One book I'm currently reading is The Fourth Turning, by William Strauss and Neil Howe. It's a history or meta-history book that came out in 1997 and has spawned a following. You might guess the publication date without looking, because it does contain some popular millennial themes. It may also be the source for the term "millennials" as in generation.
It's based on the number 4 in a lot of ways. In essence the premise is that there are four archetypes, and that history is a cycle of eras in which one of these archetypes is dominant.
I can definitely buy the idea of history being cyclical, more than most Westerners will want to admit. And on a psychological level the authors make a good point about how people can become out of place when an era very different from the one they grew up and/or thrived in takes hold.
You can see the US-centric perspective, not too surprisingly. Especially in the descriptions of the Lost Generation. In America that epithet was a moral judgment, the popular impression of them being wastrels whether young or old. And that image took hold in part because of the impression that they had only been dinged by World War I. In Europe and especially Britain, the "Lost" part was grimmer and more serious, directly because of the Great War. JRR Tolkien said that by the time he was 25, most of the people he'd grown up with were dead. Dying horribly and violently in your early 20's became the Norm, and it couldn't be too much of a surprise when the survivors chose to indulge themselves.
ADDENDUM: Could pick at a couple of other things. The authors assert that the two Eisenhower-Stevenson elections were the only time that the same Presidential nominees ran against each other twice, although William McKinley faced William Jennings Bryan both times. And there's a mention of a guitarist popular in the 60s named "Jimmy Hendrix". (Sounds wild. Any relation to Jimi?) The prose can be less than fresh, marking the fact that they're not primarily literary authors or essayists. What they do right is to suggest a large scale, one that takes enough time to play out that we're not usually aware of it.
3 comments:
I haven't read The Fourth Turning but I did read about it once it began being used as a foundational tract for The Great Reset hypothesis. I certainly wasn't happy to hear the claim that the baby boomers, having shaped the radical youth culture of the 60's, will mature into repressive prigs.
It's always seemed to me that the whole generational cohort thing has been a recent invention by social scientists who need to categorize everything into simplistic terms rather than make an effort to consider the more complex issues of modern society. It's just another way of separating people.
While it's true that historians and philosophers have detected similarities in the way civilizations rise and fall it seems to me that the authors of TFT attempted to fit their idea into far too small a container. People live and grow in their own time and not as part of twenty year sections of it. They came up with their premise and then fit their 'facts' to fit a conclusion they'd already determined.
I can see you noticed this too in your reference to the US-centric perspective and the moral judgement about the Lost Generation in reference to those who missed the Great War. There are certainly events in that have affected large numbers of people - most particularly in these past hundred years. But these events weren't caused by whole generations of people - wars are declared by just a few people who have agendas of their own.
I never figured out what Mark Twain meant when he said, 'History does not repeat itself but it does rhyme'. Can you explain?
Oh, at this point I think there's enough repressive priggery in the air that there's no point blaming any one age cohort for it. The book's fandom seems to stretch along the political spectrum. Al Gore wrote one of the blurbs, but Steve Bannon has been said to be inspired by it as well. As for the Great Reset, that seems to be the kind of rentseeking that's become more common in capitalism over the past couple of decades, but supercharged. The idea that you can constantly be selling to people without letting them have anything.
Generational theory becomes more complex when you consider that humans breed year-round at a variety of ages, so how do you decide on a cutoff between one and the other? There are large events that change the way people see things, of course. The media, being what it is, wants to have one of these every other week.
You make a good point that wars are declared by a small number of people. That's true of a lot of other things as well, like economic policy. I think there's a terror there that isn't often acknowledged, that much about our lives is determined by people we don't know or understand, who may not even be interested in understanding us in turn.
Rhyming of course is when different lines end with similar sounds. So Twain was talking about how you won't see the exact same thing happening in history, but you will be able to find parallels. That's how I interpret it, anyway.
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