest movements, whether Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter, do seem to be aping the civil rights era. I’m not sure that’s the problem, though. Rather, the frustrations being voiced now are more diffuse and the solutions less clear. Removing legal barriers to Blacks voting, attending school, and otherwise participating in society is simply easier to understand and achieve than unfocused angst over income inequality or even more discrete outrage over police brutality. But Occupy, in particular, did seem rooted in a sense that going to college no longer magically puts one on a road to the upper-middle class.
There are still unresolved policy challenges from the American Founding and from the institution of the rules-based international order. Maybe, though, each reset of the values regime builds on the successes of the previous values regimes and there's less to reset.
This time, Neil Howe admits of the possibility that the new values regime will be emergent, subject to false starts and errors along the way, and whatever implants will sow the seeds of its own destruction. Although commencing at page 421 he anticipates broad consensus on the goals and policies of that new values regime (think "rules-based international order" as established in 1945) at page 423 he notes, "Just as strength of community loyalty reaches its saecular flood tide, the reach of community authority surges over its usual boundaries." And thus does the push-back begin. There's an instructive Sasha Stone essay offering a two-stroke cycle of history as an alternative to the four-stroke cycle of Generations that offers, "Humans always take a good thing too far, creating enough misery for the pendulum to swing again." Thus does civil rights become the diversity bureaucracies, for instance.
Another possibility, as Joy Pullmann of the Federalist suggests, is that there is more than one way to conduct a "regeneracy" as the institutions break down. Fourth Turning focuses on governmental efforts, including (sadly) asset relief and social distancing as trials of new methods of governing. The small platoons might have a say.In our time, the failures of our ruling class to effectively govern are sorting people into harmonized communities that solve their own problems. People are now moving states and cities to get away from the incapacity of elites in both parties to address basic human needs like sanitation, evenly applied rule of law, good employment, education, reasonable living costs, and keeping the roads maintained.
People who are paying attention are starting new publishing houses, experimenting with new artistic outlets, finding doctors who align with their values, and developing parallel networks of educating and caring for the sick outside of the utterly broken systems that elites directly control. People are questioning conventional, Big Pharma “health” prescriptions, and taking charge of their own health.
Or, perhaps, the secular focus on the saeculum is looking in the wrong place. The crisis might be spiritual. "No civilized man, no philosopher, no historian, no artist, no student of political things can avert his eyes from the problem of spiritual collapse." I'll let Tablet contributor Liel Leibovitz offer the benediction.Observe the history of every other nation, more or less, and, at some point, the social contract theory creeps in. The idea behind it is simple: Human beings, each an atomized individual, band together and trade away some of their liberties in return for collective security. I will allow the state to collect taxes and set rules, and the state, in turn, will protect me from my neighbor should he rise up to smite me. It’s a fine idea, except, you know, being all wrong: As one famous French philosopher quipped, the social contract theory was composed either by men who had no children or who had forgotten their own childhoods. Because look at a child, any child, and you realize that we’re not merely atomized individuals, unrooted in family or faith or community. And you realize, too, that a contract is terrible precisely because it offers no theory of change and growth: Sign on the dotted line, and you have no choice but to follow the precise same contours for ever and ever.
A covenant is a very different beast. A covenant makes you sign first and then, God willing, grow up and prove yourself worthy of your word. Abraham, the ur-covenanter, strikes his deal with God and is then tested again and again and again until he evolves to become the man God always knew he could be. A covenant is another way of saying, “I believe in you, so please don’t prove me wrong.”
It’s no coincidence that the Hebrew name for the United States is Artzot Ha’Brit, the lands of the covenant. Every century or so, America renews its covenant with its creator, and no renewal looks like another. We entered this covenant first in 1776, proclaiming liberty throughout all the land. We renewed it in 1861, fighting a bitter war to erase the stain of slavery. And in 1964, we rose again to make sure we don’t slide into bigotry and bile. Do the math, and you realize we’re due to have another renewal pretty soon.
What would it look like? There’s no real way of telling, not without risking prophecy’s sweet intoxication that turns prudent people into prattling morons. It would likely be jagged, and maybe even violent. But the renewal itself doesn’t matter much; what counts is what comes next, which, traditionally, is a century or so of American flourishing. Our goodness and our greatness are intertwined; reaffirm one, and the other will follow.
And everywhere I travel in America these days, I see Americans reaffirming goodness.
Renewing the covenant includes rewriting the social contract. Stephen "Vodka Pundit" Green notes that reaffirming goodness includes ... being delivered from evil. "The elites who manage America’s statecraft don’t like America very much or understand her at all, so it should come as no surprise that they consistently fail to promote or protect her interests." God will help those who help themselves.
Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.