January 26, 1997

Generation Gaps

By MICHAEL LIND

Everything goes in cycles, the authors say, including American history

The Fourth Turning

An American Prophecy.

By William Strauss and Neil Howe.

382 pp. New York:

Broadway Books. $27.50.





he idea that history moves in cycles tends to be viewed with suspicion by scholars. Although historians as respected as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and David Hackett Fischer have made cases for the existence of rhythms and waves in the stream of events, cyclical theories tend to end up in the Sargasso Sea of pseudoscience, circling endlessly (what else?). ''The Fourth Turning'' is no exception.

This is the third book on the subject of American ''generations'' written by William Strauss, the director of the Capitol Steps, a Washington satire troupe, and Neil Howe, a senior adviser for the Concord Coalition, a group dedicated to balancing the budget. In case you missed the previous two, ''Generations: The History of America's Future'' and ''13th Gen,'' Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe claim that the key to understanding not only American but world history is ''a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum.'' Practically every major historical crisis, the authors assert, comes in a transition between saecula, or at distinct periods within a saeculum. This claim seems less impressive when it is revealed that one size of saeculum fits all facts. ''Eighty-five years passed between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the attack on Fort Sumter. That is exactly the same span as between Fort Sumter and the Declaration of Independence,'' they write. ''Add another decade or so to the length of these saecula, and you'll find this pattern continuing through the history of the colonists' English predecessors.'' The key to history, it appears, is the Fudge Factor.

After introducing the non-falsifiable concept of the elastic saeculum, Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe proceed to stupefy the determined reader with dozens of equally mystifying categories: not just Anglo-American Generations (from the millennial, 1982 onward, back to the Arthurian, 1433-60), but also Four Archetypes (Hero, Artist, Prophet, Nomad) and Four Turnings (whence the title). Put these together, and you get sentences like this: ''An Unraveling cannot lead back to an Awakening, or forward to a High, without a Crisis in between.''

Purveyors of pseudoscience typically try to validate their theories by brutally ransacking scholarship and mythology. Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe have a chart purporting to show that ''Four-Type Generational Cycles'' can be found in the writings of, among others, Arnold Toynbee, the Old Testament's authors, Homer and Samuel Huntington. Surely this is the first time that the Blind Bard and the Harvard political scientist have been neighbors, though there are other equally bizarre juxtapositions -- how about ''role models who combined G.I. confidence with boomer sensitivity (Merlin Olsen, Carl Sagan)''? Somehow, in rummaging through the library, the authors missed Yeats's gyres and Blake's Four Zoas. Perhaps next time. All of this huggermugger might be forgivable if the authors delivered on their promise: ''This is a book that turns history into prophecy.'' (I should disclose that they gently criticize Walter Dean Burnham and me, for not predicting in our own work exactly when the next American republic will be established; I wish I knew.)

Now and then, Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe are capable of brilliant apercus: ''By the time Saigon fell, both political parties were agreeing to spend the new 'peace dividend' on middle-class elder benefits.'' Even more provocative is the claim that the baby boomers, having shaped the radical youth culture of the 60's, will mature into repressive prigs. ''Calls are mounting for more objective grades, separation of boys and girls, abstinence-only sex education and school prayer -- along with longer school days, year-round schooling and stiffer truancy laws,'' the authors write. The boomers' millennial-generation offspring will be strictly policed by the gray-haired fans of classic rock. ''In their new attitudes toward children, boomers are playing out a psychodrama about how undisciplined they themselves have become.'' Ultimately, Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe foresee calls ''for a spare-no-expense national program of compulsory youth service.'' They themselves approve: ''We must battle against civic dysfunction wherever it appears.''

The boomers, then, will be even harder on their children than they were on their parents. The ''final boomer leaders,'' Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe predict, will be ''authoritarian, severe, unyielding''; ''the same boomers who in youth chanted 'Hell no, we won't go!' will emerge as America's most martial elder generation in living memory,'' they warn.

The boomers are to get their comeuppance when they are impoverished during a financial panic early in the next century. ''Following the Great Devaluation, boomers will find new ethical purpose in low consumption because, with America in Crisis, they will have no other choice,'' the authors write. Many boomers ''who spent a lifetime paying steep Social Security and Medicare taxes will be substantially excluded from benefits by an affluence test.'' Making a virtue of necessity, the aged Aquarians ''will eschew high-tech hospital care for homeopathy, minimalist self-care and the mind-body techniques Deepak Chopra calls 'quantum healing' '' -- thus perhaps accelerating generational succession.

Alas, most of the authors' predictions about the American future turn out to be as vague as those of fortune cookies: ''Decisive events will occur -- events so vast, powerful and unique that they lie beyond today's wildest hypotheses.'' And: ''Soon after the catalyst, a national election will produce a sweeping political realignment, as one faction or coalition capitalizes on a new public demand for decisive action.'' This faction, Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe inform us, will be ''Republicans, Democrats or perhaps a new party.''

Sometimes Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe try to have it both ways: ''America will become more isolationist than today in its unwillingness to coordinate its affairs with other countries but less isolationist in its insistence that vital national interests not be compromised.'' At other times they hedge their bets: the ''New Silent'' generation ''could well be the first to reach other planets in a rocket fleet,'' even as ''the Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation.'' All the blinking and whirring of their methodology permits them to make this daring prediction: ''The Fourth Turning will be a time of glory or ruin.'' The Macintosh has labored and brought forth a mouse. ''Human history,'' Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe write, ''seems logical in afterthought but a mystery in forethought.'' Indeed.