Neil Howe's "The Fourth Turning is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us About How and When This Crisis Will End" offers a generational approach to understanding history, and predicting the future. He argues that generations move through cycles, more-or-less in 100 year periods, often marked by key events or experiences that leave imprints on each generation within it. This is not an academic book (for example, not well referenced). However, the historical analysis presents an interesting way to think about cycles of history. What is not clear from the book is its methodology - for example, why some events are catalyzing and not others? Without this defined methodology, crafting is easier to impose on history than draw from it per se. Nonetheless, the book is fascinating book (the earlier book The Fourth Turning" was also a best seller) and worth a read. A few notes:
"At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history's periodic rhythm, in which the seasons of spring, summer, fall, and winter correspond to eras of rebirth, growth, entropy, and (finally) creative 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." (p. 12)
"What typically occurs early in a Fourth Turning - the initial catalyzing event, the deepening loss of civic trust, the galvanizing of partisanship, the rise of creedal passions, and the scramble to reconstruct national priorities and policies - all this has already happened. The later and more eventful stages of a Fourth Turning still lie ahead. Every Fourth Turning unleashes social forces that push the nation, before the era is over, into a great national challenge: a single urgent test or threat that will draw all other problems into it and require the extraordinary mobilization of most Americans. Historically, it has nearly always been connected to the outcome of a major war either between American and foreign powers, or between different groups within America, or both." (p. 23)
"To be sure, this global saeculum is not yet, literally, global. We can still identify regions where it is not yet fully active, either because the inhabitants are not yet fully modern or because they have fallen into a somewhat different generational rhythm. The latter possibility may describe the Muslim majority societies of Africa and the greater Middle East. Most of these did not experience their most recent regime founding Fourth Turning in the 1930s and '40s but rather (with full national independence) in the 1950s and early '60s. As we might expect, their second turning also came later. Their "Muslim Awakening" suddenly exploded in 1979 (in Iran, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia) and raged until well passed the year 2000. The awakening triggered violence and crackdowns throughout the region - and ghastly Jihadist terror episodes throughout the world. The youthful prophet archetype that spearheaded this awakening was certainly younger than its counterpart in the West. Most of its members were born in the 1960s and '70s (Osama Bin Laden, born in 1957, counts as one of its very oldest members). Yet even these Muslim awakeners have by now moved well into midlife - which, they are finding, presents its own surprises. In their youth, they angrily rebelled against their own civic minded parents, who had once joined secular socialist parties like the Baathists (Arab nationalists). Today they often skirmish with their own children, whom they find more materialistic and libertarian than they were at the same age. This emerging Prophet-Nomad friction is likely to shape the politics of the Arab, Turkic, and Persian Middle East well into the 2030s." (p. 180-181)
"Rising political passions, aligned as they now are with behaviors and lifestyles, are pushing like-minded tribal members to seek out geographic cohesion. Life is just easier that way. Surveys show that political differences now outrank all other differences, including those of income or religion or race, in day-to-day encounters that people wish to avoid. One way to avoid such counters is to choose a new church, club, or employer whose views match your own. An even better way is to choose a new neighborhood. Geographic sorting, in turn, itself tends to intensify political polarization: Partisan intensity grows strongest, and voting rates and political donation rates rise fastest, in neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of people who think the same way." (p. 237)
