do the post-war hippie boomer prophets sound like a fit?

the latchkey cynical generation x nomads?

millenials were children when this was written, but do they seem up to being heroes?

how about generation z artists?

it’s worth minding that this theory, like almost every narrative of american history, has a limited scope on middle and upper class values, which, until the past few decades, has been mostly WASPy. while their historical dominance merits their spotlight — discussing history from the vantage of those most involved in its shaping seems reasonable, as long as it’s not the only story — it is inconclusive to what extent the generational cycle theory accounts for potentially invalidating data about subalterns and minorities, or what other social mechanisms may be at play for this cycle to exist.

whether or not that’s fair or these generalities are otherwise compelling, i’m not trying to convince you of these quarternaries in themselves; of greatest concern for my purposes is what they highlight as the crises of american history: the american revolution, civil war, world war ii. in strauss and howe’s own words in the fourth turning (p. 5-6):

during each of [the] previous third turnings, americans felt as if they were drifting toward a cataclysm. and, as it turned out, they were. … all these unraveling eras were followed by bone-jarring crises so monumental that, by their end, american society emerged in a wholly new form. each time, the change came with scant warning. … sudden sparks (boston tea party, john brown’s raid and execution, black tuesday) transformed the public mood, swiftly and permanently. … as a new social contract was created, people … used the crisis to elevate themselves and their nation to a higher plane of civilization: in the 1790s, they triumphantly created the modern world’s first democratic republic. in the late 1860s, wounded but reunited, they forged a genuine nation extending new guarantees of liberty and equality. in the late 1940s, they constructed the most promethean super-power ever seen. the fourth turning is history’s great discontinuity. it ends one epoch and begins another.

what poetry.

they also predicted a fourth crisis to start around 2005 and end by the 2030s; that’s soon!

eric lowe believes the 2008 financial crisis, the one we never really recovered from, started it off. the end of the 2030s approaches, and with it (p. 256),

the community instinct regenerates … [people] rediscover the value of unity, teamwork, and social discipline. far more than before, people comply with authority, accept the need for public sacrifice, and shed anything extraneous to the survival needs of their community. this is a critical threshold: people either coalesce as a nation and culture-- or rip hopelessly and permanently apart.

their work made serious waves upon release; apparently al gore and newt gringrich loved it. steve bannon still does. strauss and howe coined the term millennial and are recognized as the source of our widespread generational awareness and consciousness. howe is still recognized as the preeminent researcher and thinker on generations.

okay so what

given how the 2010s progressed and 2020s have begun, this theory resonates with me more than ever.

when i first truly learned about united states history in high school, i didn’t have to be told that these three wars were the biggest turning points of the country. they stood out — the country formed, it fought itself over (among other things) a deep hypocrisy, it became a world superpower.

and as a millennial, i’ve long sensed the social fabric fraying with the excesses of individualism. maybe i read too much crimethinc and adbusters as a teen, but for all the post-cold war end of history tranquility, the rootless alienation of consumerism and pop culture never felt right. nor post-9/11 neocon nation building and global policing, nor post-2008 neolib corporate and financial impunity, nor post-2012 intensification of partisan sorting, nor the increasingly-obvious elite consensus and corruption, nor growing ecological collapse.

i sensed — and to be honest, just a little, yearned — that there’s something big on my generation’s shoulders. strauss and howe’s theory validated me. i am seen

that’s great for your feelings what about reason

of course, there’s wars and technological changes in all periods of history; every generation faces their own important struggles, but it’s the social body’s reaction to them that matter. (p. 117) “more often than not, technology tailors itself to the national mood.”

strauss and howe see high-era wars as (p. 119) “echoes of the prior crisis” like the korean war confirming the cold war order; awakening-era wars as “enmeshed with passions of the youth” and remembered unfavorably, as with the vietnam war’s righteous boomer revolt; unraveling wars — like wwi or the gulf war — are “victorious and momentarily popular”, but don’t resolve underlying problems.

crisis wars, like what we are approaching, are the biggest conflagrations; (p. 119) “large, deadly, and decisive.” we have to confront everything. wholly rise or fall —- not that war at any point is inevitable, but “every fourth turning since the fifteenth century has culminated in total war.”

even if the eminence of the crisis events stands out to you too, you may still be thinking — historical cycles, though… really? sounds pretty pseudoscientific. where does one end and another begin? what about other countries?

great points. cycles are of course common in nature and society. very common. i could wax poetic about it, how time is inherently bound up in cycles; day to night, season to season, cradle to grave. the cell has a life cycle, as does the organism, so why not the social body?

strauss and howe trace our social body back to the renaissance and its birthing of a european generation cycle that, through english colonials, was transplanted and developed in greater isolation in the americas. so are we still tied to them, like monthlies remaining pseudoscientifically synchronized?

uh, maybe? strauss and howe talk a bit about global and regional cycles of war and peace. where does the social body of a people begin or end? things get messy quickly. “each [nation] could be running on its own somewhat different saecular cycle, and each could be interfering in the affairs of its neighbors.” (p. 41-42) so clear regularity may be rare, but does that mean there’s no underlying pattern, no fundamental frequency?

i hear your YES, but i see the possibility; where strauss and lowe’s model is weak in mechanism and theory, it may be strong in predictive power, at least with the (relative) geographic and cultural independence of the united states. damn everyone else; we can at least test the theory here. usa! usa!

what does trip me up is the the relatively large range between crises in the united states, 80 to 110 years. strauss and howe say one european cycle was up to 130! additionally, strauss and howe posit that there was no fourth generation before the civil war, suggesting it was some particular aberration. sounds pretty squishy, and easy for constructing post-hoc generational divides between any two major events for a just-so story.

but if we accept the acausality and generalities of the cycle as an insufficient critique, how could we make this historical model more rigorous?

it gets weirder

coincidentally, strangely, their cyclical model of history correlates with a natural phenomena that is much more precise: the astronomical cycle of uranus.

that is, imagining the sky split into 360 degrees, whenever uranus get near where it was during birth of the united states, the aforementioned crises have erupted as the country shifts to a new paradigm.

now that’s a much more narrow predictive window; while strauss and howe’s model can’t give a narrow range for change, this simple cycle can.