It's hard to believe 'The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy' was published in 1997. Yet it's equally hard to believe this way of viewing history and current events and predictions for the future is so seldom employed or adopted. Why have I not heard more about this before?
Instead of viewing history as linear - either toward inevitably greater and greater human progress or else toward devolution and destruction - Howe and Strauss tackled American history in particular as cyclical.
Like the four seasons of a year - Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter - our history looks very interesting when we see it in terms of four generation cycles of High, Awakening, Unraveling, and Crisis periods lasting about 20-years each, and general archetypes of generational personality and mode - Artist, Prophet, Nomad, and Hero.
Each generation is born in one of the four repeating periods in the cycle, coming of age and having certain general characteristics in each of the four cycles based on five stages of life - Childhood, Young Adulthood, Midlife, Elderhood, and Late Elderhood.
Like so, our history begins to look something like a sine wave.
The whole book feels like a long-form application to our nation's story of what wise King Solomon wrote in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes.
"A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever."
And also,
"Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us."
Of course this is a lot to take in, and it bears careful examination and consideration. But I am entirely fascinated with the premise of 'The Fourth Turning,' and feel certain I will be returning to its claims and predictions for quite some time as I ponder the implications for my understanding of my grandparents, parents, self, wife, and children, as well as the times we have lived through, are living in, and may yet live to see.
Perhaps Robert Jordan was onto more than I appreciated with his epic fantasy series. The reincarnation business therein is nonsense, of course. But maybe "the wheel of time" does indeed turn something like what Jordan portrayed. And maybe human affairs and general themes repeat over and over like that in something approaching a predictable pattern.
The more I think on it, the more convinced I am that such is the case.
Indeed, as Ecclesiastes 3:1 puts it, "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven."
