I joined a book club that originally focused on note-taking and personal knowledge management, topics I have written about frequently since. However, the group’s background leans toward history, economics, and politics, which led to our current read – The Fourth Turning.
The Fourth Turning has bothered me in how it describes our life experiences. Perhaps the political climate in our country in the run-up to this now-imminent election and my personal mindset-related events have a lot to do with my reaction. Sometimes I write to work through my own concerns and perhaps test what is going on in my head against the reality of what I can put on paper. Having an audience somehow helps.
The Fourth Turning was an effort by its authors, William Strauss and Neil Howe, to offer a “big history” theory proposing that history falls into stages roughly the length of a human lifespan, follows a predictable pattern, and repeats over and over. If you are convinced, you may begin to feel that humans have limited control over certain categories of life experience they will collectively face, depending on where individual lives fall in the ongoing pattern the theorists identify. The outcomes of these experience categories seem less predictable than the experiences themselves.
I don’t pretend to know much about history (as the lyrics of the song go) and these are complicated books, but I think I have the basics figured out and I will explain why the books have caused me some concern. The following are the basics.
The cycle of history is described as being roughly the duration of a human life. Each stage making up this cyclical pattern has certain characteristics.
- First Turning — High: A period of strong institutions, confidence in public life, and shared social values. Individualism tends to be less prominent as people work within established systems.
- Second Turning — Awakening: A period of spiritual or cultural upheaval in which people question established institutions and emphasize personal meaning and authenticity. Older norms lose influence as new values and movements emerge.
- Third Turning — Unraveling: A period when institutions weaken and public trust declines, while individualism and cultural divisions grow. Culture wars flourish. Society may appear energetic, but shared purpose becomes harder to sustain.
- Fourth Turning — Crisis: A period of severe disruption that tests existing institutions and social arrangements. Collective action may strengthen, and the crisis can lead to major institutional change and a new social order.
These historians propose we have been in the Fourth Turning and they mark the financial problems of 2008 as the beginning of this stage. It is not my intent to elaborate on the environment of each stage beyond identifying the sequence of stages and roughly what is happening. My point is to indicate we are in the Crisis stage within the more general context of the theory.
People, because they differ in age, experience a given turning at a different period of life. The historians describe these periods as artist, nomad, hero, and prophet (youngest to oldest period of approximately 20 years) with predictable pattern of roles and life challenges. These two category systems interact at a given point in time as I have tried to illustrate in the following chart. I have included more familiar generational titles we tend to be more familiar with so you can identify yourself within this framework.
So much for the background.
We are in the Fourth Turning and each of us is stuck with this situation. The authors contend in their most current book they we will be dealing with this dangerous and disruptive stage of history in the early 2030. We are in for a rough go, which, I admit, as someone in my late 70s, seems discouraging, and the authors don’t guarantee positive outcomes for anyone. Disruption can spiral out of control downward, with the authors admitting that we now have the means to destroy humanity and/or the planet, which, in the long course of history, seems a new possible outcome.
This history stuff was never a personal interest, and even when I became aware of some of the theoretical bases historians propose, it always seemed like historians could fall into a kind of Rorschach test, their theory or mindset biasing the events they selected to verify a theme or theory. Perhaps in response, the authors identify approaches history might take.
- History is random with no pattern. Things happen and people react.
- History is linear – within our book club, we decided this was to be called “up and to the right. This perspective proposes a continuous path toward improvement or advancement.
- Cyclical – the model the Fourth Turning advocates.
Within certain aspects of history – say science – it seems obvious to me that this area of history is linear. I struggle to understand what history is beyond a description of the past. Here is the one challenge Ithe Turning books forced in the way I tend to think about history. Strauss and Howe made predictions about what experiences we were likely to have as we worked our way through the Fourth Turning. I decided to excerpt a section of the Preface to the 1996 book on its more recent release in which they restate their predictions.
[Begin Quote]
While our purpose was not to predict particular news headlines, we did at one point (see chapter 10, “A Fourth Turning Prophecy”) offer five hypothetical scenarios for how this Crisis era might accelerate toward its climax: a terrorist WMD attack on U.S. cities using airplanes; a “tea party” fiscal rebellion triggering a fiscal meltdown; a Russian invasion of a former Soviet state; a pandemic requiring martial law; and a succession threat triggered by a state’s refusal to follow federal law. Back when we wrote the book, many readers told us these scenarios seemed utterly implausible. Today, they seem like a mere description of the world we live in. The first four have already happened. The fifth (a succession threat) remains as conspicuously on the table as a pistol in act one of a Chekhov play.
[End Quote]
Strauss, William; Howe, Neil. (1997). The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny. (Preface)
I found this content both impressive and scary. Historians can’t run experiments, but verifying a theory in other fields amounts to predicting experimental outcomes and then checking that the results match the predictions. In history, the lack of control makes setting up a manipulated environment impossible, but successful predictions seem about as close as historians can get to testing a model.
So?
I leave you with this theory a week before what I believe to be a consequential election. Politicians love scaring people by claiming how consequential a given election will be. There are consequences and then there are consequences. We may not be in control of the stages of history, but it does seem important that we participate.