It was unquestionably a “high” moment in American life, captured perfectly by the above-pictured ad for the General Electric exhibition at New York’s 1964 World’s Fair.
My memories of the event are decidedly dim. In fact, the only thing I do recall is arriving with my family to a huge line of people waiting outside to get in. But because my father had authored much of the content of the exhibition (something I found out only after he had died), we were ushered in ahead of everybody. I remember this especially because it was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before – or since.
I was 13 at the time, having been born in 1951, right in the middle of the post-WW2 baby boom. Little did I know that soon the secure, confident, forward-looking world I was living in, which seemed destined to last forever, would be shaken to its foundations by a sudden and powerful cultural earthquake.
In truth, its first tremors could already be felt, if imperceptible to most. For this event took place just months after the assassination of JFK in November 1963, a haunting, apocalyptic moment that ultimately helped define the end of the era. What would follow was a decade of political assassinations, a highly polarizing war, troubling social unrest, and an explosive youth rebellion.
In short, “Progressland” was about to enter into a cage match with the Age of Aquarius. [Spoiler alert: things didn’t end well for the former.] Yet who could have imagined such a thing at the height of America’s ascendency?
Looking back, for all its failings, I still value the experience of having lived in that world of relative security and shared optimism. And I lament that generations since have yet to know a comparable time of innocence and promise.
Enter William Strauss’ and Neil Howe’s 1997 book, The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us about America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny.
Here the authors present a startling insight – that the way we in the West today understand history runs completely counter to the way the vast majority of civilizations throughout time have understood it. And the implications are profound.
Generally, up until the Renaissance, ancient and traditional societies understood history as moving in a cyclical fashion. Social life was divided into four quadrants within a recurring circle, mimicking not only nature’s spring, summer, fall, and winter, but also the generational stages of childhood, early adulthood, midlife, and death. Social history here follows the same pattern, involving a High, an Awakening, an Unraveling, and a Crisis – after which the cycle begins again, albeit in altered form.
The linear view, in contrast, developed in earnest during the Renaissance, maintains that history is unidirectional, that it only moves in progressive stages of scientific, economic, and political improvement. Moral goals (such as justice and equality) and material goals are strictly established and then pursued as if categorically attainable. Such assumes our ability to both defy nature and overcome it. The cyclical view, on the other hand, is far more modest, based as it is on natural and existential limits simply beyond human control.
Reclaiming the cyclical idea of history, Strauss and Howe identify a recurring societal and generational pattern through time. The Romans called it a “saeculum,” or age, the Greeks a “genos,” or generation, and what we today call a siècle, or century. Every 80-100 years, going back centuries, societies have been shown to exhibit discernable, even predictable, changes that ultimately reorder and regenerate society, wanted or not.
The authors identify each saeculum as comprising four separate “turnings,” reflecting the quadrantal divisions within a given cycle. Here’s how the authors describe these various stages:
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.
“In the current saeculum,” the authors write, “the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies.
“The Second Turning was the Consciousness Revolution, stretching from the campus revolts of the mid-1960s to the tax revolts of the early 1980s.
“The Third Turning has been the Culture Wars, an era that began with Reagan’s mid-1980s Morning in America and is due to expire around the middle of the Oh-Oh decade, eight or ten years from now.” [Recall, this was written in 1997.)
In a later revised edition of the book, Howe argues that the Fourth Turning, the Crisis era, is now upon us, starting in earnest with the financial meltdown of 2008. This turning, by the way, Howe says has yet to be resolved. His prediction a few years back was that the Crisis would be resolved and the new High begun around 2025.
Succinctly put, “In a high, people want to belong; in an Awakening, to defy; in an Unraveling, to separate; in a Crisis, to gather.”
One interesting fact relates to the initial publication date of 1997, right around the time Francis Fukuyama famously announced the “end of history,” an optimistic note if ever there was one. Fukuyama’s argument was that since the Cold War had ended, America stood alone as the world’s superpower. And, from that point on, America would fix all that ails our erstwhile troubled world.
So when Strauss and Howe came out and said that America, far from being ascendent, was actually in an Unraveling period and would soon enter a Crisis, they were attacked for their perceived pessimism. (Subsequent events would seem to have proven them right.)
This highlights one of the major problems with linear thinking. When things are going well, as in the High era, linear thinking’s flaws are not particularly apparent. But when the opposite occurs, when the center fails to hold, life can seem doomed.
That’s because linear thinking assumes a kind of eternal, rather than temporal, quality. Instead of seeing the present as part of a four-part drama similar to those experienced by our ancestors, it is interpreted as a novel, unique, and unending progression of time (“no exit”).
Lost, among other things, is the wisdom of the past, along with the accompanying tools it bequeaths in terms of understanding our place within the cycles of time. Believe it or not, and I have this on good authority, others have gone before us.
In a very real sense, linear thinking forces us to “immanentize the eschaton” (to imbue the present with too much meaning and significance). It forces us, with apologies to Peggy Lee, to experience the present as being all there is.
During the High, in other words, we adopt a Progressland mindset, thinking its future will go on forever, strength to strength. During the Awakening, an attitude of defiance and rejection of all that Progressland implies appears inevitable and unstoppable (the “new” Age of Aquarius). During the Unraveling, a dark mood of pessimism and declinism seems our unavoidable fate. And during the Crisis period, chaos, fear, and uncertainty foretell unending disaster.
Of the Fourth Turning, the authors argue that it “will trigger a political upheaval beyond anything Americans could today imagine. New civic authority will have to take root, quickly and firmly – which won’t be easy if the discredited rules and rituals of the old regime remain fully in place.” (Still, alas, the dead-enders persist. Take our religious leaders…please!)
This Fourth Turning will necessitate, in short, nothing less than the death and rebirth of the the social order. Like winter, it will shake the wilderness and strip the forests bare, preparing the world for spring, for a new, regenerated order. Of course, the specifics of what that will look like are yet to be determined, whether positive or negative.
So, in revisiting my earlier concern for those succeeding generations who have never known the security and optimism of Progressland, as I did in my youth, there is hope. For God, as always, is creating something new out of the death of the old.
And if Strauss and Howe are right, we just may be on the cusp of that new High, bringing with it a welcome, newfound sense of security, unity, and optimism.
Of course, since the world is the world, and humans are humans, no change in nature or civic affairs will ever bring about perfection. For it is not possible.
The only perfection to be found in this world is that which comes from the things of the Spirit. Such things, it is true, may ebb and flow within history, but only God is justly constant, eternal.
In the final analysis, then, any experience we have of the eternal is found only within an ordered life born of a timeless God, and not within the vagaries of an ever-changing, disordered secular world.