It will all work out if we don't blow ourselves up. How? The Boomers will die off and be supplanted by Millennials.
History does not end. It regenerates.
Guest Post: The Labor Day Weekend Big Picture History, continued.
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| Shiva: Creative Destruction |
Every era ends, and something better will come out of it. Boomers are messing things up, but our turn will end because our generation will end. Periods in a cycle are self-correcting. Big movements and trends create backlash and counter movements.
Worlds are destroyed so they can be re-built. The Flood in Judao-Christian thought. Shiva in Hinduism. Creative destruction in business.
Worlds are destroyed so they can be re-built. The Flood in Judao-Christian thought. Shiva in Hinduism. Creative destruction in business.
And most important, new generations come of age and take over.
Guest Post, by Wayne Taylor
What can we do about the coming crisis?
Since it looks quite clear that we are in the middle of the 4th Turning Crisis time of this Millennial cycle in history, the prediction is that we need to get ready for a big War in the 2020's. I want to be very clear that I do not like war; it is a huge tragic waste. Rather, I am trying to warn everyone realistically about this pattern of history, so that we can have a chance to prepare and do something to make it come out better, if possible.
What can we do? Many of us, including friends who are both liberal and conservative, are already working at their local level to do something positive! They are working to help out their families, and their community of friends, or even the poor ones who have been left out.
So what more can we do, by knowing that the Crisis time may reach a Climax and get worse?
Since it looks quite clear that we are in the middle of the 4th Turning Crisis time of this Millennial cycle in history, the prediction is that we need to get ready for a big War in the 2020's. I want to be very clear that I do not like war; it is a huge tragic waste. Rather, I am trying to warn everyone realistically about this pattern of history, so that we can have a chance to prepare and do something to make it come out better, if possible.
What can we do? Many of us, including friends who are both liberal and conservative, are already working at their local level to do something positive! They are working to help out their families, and their community of friends, or even the poor ones who have been left out.
So what more can we do, by knowing that the Crisis time may reach a Climax and get worse?
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| Wayne Taylor |
An important thing that the authors of "4th Turning" found, was that when people came together during the time of Crisis (4th turning of the cycle), by preemptively repairing their towns and healing their families at the local level. These people were better prepared and more resilient when the depredations of warfare descended upon them. Even more importantly, when a community worked together during the Crisis time to have new plans for vital systems tested and ready to go, then they helped insure that their own side prevailed in the war, and their community was able to flourish immediately when the Crisis war was resolved.
The warning for us is clear: we need to remember our moral compass and heal our nation. But if we fail to work together now during the time of Crisis to begin resolving the serious problems, then a tragic outcome can happen, as in the Civil War.
A good example of local regeneration for the previous 1930 -40 Crisis before the WW2 climax is Roosevelt’s New Deal programs including the Civilian Conservation Corps, which strengthened families for the coming war. Now in this pre 2020 Crisis time of the Millennial cycle, Trump is sabotaging ecological and local economic rejuvenation with massive corruption at the US national level. By hopelessly trying to revive a dying coal and tar-sands energy industry with subsidies and gagging /preventing the EPA from regulating water and carbon pollution, the administration is doing irreparable damage to Earth’s atmosphere and habitability.
However, this is accelerating the resolve of local communities to repair their neighborhoods and towns, and protect their states’ initiatives, such as the clean solar energy bonanza here in California where I live. We now need to rebuild our infrastructure of roads, bridges, powerlines, waterpipes, and solar plants.
The mechanism which drives the turning of the saeculum is that the new generation overshoots in trying to fix the problems left from the elder generation's own overshooting etc. etc. When the upcoming generation awakens to an idealistic solution to their world's problems like racism, sexism or pollution, it is imperfectly implemented immediately, leading the elder's backlash to try unravelling these reforms (“Take America back; put blacks and women back in “their place” etc.), and finally ending in a stalemate of unworkable crisis.
The time of Crisis is sadly resolved by total warfare, such as the internal fight of the American Civil War, or the international warfare of World War II. So during these intensely difficult times of either an idealistic Awakening or the warfare in a life-and-death Crisis, it happens that the generations who come of age as impressionable young adults are imprinted by the character of their times. The idealistic generation imprinted by an Awakening (the Boomers in the Millennial cycle) will mature into the moralistic elders who lead the Crisis war.
The practical generation imprinted as young adults by a Crisis (Great Generation of WW2, and Millennials in the coming struggle) will be the can-do leaders who hopefully win the war and set the new agenda for the next saeculum. It is clear why the practical young Millennials have no patience or interest in the divisive morality-fights of their Boomer elders, while the Gen-Xers just want to survive.
In this context, it is very clear that even though Trump was in the early cohort of the Boomer generation, he is the leader of throwbacks to the older generation's reactionary politics, which has degenerated into social posturing with no real consistent policies. This old "silent majority" has many deplorables who are now unraveling the reforms of the Boomer generation's Awakening, (including civil rights, women's rights, environmental cleanup, LGBTQ+ rights, and monetary regulation).They will have their last orgy in abusing power, and then be supplanted by the next generation who will inevitably win the struggle (as the old ones die off), and re-establish the necessary reforms on a firm institutional foundation. Trump is an embarrassing blip in history. He is doing great harm out of his ignorance and narcissistic vanity, but America and the world will get over it, or at least get on with it, when this con-artist Showman-President is impeached for treasonous obstruction of justice, and/or money laundering.
So goes the immortal turning of the Saeculum wheel of history. Liberty, Freedom, and Survival of our ecosystem must win in the end, or there is simply no way for us to continue living. I feel hopeful and optimistic that we with God’s help will heal America and the world.
3 comments:
Indeed, the transformation of the United States federally from a quasi-capitalist oligarchy to a modified social democracy is showing to be rocky, but it's happening nonetheless.
The institutions are in place to administer a more equitable distribution of wealth, and will in time become the arbiters of the social and economic justice movements that began after the Great Depression. After the '08 crises, enabled by a SEC and DOJ asleep at the wheel, it became clear that there was an opportunity to accelerate the process and voters made a choice that reflected that urgency. The slogans "Hope and Change" and "Yes We Can" were right on the money, however societal change in the modern era is shown to be a "two steps back" process.
Strategically, Democrats have the right vision but have become untrustworthy and trepidatious. They simply have to move away from left and right and embrace right and wrong with a little more passion.
“Trump, the Rapture and the Fourth Turning”
It’s always the same with predictive pseudo science— aggrieved believers become so distraught with an unfair world order at the hands of sinners (i.e. political adversaries) that they predict Armageddon or the renaissance. It was only a matter of time before political zealots prognosticated that Trump is the trigger of either doom or salvation. Steve Bannon was fast out of the gate in claiming that Trump is a historical savior predicted in the Fourth Turning. See “Bannon’s Worldview: Dissecting the Message of The Fourth Turning”, New York Times, Apr 8, 2017 (https://goo.gl/nZHKRV). Alex Jones at InfoWars has also been captivated by the book as proof that Trump is a latter day American saint. See, “Are We Entering A Fourth Turning Of Cyclical History?”, Infowars, Feb 23, 2017 (https://goo.gl/HmJZSz).
The left has perhaps been a bit slow in claiming that Trump is instead a villain from the Fourth Turning. Although the book was published in 1997 and has attracted a cult following, the authors based it on their 1991 book “Generations”. See, “Strauss–Howe Generational Theory”, Wikipedia (https://goo.gl/zay1pD). But the perennial trick in religion or predictive pseudo science is to not box yourself in with the dates for coming wars or the Rapture. Rapture enthusiasts, to their credit, seem to grin and bear it as date after date passes for the coming of Christ following a rain of fire.
The Fourth Turning gave kind of a vague date range for the war we boomers would cause until saved by our millennial children (emerging bravely from their rooms in our homes. To some on the Christian right, Obama was “the sign” in 2008, but he wasn’t a good fit for either the boomer or millennial parts in the “long life” script of the book since he was born in 1961. Still, some Tea Party activists were very big in 2010 on using the Forth Turning prophecy as proof of destiny for their revolution in taking back the House as revenge for Obamacare.
In his 1997 review of the Fourth Turning, historian David Kaiser wrote: "If the United States calmly makes it to 2015, their work will end up in the ashcan of history, but if they are right, they will take their place among the great American prophets." (See Wikipedia, id.). Well, the US did calmly make it to 2015 in the Great Recovery led by Barrack Obama, who not only saved us from the 2008 recession, but also got us out of the wars started by his predecessor. And that’s where Donald Trump comes in, and kind of rescues the book from the ashcan. He was just a couple of years late in being inaugurated in January 2017.
So we wait for Trump to either start the big predicted war or to save America for the next generation. Unlike the Rapture, the Fourth Turning will support either ending.
Thad's comment was a good review of how people on the right, left, and Waco-land (Bannon) have all used the "Fourth Turning" to portray their cause and its leader as the Grey Champion coming to save America. "So we wait for Trump to either start the big predicted war or to save America for the next generation. Unlike the Rapture, the Fourth Turning will support either ending."
I agree that Howe's "4th Turning" theory of history is pseudo-science, or not-yet accepted science (will history ever be a science?). But it is significant that while people's interpretations of events have proven false, history itself has confirmed the theory now for three decades; Trump will either be the villain who brings on the Crisis culmination, or the hero who resolves the Crisis. Either outcome would not prove the theory, but as scientists we can say that either one would be "consistent with" events as they unfold. Note that as a scientist, it is clear to me that the "4th Turning" theory would be falsified (by Popper's view) if the Crisis was skipped over and resolved (by hero Trump or a successor) into a new tolerant High period, by folks magically deciding to CoomByHeah and get along again. Howe definitely stressed that the Crisis can not be skipped, and the resolution must pass through an all-out struggle of war, before a new cycle can begin.
There is a reason why "The Fourth Turning gave kind of a vague date range for the war we boomers would cause until saved by our millennial children--" Howe stresses that history is not like physics or astronomy, where the dates of seasons or eclipses can be predicted with mathematical accuracy. So any theory of history that is correct would need to admit that history must take biology, sociology, and psychology etc. into account, so its timing of the turnings of cycles will not be precisely calculated. The prediction of dates must in fact remain squishy and vague, but the order of the zeitgeist seasons is logical.
It was remarkable that during the Civil War cycle, the 3rd Unravelling turning was skipped when the Transcendental Awakening went prematurely into the Crisis of warfare in 1860, with no Hero generation born, and also no period of Regeneration before the war. This tragic mutation of the saeculum caused the Civil War to be much worse in its severity; so Howe called it the exception that proved the rule, which still supports the "4th turning" theory. An interesting fudge, or else very perceptive??
Wayne Taylor, 4 Sept, 2018
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