When Howe and Strauss released The Fourth Turning book in 1997, they didn’t know when the Crisis would return. They only knew that it would, inevitably, like the rising of the sun. In Neil Howe’s sequel, called The Fourth Turning is Here, released just a few months ago, he outlines the Crisis we find ourselves in.
What is The Fourth Turning? This book delves into six centuries of history, American and British before it, to determine a crucial question: does our modern society succumb to the cycling of generational change? And if so, can we predict it? Their answers were a resounding yes – with some guesses on timing looking ahead.
Strauss and Howe explain how there are four turnings, each one the length of a generation (about 20-25 years), altogether adding up to the length of a long human life. These turnings are driven by the natural development of generational personalities, with each one truly different than the last. Our history, and very likely our future, cycled through these turnings, producing wars, cultural revolutions, and periods of true stability and peace (read my previous post to learn more).
How do we know we’re in a Crisis? Well, it certainly feels and sounds like one, doesn’t it? It isn’t just anecdotal: Google Ngram is a website that tracks the relative frequency of words and phrases used in US books published since 1800. Take a look at some of the words that hit the highest ever usage rates in 2019: radical, racism, authoritarian, repression, inequality, next civil war, and so on. In fact, there’s a film releasing soon called Civil War, about, you guessed it, a new civil war in the US. On the other hand, trust in any large institution has been falling steadily, especially since the pandemic, and words rarely showing up on Ngram today include organization, committee, citizen, connected, and others like them.
How Do Fourth Turnings Play Out?
The precursor (Howe and Strauss’s term) to the Millennial Crisis was 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror. Like World War I, this war was fought with great enthusiasm but little patience. Just two years in, few still believed anything positive would come of it. Just like Versailles, the post-Iraq disillusionment coincided with disengagement from the world. Indeed, the US is increasingly uninterested in being the world’s police force, something they took very seriously since World War II.
The catalyst began in 2008 with the Global Financial Crisis, the greatest economic collapse since 1929. The governments of the day bailed out the biggest companies, pumped trillions of dollars into economies, kept interest rates low, and did everything they could to prevent a cataclysmic economic crisis. But in doing so, they laid the foundations of the Crisis to come. The bounce back from the Great Recession was slow and weak. While stock markets rebounded quickly, employment and productivity did not. By this measure, in fact, the financial crisis of 2007-2009 was just as devastating as the crash of the early 1930’s. And making things worse, wealth and income disparity has grown considerably since, helping along the frustration felt by so many who feel they’ve been dealt a bad hand.
The next step, the regeneracy, occurred in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump, which helped mobilize party partisans to an intensity not seen since the 1930s and 1850s. The left rallied against him, treating him like an occupying army that must be defeated at any cost. When Trump lost in 2020, he treated it not as a lost war, but simply as another battle – he was not finished. The arguments over the legitimacy of the election have gone on ever since. Politics has become a bloodthirsty, team sport. And the partisanship has hardly improved with the election of Biden. His approval ratings aren’t really any better than Trump’s and very little has been achieved – aside from further deficits.
Geopolitical conflict has rocked the world, with two wars going on at the moment. The Russia-Ukraine war is the largest and bloodiest land war since World War II, with hundreds of thousands dead and no resolution on the horizon. The brutal and vicious attack on Israel by Hamas was shocking to most of the world – and there is no end in sight to the violence as Israel attempts to destroy Hamas in retaliation for their horrific atrocities against innocent Israelis.
The consequences of America’s disengagement from international affairs are long. Red lines issued against countries like Russia, China, Iran, Syria, and North Korea were never enforced, and many defense and trade agreements were simply neglected or undermined. The two main political parties can hardly agree on the time of day, so how do they debate any long-term, serious issues?
We are likely at the halfway point of the Millennial Crisis, which puts the conclusion of it somewhere in the early 2030s. Every single previous Fourth Turning has culminated in some sort of climax and resolution, which Strauss and Howe call an ekpyrosis. Whether a struggle against an external power or the collapse into civil war, this is when the risks will be greatest for cataclysm.
I’ve spent the majority of the explanation of the Fourth Turning talking about America. It is still the world’s largest economic and cultural superpower, constituting a quarter of the world’s GDP and by far its largest military. But what about the rest of the world?
Interestingly, since the last Crisis, the generational experiences of much of the world have merged toward archetypal symphony. Europe, China, South and most of East Asia, and much of Latin America (along with us here in Canada) share, more or less, America’s generational constellation. Possibly this is because World War II had such an impact on the world, forcing a Hero generation to emerge across the planet. This means much of the world will join the US in the Fourth Turning.
What’s Coming Next?
Strauss and Howe lay out three paths we could travel: in the first, the animosity we see between political factions of the left and right could grow until a climax-defining conflict finally breaks out between them. This was the path America followed in the Civil War crisis, along with the War of Roses one. The other path could see one faction achieving dominance over the other, leading them into a climax-defining conflict against an external enemy. This was the path of the Armada Crisis (I don’t have the space to go into each of these historical crises – again, I recommend reading the books for a complete picture).
A final path, the most complex of the three, develops a second regeneracy, which redefines the two factions before moving ahead to the climax. This was the path followed for the American Revolution, the Glorious Revolution, and our most recent one, the Great Depression – World War II Crisis. We have no way of knowing yet which path we’ll take.
Perhaps the worst-case historical episode was the Civil War Crisis, the only anomaly of Anglo-American history. No Hero generation was produced. The war was terrible, with unparalleled brutality and suffering. An estimated 620,000 Americans were killed. The Crisis came swiftly, and did, like all Fourth Turnings, transform America. Slavery was abolished and there was a remarkable improvement in racial rights. But it all collapsed quickly, ultimately leaving Black Americans with little real improvement in just a couple of decades.
Why did the Civil War Crisis go this way? Perhaps the three adult generations let their worst instincts prevail. America emerged from it shell-shocked rather than empowered, and without a Hero generation emerging to build the new institutions, society never truly unified around a common vision. This singular deviation from the norm does tell us one thing for sure: there are no guarantees in complex systems. Let’s hope we don’t experience the same thing this time around. But, even as the Civil War Crisis was an abject failure, the generational turnings slowly reasserted themselves, and a new High came just the same, even if atypical and far less rejuvenating. The next Crisis following it, the Great Depression/WWII, came regardless, right at its place in the cycle.
None of these paths sound appealing. But no Crisis has occurred without one of them. This may seem awfully bleak and depressing. But Spring cannot come without Winter. The seasons of time come and go, just as the seasons of climate do, inevitably.
Perhaps a new Civil War is coming. It is a possibility that should not be discounted. Perhaps a true new total war is just around the corner. Or perhaps we will be a new generational anomaly: a Fourth Turning without a broader conflict. No generation has had so many reminders of the horrors of the last war as we have – countless films and books have been created with the terrible reminders of the reality of WWII. Perhaps that will be enough to warn us not to do it. Perhaps, for the first time, the memory of the horrors of war will live long enough to prevent the next one from happening.
However, it is also worryingly possible that, with our greater technological prowess and substantial pile of weapons of mass destruction, that this Fourth Turning will unleash disaster on a scale as yet unimaginable that could destroy our society as we know it. All it will take is the wrong choice at the wrong time.
But Wait… Are Generational Cycles Real?
It’s a fair question: when looking back at history, is it possible that Howe and Strauss are fitting historical events around their pet theory, rather than the other way around? Does all this just fit too neatly? Can the randomness of our vast history truly be whittled down to mere generational cycles?
I don’t have a firm answer on that. It’s possible. Howe and Strauss lay out a convincing, data-driven argument for their case, but they could be wrong. If they are, though, they aren’t alone.
There are several prominent economists and scientists studying for the turning of cycles – many of them seeing the end of a major one in the coming decade. People like George Friedman, Ray Dalio, Peter Turchin, John Mauldin – they are all seeing the same historical patterns through different lenses, all seeing them culminating in a crisis, the end of a cycle, all at the end of this very decade. I find Turchin’s analysis to be particularly interesting.
Could they all be wrong? Absolutely. Hordes of economists are wrong each and every year in their forecasts. The thing a lot of critics of generational cycles miss, though, is that they are not meant to be specifically predictive. Rather, they lay out a framework for how generations turn and change, along with the theme of each turning. Howe doesn’t predict total war in the next decade across the world – he simply observes that has been humanity’s typical experience over time.
Economic models constantly fail because the underlying economy changes, much like the weather. What hasn’t changed, though, in at least ten thousand years, is human nature. We are, unfortunately, in so many ways, flawed in predictable and well-understood ways. These theories of long-term cycles use that, rather than trying to predict specific economic output or outcomes.
The idea isn’t perfect and doesn’t tell us exactly what will happen. What Howe, and others, do is lay out what has happened, and how that can inform our expectations for what’s coming next. We will find out just how accurate this proves to be over the coming decade.
Spring is Coming
Why am I writing about all this? Why did I spend so many hours, both reading and writing, about heavy, complex generational cycles that predict serious risks of total catastrophe? Don’t we have enough bad news these days as it is?
Despite the possibilities of catastrophe being seemingly endless, there is reason for hope. The Fourth Turning is not a book warning of apocalypse. It is a book of hope.
Though it may not seem possible, all the problems plaguing our society have occurred before. The political tribalism, economic inequalities between rich and poor, wealth and income disparity; they have all happened before. Every Fourth Turning, with the possible exception of the Civil War, solved them all. Spring, the High, came, bringing about a new nation almost unrecognizable before the Crisis. The myriad problems we face today will, most likely, be solved when we emerge on the other side of the Crisis.
It appears the world is in the middle of its Crisis, its Fourth Turning. Some countries, like Russia, may have hit the climax of it a few years earlier than us. But by and large, the world has become an interconnected, interdependent place – we will arrive at the climax of our Crisis at a similar timing. It may lead to total war. It may lead to unprecedented levels of human suffering. On the other side of all this, though, is a new First Turning. A new spring. A new dawn.
Despite finding ourselves in the midst of a Crisis period, with all its risks and suffering, the world is still a better place to live than ever. We have never lived longer, happier, healthier, or easier lives. Imagine what we will achieve once we turn to the other side of this great generational cycle?
The High coming our way will very likely be an age of unprecedented, perhaps unimaginable progress. We just have to get there. This Crisis period we are enduring will end. And it will end with an age of terrific changes that will make our lives immeasurably better. We will get there.
