By Rich Erwin
Humans love patterns. We love to create them, and we love to find them. Sometimes, the more they seem to wink at us, call out to us, the more we want to fully perceive them.
Along these lines, many people seem to need a metanarrative of one form or another to provide a greater sense of where their lives may fit within the multiple concepts of existence, culture and power, especially when life can feel uncertain. William Strauss and Neil Howe have spent just over three decades trying to weave a circular American metanarrative together, an ultimate pattern of sorts, and explain away any potential frays within its fabric.
SEASONS OF CHANGE
Howe and Strauss began their first work on the concept in 1991, with Generations: The History of America’s Future, which used generational biographies as examples of dominant mindsets between the years 1584 and 2069. These were followed by 13th Gen in 1993 and The Fourth Turning in 1997. They’ve declared themselves the creators of the term “millennials,” first using the term for Generations, later publishing Millennials Rising in 2000 and Millennials go to College in 2007. Beyond creating modern-day generational social memes, they also predicted in Generations a major event in the early 21st Century that would draw Americans together, which coincided neatly with the events of 9/11. This specific event plus the rise of marketers further developing this generational concept to better sell their goods and services has cemented their relatively small but very significant place within American culture.
The Fourth Turning is Here is essentially a second, updated attempt at The Fourth Turning. What’s presently known as the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory anchors their work. Within their Anglo-American Saecula, each saeculum, approximately 80-100 years, has four shorter periods of 20-25 years, known as turnings. These follow a pattern of High, Awakening, Unraveling and Crisis, the last of which is eventually resolved and results in both a new saeculum and a new High turning. Each of these turnings have comparable dominant generations, or archetypes, though all four exist within a turning - Heroes, Artists, Prophets and Nomads.
During a “High” turning, society responds to resolution of its immediately previous Crisis period by wanting to institutionalize the ideals most valued during that time. Communitarian values are strong and individualism is less valued, which can lead some to feel stifled by the new majority consensus.
An “Awakening” follows, when the development of one’s inner life becomes increasingly paramount and rebellion increases against the generation that made the High period possible, typically with accusations of cultural and spiritual poverty, or of willful ignorance of those not benefiting from the consensus of the High period.
This eventually results in an “Unravelling,” when the desire for individualism is at its peak and trust in communitarianism and public institutions hit their nadir. Society increasingly polarizes between specific groups and their related power blocs become increasingly mistrustful of one another. Reaching consensus becomes somewhere between difficult and impossible.
WEEKS WHEN DECADES HAPPEN
Eventually a catalytic event or set of events occur, resulting in a “Crisis,” which begins a process of galvanizing people towards wanting a new, action-oriented consensus, accepting self-sacrifice, greater communitarianism and lesser individualism willingly as the price for dealing with both the Crisis and the Unraveling that many see as having provided the environment resulting in the Crisis.
Sometimes this is perceived as a necessary response to war from without – World War II, the American Revolution and the friction between England and Spain in the mid-16th Century, which resulted in England’s defense against the Spanish Armada. Other times, two polarized factions from the Unraveling decide that they and only they are the way forward, which results in war from within.
What is less discussed in the book is that, when from within, one of the two factions is often part of the consensus during the previous High – steadfastly against the turmoil of the Awakening and Unravelling, determined to retain their power and privilege and increasingly hardening their stance over time.
Examples would be the Slave Power of the post-Revolutionary and Antebellum period before the American Civil War; Jacobitism, which ruled England just before the Glorious Revolution, which was more realistically the last gasp within the British Isles of the combination of the Divine Right of the monarchy to rule with anti-nationalist Catholicism, which believed that the Vatican held sway over monarchs; and feudalism within England, which led to competing claims for the leadership of England and the eventual exhaustion through war of the Lancastrians and Yorkists, falling into each other’s arms though the Yorkists were technically victorious, to create the Tudor royal line.
John J. Xenakis at Generational Dynamics has made tentative attempts to apply Strauss-Howe Generational Theory to other countries, but there haven’t been significant efforts to apply it outside the United States.
INTENTIONS VERSUS EFFORTS
Part of the problem with the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory is that it presents no empirical evidence to back it up. They highlight individual case studies that reinforce their points but don’t provide conclusive proof that these examples are the majority viewpoint in the midst of competitive minority counterexamples.
By comparison, the two primary American proponents of generational theory before Strauss and Howe were Karl Mannheim and Glen Elder.
Mannheim’s work from the early 1950s theorized that generations provided a basis for understanding social movements — how social change was possible while cultural traditions and identity were preserved — but stressed that birth year alone was insufficient to place a person in a specific generation; rather, the person needed to experience and participate in the defining events of the generation. He also noted that the same historical events would not affect people from different cultural backgrounds and social classes in the same way.
Glen Elder’s longitudinal surveys of child and adult development in the 1970s and 1980s built upon Mannheim’s work and led to his belief that an individual’s family resources, values, and strategies for adapting to the broader external context, especially in their adolescent years, exerted a stronger effect on them as they became adults than the historical context in which they lived, with a resulting high heterogeneity of mindset within a given generation.
Mannheim and Elder’s work is the basis for at least some effort at applying generational theory outside the United States, for example with regard to workforce availability and the viability of pensions over time.
The Strauss-Howe Generational Theory is partially attractive in that it roughly coincides with an individual’s life – the word saeculum can be defined as just that or the complete renewal of a human population. It feels right for many – to borrow from Alan Watts, it provides a rhythm we recognize from which to join the dance. There have also been two competitive dominant paths toward national consensus in the United States since at least the 1990s that consider each other increasingly dangerous. The Fourth Turning and its update provide an attractive explanation as to why they exist.
ADDICTED TO (THE DESIRED) STORY
This isn’t an unusual reaction. Mid-19th Century Chinese historian Wei Yuan’s own ethnonational cycle for China was quru (“chaos and humiliation”), fuxiang (“rejuvenation”), fuquiang (“wealth and power”), then a return to quru. But Yuan borrowed from an earlier Chinese concept, the Dynastic Cycle, to create an explanation for the recent severe loss of face and power resulting from the First Opium War. While the Dynastic Cycle focused on specific faults of leadership over time, combined with eventually intractable problems resulting in a loss of the “Mandate of Heaven” by the old dynasty and its recovery by a new dynasty, Wei Yuan’s cycle removed the then Qing Dynasty as a specific cause of the nation’s humiliation and emphasized the idea of rejuvenation and its rewards. And it did lead to attempts at westernization, specifically the Self-Strengthening Movement, which while ultimately inadequate compared to similar campaigns within Japan, lasted until the mid-1890s.
That in turn leads to one of the problems with the concept of The Fourth Turning – can failure result from Crisis? More broadly, is there a probability of things spiraling down as a result as much as spiraling up? Howe doesn’t seem to think so, citing that every fourth turning has gone “from fragmentation, sclerosis and insecurity to a new regime of inclusive unity, collective energy and grand expectations.”
It would not be a difficult argument to make that while the Union won the American Civil War, it “lost the peace” by the end of the presidential election of 1876, which ceded control of formerly Confederate states to “Redeemer” forces determined to withdraw all available civil rights for Black Americans through the establishment of Jim Crow laws, regardless of the passing of the 13th through 15th Amendments to the federal Constitution. It would extend the Civil War saeculum of the Anglo-American Saecula to 88 years, well within the approximate 100-year limit. But Howe doesn’t seem to consider a Crisis ended until a consensus results in an improved American society.
One could as easily make the case that Howe’s High turning of approximately 1865 to 1896 is valid, but that a consensus existed that, while increasingly in favor of manufacturing and capitalism, was also extremely anti-farmer, anti-workers’ rights and more than willing to concede to the Redeemers in return for the unity of the Union, and thus not exactly a period of a “better” nation, though definitely with a consensus in place that a majority accepted.
Thus, one can potentially discern a certain level of malleability to the Anglo-American Saecula which calls out for “reality testing” by a panel of historians of American History. The opinions of such historians will be varied in terms of specifics, but they will likely have broad areas of agreement that can be usefully applied.
A FORESIGHT TOOL
However, all of this assumes the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory and thus The Fourth Turning is Here is in essence a means toward eventually creating a foresight-oriented tool and not a metanarrative that can provide a potential level of insight but not a specific set of paths with resulting expectations.
As a point of comparison, Deleuze and Guttari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia would be nearly impossible to model and test but provides an excellent and dynamic metanarrative regarding social relations, creativity and the often-innate anti-hierarchical nature of change that has (or that we can be deceived has) occurred. Both force you to think in ways you may not otherwise. Neither are something from which a reliable toolset can be stood up by itself.
Rich Erwin, a resident of the Puget Sound, graduated at the end of 2023 from the University of Houston master's degree program in Foresight. He takes great store not only in the effect of the weight of history on the potential for preferred futures, but also the willful curation of our pasts.
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