Read & Listen
This 2023 book entitled: “The Fourth Turning Is Here …” by Neil Howe is a fascinating theory of how every generation (say every 20 to 25 years) reacts to or over corrects for errors of the previous generation. Moreover, such a process goes on for 4 cycles totaling about 100 years. Moreover, this is more than a hypothesis but contains data supporting the theory over many hundreds of years. Howe explains that this is a major driver and influence over the course of history not to be ignored.
The author, Howe, provides explanations of anomalous data apparently disagreeing with the theory; this was helpful in understanding the nuanced theory that he subscribes to. When this reviewer, upon recommendation to read this book, found a lower cost earlier version of the book co-authored by another person opted for the newest (year 2023) rewritten and published after the death of the co-author. The current book is worth purchasing and reading even if one might speculate that the earlier edition might be more readable. At times the author introduces some religiosity that some readers will consider adding value while others may see these additions as detracting from the main theme; the same observation is true for mentions of Donald Trump. This reviewer found the 2023 version, reviewed here challenging to read.
Illustrative of the style and substance of this book, the author writes: “Preface. This book presents a theory of modern history and a forecast of America’s future that have been in development for many decades. Bill Strauss and I began working on both the theory and the forecast back in the late 1980s, while writing Generations: The History of America’s Future, which was published in 1991. We released our most recent book-length exposition of both in The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, published in 1997. That was twenty-six years ago… Over the last several years, I have been showered by requests to reapply our theory to the future from the perspective of where America finds itself today. This book is my effort to do just that. I am authoring it alone. My longtime collaborator Bill Strauss passed away in the fall of 2007...”
Howe writes: “In writing this book, my key objective was to answer the questions today’s readers most want answered: When did our current Fourth Turning (or Crisis era) begin? How has it evolved? Where is it going? And how will it end?... Before this book is over, I will be asking readers to imagine a plausible future for America that will stretch deep into the twenty-first century… For readers who are new to our work, I include a concise introduction to our theory of generations and history. You the reader are of course invited to read our earlier works. But you don’t have to read them to understand this book… Over the course of this book, I hope to persuade you of a more ancient yet also more optimistic doctrine: that our collective social life, as with so many rhythmic systems in nature, requires seasons of sudden change and radical uncertainty in order for us to thrive over time. Or, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal: History has reasons that reason knows nothing of… In truth, every generation is what it has to be… Marcel Proust wrote that “what we call our future is the shadow that our past projects in front of us.” It’s easy to understand that our future must somehow be determined by our past...”
Howe writes: “History never looks like history when you are living through it.—
The old American republic is collapsing. And a new American republic, as yet unrecognizable, is under construction… Measures of national happiness and national pride (“ very proud to be an American”) have fallen to record lows… We can’t conduct a peaceful military withdrawal from an allied democracy or a peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next… America ended up with Covid deaths-per-capita on par with many of the poorest and least stable countries of the world. U.S. life expectancy, already declining since 2014, fell further in 2020 than in any single year since 1943, when America was suffering major battle casualties in Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. It fell again by seven months in 2021… The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives cannot maintain a national firearms registry, even though guns now kill more children annually than automobiles (an astonishing predicament America shares only with Yemen)… Like addicts acquiring tolerance, policymakers have backed themselves into a corner: The public braces itself for the dark hour when the Fed can no longer ease and Congress can no longer borrow no matter how badly the economy founders… Today’s older generations, including most of America’s leaders, were raised amid rising abundance.… In every sphere of life, [a] new mood of contracting horizons has been creating a new and different America… The Global Financial Crisis in 2008 was the pivot point. Until then, “globalization” seemed inexorable and global trade expanded (as a share of global production) almost every year… Until 2008, the number of democracies around the world was still expanding… Income is becoming more correlated with education (though less with race or ethnicity). Education in turn is becoming more correlated with health and longevity… Over the last decade, we have witnessed a declining birth rate and falling home ownership among young adults—and fewer business start-ups either by or for young adults… Congress dares not touch the growing share of federal outlays dedicated to “earned” senior benefits… Electoral choices are becoming ever-more lopsided, one way or the other, by state or county. Elected leaders from the two parties hardly talk to each other, much less socialize or discuss ideas… Half say that politics is a struggle between right and wrong. A third say that violence may be justified to achieve political goals, and two-thirds expect violence in response to future election results… Yet as Americans witness the old civic order collapse, they are moving beyond pessimism. They are coming to two inescapable conclusions. First, in order to survive and recover, the country must construct a new civic order powerful enough to replace what is now gone. And second, the new order must be imposed… by “our side,” which would rescue the country from its current paralysis, rather than by “the other side,” which would plunge the country into inescapable ruin… we are becoming… a nation of all-in tribal partisans,..”
Howe writes: “THE SEASONS OF HISTORY… At the core of modern history lies this remarkable pattern: Over the past five or six centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era—a new turning—every two decades or so. At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history’s periodic rhythm, in which the seasons of spring, summer, fall, and winter correspond to eras of rebirth, growth, entropy, and (finally) creative destruction: The First Turning is a High,… The Second Turning is an Awakening,… The Third Turning is an Unraveling,… The Fourth Turning is a Crisis,… The Fourth Turning—for now, let’s call it the Millennial Crisis—began with the global market crash of 2008 and has thus far witnessed a shrinking middle class, the “MAGA” rise of Donald Trump, a global pandemic, and new fears of a great-power war...”
Howe writes: “IT’S ALL HAPPENED BEFORE… So much for the shifts in national mood and generational alignment over the last saeculum, stretching back to the end of World War II. Have shifts like these ever happened before in earlier saecula? Yes—many times… When people start taking on less risk as individuals, they start taking on more risk as groups… WHAT LIES AHEAD… sometime before the mid-2030s, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II… Yet Americans will also gain, by the end of the Fourth Turning, a unique opportunity to achieve a new greatness as a people. They will be able to solve long-term national problems and perhaps lead the way in solving global problems as well. This too is part of the Fourth Turning historical track record… today’s generations have their own rendezvous with destiny… MEMORIES OF TOMORROW “The farther backward you look, the farther forward you are likely to see,” Winston Churchill once said… One central purpose of this book is to make sense of these turnings by distilling them into a recognizable pattern… The book is organized into three parts. Part One explores our cyclical perspective and explains our method and terminology… Part Two covers what can be expected to happen over the next decade or so… Part Three pushes further ahead in time, past the winter and into the spring season of the saeculum… Over the millennia, people have … develop[ed] three ways of understanding time: chaotic, cyclical, and linear… In chaotic time, history has no pattern… Enter cyclical time, whose prehistoric origins are informally rooted in the countless rhythms common to virtually all traditional societies: chanting, dancing, sleeping, waking, planting, harvesting, hunting, feasting, gestating, birthing, and dying… Unlike chaotic time, cyclical time is both descriptive and prescriptive… Clearly, cyclical time continues to shape our lives today… Even more decisive was the rise and spread of the Western monotheistic religions, which inspired the hope that we are all destined for more than a life tied to fortune’s wheel. The Judaic, Persian, Christian, and Islamic cosmologies all embraced the radically new concept of personal and historical time as a unidirectional drama. For humanity, time begins with a fall from grace; struggles forward in an intermediate sequence of trials, failures, and divine interventions; and ends with redemption and re-entry into the Kingdom of God… by the early Christian theologians remained a relatively arcane idea, fully understood by only a clerical elite. But in the sixteenth century, the Reformation and the spread of the printed Gospel ushered in a new urgency (and popular involvement) to linear history. For the first time, ordinary people throughout Europe began speculating about the historical “signs” of Christ’s second and final “coming”—and inventing new sects according to their expectations about when and how this would happen… England’s first New World settlements began as outposts of radical Calvinism and the radical Enlightenment. Not surprisingly, America has come to embody the most extreme expression of progressive linearism.
We introduced this long-term cycle earlier. We call it the saeculum. It is roughly eighty to one hundred years in length—the duration of a long human life—and it naturally divides itself into four basic moods or seasons. As for the “new social groups” that push this dynamic forward, these of course are generations, each of which is roughly eighteen to twenty-five years in length… As we shall see, the term saeculum dates back over two millennia. Generation, as both a word and concept, dates back even earlier, to the very dawn of civilization.””
Howe writes: “by the time the Romans adopted the ritual, it was known as the saeculum… approximating one hundred years… In De Die Natale, Censorinus described “the natural saeculum” as “the time span defined by the longest human life between birth and death”—… A more probable explanation is that the Romans were impressed by a strong 80-to-110-year rhythm that seemed to pulse through their history. During the republic, this rhythm appeared in the timing of Rome’s greatest perils and its subsequent renewals: the founding of the republic; the wars against the Veii and the Gauls, in which Rome was nearly overwhelmed; disastrous defeats in the Great Samnite War, which sent Rome officially into mourning; the near catastrophe of Hannibal’s invasion; and Rome’s desperate campaign against invading Germanic tribes… Rome did not soon forget these near-death experiences… During the empire, the saecular pattern resumed, with periodic renewals after civil wars or invasion:… the… late third-century recovery under Diocletian and Constantine. The first emperor to be baptized a Christian (on his deathbed), Constantine notably declined to hold another saecular games…”
Howe writes: “Following the Gregorian calendar reform of the 1580s, Protestant historians began to categorize Western history into centuries. During the seventeenth century, essayists and diarists began referring to such “natural” centuries as the prior “century of Spanish gold” or the current “grand century of Louis XIV.”… The first to contribute was Quincy Wright… In his Study, Wright observed that war-waging occurred “in approximately fifty-year oscillations, each alternate period of concentration being more severe.” Wright uncovered this pattern not only in modern American and European history, but also in Hellenistic and Roman times—… Wright’s timetable was corroborated by… Arnold J. Toynbee. In A Study of History, best known for its grand theory of the rise and fall of civilizations, Toynbee identified an “alternating rhythm” in a “Cycle of War and Peace.” Punctuating this cycle were quarter-century “general wars” that had occurred in Europe at roughly one-century intervals since the Renaissance. Toynbee identified and dated five repetitions… of this cycle, each initiated by the most decisive conflicts of its century… In addition to these five modern centuries, Toynbee identified similar cycles spanning six centuries of ancient Chinese and Hellenistic history… Like Wright, he linked this rhythm to the gradual decay of the “living memory of a previous war.”… Toynbee did something more. He subdivided the war cycle into four periods and identified a “breathing space” after a bigger war and a “general peace” after a smaller war. He sometimes seemed to imply that no wars occur during these intervening quarter-century eras.”
Howe writes: “Some wars, at least minor wars, have occurred during practically every quarter century of European (and American) history… Modelski calls this property “closure”—and that its particular timing is regulated by generational change: “It is not difficult to see how a concatenation of four generations might also determine the wave-length of the war-peace cycle.”… The Crisis ends one saeculum and launches the next.
Wallace hypothesized that all of today’s established religions are the ossified remains of the “prophetic and ecstatic visions” of past revitalization movements. Wallace did not say how often these movements arise, but he did note that “they are recurrent features in human history”…”
Howe writes: “Central to Khaldun’s outlook is a cycle of social beliefs and behavior. And driving that cycle is a dynamic of generational aging—which helps to explain history’s underlying regularity… These are the solstices of the saeculum: Crises and Awakenings. Through five centuries of Anglo-American history, no span of more than fifty years (the duration of two phases of life) has ever elapsed without the occurrence of a Crisis or an Awakening. Every generation has thus been shaped by either a Crisis or an Awakening during one of its… first two phases of life—and has encountered both a Crisis and an Awakening at some point through its life cycle.
When we first notice a generational difference, we often interpret it as a mere phase-of-life difference. “If you aren’t a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, but if you aren’t a conservative when you’re middle-aged, you have no head,” goes the old saying—which (in its various wordings) has been attributed to Edmund Burke, François Guizot, Benjamin Disraeli, and Winston Churchill.”
Howe writes: “As the twentieth century progressed, social scientists began routinely to weigh “generational effects”… as an explanation for changes in behaviors or beliefs. In recent decades, corporations have learned to practice “generational marketing.”… Each generation’s link with pop music, social media, and technology has become far better understood (and accepted) than its profound connection to nature and history.”
Howe writes: “the length of a generation… it should average about twenty-one years,… Like any social category (race, class, nationality), a generation can allow plenty of individual exceptions and be fuzzy at the edges…. to quote the Italian historian Giuseppe Ferrari, is that every generation “is born, lives, and dies.”… it helps to look for three attributes: first, a generation’s common location in history; second, its common beliefs and behavior; and third, its perceived membership in a common generation… Perceived membership confirms what many pollsters have long suspected about Boomers—that their true boundaries (born between 1943 and 1960) should start and stop a few years earlier than the fertility bulge used by the Census Bureau to define this generation (between 1946 and 1964)... Here’s the point: Every twenty years or so, Americans are surprised to encounter a new rising generation. They are struck by some publicized event or situation in which youth seem to behave very differently than the youth who came just before. This typically happens when the oldest members of the new generation are in their late twenties or early thirties… The average periodicity of these events is significant. At 21.5 years, it is very close to the average recent length of a phase of life—and of a generation… The generational birth years also coincide with the saecular rhythm of alternating Crises and Awakenings. When you compare dates, you will find that the first birth year of each generation usually lies just a few years before the opening or closing year of a Crisis or Awakening… Most ancient cultures not only divided up time into four parts, giving rise to four seasons...”
Howe writes: “When it assumes a persona, a generation, like an individual, can choose from only a limited number of available roles, each pre-scripted… Lewis Mumford sums up the pattern nicely: “The commonest axiom of history is that every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.” 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.”
Howe writes: “SEASONS OF AMERICAN HISTORY It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.—MARK TWAIN… As late as the 1830s, the free population of the United States was almost entirely Northern European and Protestant. “American” political debates were waged largely in terms of British precedents (think: common law, bill of rights, trial by jury), and the usage of the English language had become more standard in America than in England itself… The growing influx of new ethnicities (Catholic Germans and Irish in the 1850s; Jews, Italians, and Poles in the 1910s; Hispanics and Asians in the 1990s) has coincided with the rise of the Nomad archetype… As generations age, they together form new archetypal constellations that alter every aspect of society, from government and the economy to culture and family life… The modern Anglo-American saeculum has thus far produced six or seven repetitions of each turning.”
The author, Neil Howe, continues in this fashion to explain and defend his thesis.
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