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Introduction
A new sub-genre of books recently seized our imagination: nonfiction books that are quietly influential. They don’t grace many mainstream reading lists or undergraduate syllabi. The first few that came to mind have some uncanny similarities. For example, many were published in the 1990’s and made eerie predictions about the impending twenty-first century. Members of certain sub-cultures outside of the academic mainstream swear by their principles. They make interesting, often heterodox, reads and are relevant to our study of important ideas. The first book we thought to cover in this mini-series was The Fourth Turning¸ by William Strauss and Neil Howe.
The Fourth Turning is the most famous of a series of works in which Strauss and Howe, both writers with backgrounds in the US government, laid the foundation of what is now known as Strauss-Howe generational theory. Their theory is based on supposed patterns that recur over time and are part of the natural rhythms of social experience. In the last five hundred years of Anglo-American history in particular, there are four basic generational types that cycle predictably. They follow the archetype of the prophet, the nomad, the hero and the artist. Generations fit into one of these molds depending on how they are raised and the events that occurred as they came of age. The combined four-part cycle “spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum.”
The Dynamics of a Saeculum
The interaction between the dominant generation at a point in time (those clustered around the age of sixty-five) and other coexistent generations sets the societal mood, called a turning. According to Strauss and Howe, the four turnings of a saeculum comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy and destruction:
The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.
The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime
The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants
The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one
Each turning comes with an identifiable mood, and the mood shifts always catch people by surprise. The previous fourth turnings that Strauss and Howe identify in American history ended with the American Revolutionary war, the American Civil War and World War II. Writing in 1997, Strauss and Howe thought they were living through the gloomy malaise of a Third Turning. They predicted that forces on the move at the time of writing would culminate in a Fourth Turning beginning some time around 2005 and culminating in the late 2020’s.
“Decisive events will occur – events so vast, powerful and unique that they lie beyond today’s wildest hypotheses…For a brief time, the American firmament will be malleable in ways that would stagger the today’s Unraveling-era mindset…With or without war, American society will be transformed into something different. The emergent society may be something better, a nation that sustains its Framers’ visions with a robust new pride. Or it may be something unspeakably worse. The Fourth Turning will be a time of glory or ruin.”
Are We in a Fourth Turning?
While Strauss and Howe garnered criticism for their unscientific methodology at the time of publication, they won more followers in the twenty-first century once predictions seemed to come true. Some pinned the September 11th terrorist attacks, the 2008 Financial crisis or even the recent pandemic as events consistent with a Fourth Turning. The idea seems to be especially popular amongst Americans working in financial markets, regardless of their political ideology.
We suspect that the Strauss-Howe generational theory has gained special currency among financial market participants because the analysis it recommends resembles how certain types of investments are analyzed. It attempts to be quantitative and to incorporate recurring cyclical trends, resembling the analysis of commodity cycles or of businesses whose fate is closely tied to the stage of the business cycle.
Historical timelines contain too many variables and too high a degree of randomness to safely be so deterministic about how they progress. The generation is a useful unit of analysis, but we don’t see it as the leading unit of action in history. After all, the USA alone has a great diversity of values and behavioral patterns within each of the last few generations. To the extent that the twenty-first century has been full of societal trauma, we prefer the view that the vacation from history we’ve taken since 1945 or 1989 has finally ended. We agree with Strauss and Howe that their roots lie in problems we’ve kicked the can down the road on for too long, such as public health preparedness, public indebtedness, and social decay. Taken as a whole, it has been valuable to explore The Fourth Turning; we’ve learned why it’s so attractive to some and the extent to which we can glean morsels for our own understanding.
All the best,
The Citizen Scholar Team
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Discussion #32: The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, by William Strauss and Neil Howe