The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

by Neil Howe

“Ekpyrosis”

Part Three pushes further ahead in time, past the winter and into the spring season of the saeculum.

Before moving on, however, we first need to step back and rethink some deep preconceptions about how we see time and history.

paradigm for understanding history is in fact a very recent innovation. Before this innovation, during nearly all of the millennia that humanity has (to our knowledge) thought about time at all, a very different paradigm was dominant: the cycle.

One important lesson we will draw from this recounting is that civilization began to behave in a recognizably cyclical pattern precisely when civilization began to assume that history should be understood as progressive.

three ways of understanding time: chaotic, cyclical, and linear.

In chaotic time, history has no pattern.

cyclical time, whose prehistoric origins are informally rooted in the countless rhythms common to virtually all traditional societies:

Cycles conquered the fear of chaos by repetition and example, by the parent or hunter or farmer

performing the right deed at the right moment in

Eventually, great cycles came to mark the duration of kingdoms and prophecies,

cyclical time is both descriptive and prescriptive.

“participation mystique” in the divine re-creation of nature’s eternal round. The power of this concept is conveyed by the colossal monuments to recurring time (the obelisks, pyramids, ziggurats, sunstones, and megaliths) left behind by so many archaic societies. It is also conveyed in the linguistic roots of our very words for time. Etymologically, the word “time” derives from the Indo-European root for shining heavenly beings (cognates include deity, divine, day, and diurnal), almost certainly linking it to regular celestial cycles. Period originally meant “orbit,” as in “planetary period.” Annual comes from annus, whose root meant “circle.” Hour comes ultimately from the common ancient Greek root horos, meaning “solar period.” Year is cognate with horos. Month derives from moon.

none of us takes cyclical time as seriously as the ancients. And for a very simple reason: The sacred cycle would strip those of us who live in the modern world of our most treasured privilege—a free and open-ended future in which we can aspire to be different from or better than our ancestors. It would leave little room for what we think of as originality, creativity, and progress.

ab origine

ad infinitum,”

linear time—time as a unique, directional, and (usually) progressing story with an absolute beginning and an absolute end.

This option, which arose upon occasion in the ancient world, had both secular and spiritual origins.

The Judaic, Persian, Christian, and Islamic cosmologies all embraced the radically new concept of personal and historical time as a unidirectional drama.

Linearism required hundreds of years to catch on, but when it did, it changed the world.

medieval Europe, unidirectional time as outlined by the early Christian theologians remained a relatively arcane idea,

“Providence was progress,” was how Lord Acton later described the prevailing Victorian view.

America has come to embody the most extreme expression of progressive linearism. The first European explorers often saw in this fresh landmass—this New Atlantis, El Dorado, or Utopia—an authentic opportunity to remake humanity and therein put an end to history. Successive waves of immigrants likewise saw themselves as builders of a millennial “New Jerusalem,” inaugurators of a revolutionary “Age of Reason,” defenders of “God’s chosen country,” and pioneers in service of a “Manifest Destiny.” Thus arose the dogma of American exceptionalism, the belief that this nation and its people had somehow broken loose from any risk of cyclical regress.

Only “the wicked walk in a circle,” warned Saint Augustine.

Along the way, the West began employing technology in an effort to flatten every physical manifestation of the natural cycle.

Triumphal linearism has shaped the very style of Western and (especially) American civilization.

when cyclical time reigned, people valued patience, ritual, the relatedness of parts to the whole, and the healing power of time within nature. Today, we value haste, iconoclasm, the disintegration of the whole into parts, and the analytic power of time outside nature.

Cyclical time tended to interpret change in a fourfold pattern corresp...

Linear time prefers to interpret it in a threefold pattern of progress, o...

quaternity reconciled us to what must always be. The triad prepares us ...

By means of advanced technology and ever-more rational forms of social organization, modernity promises to flatten all the age-old natural and social cycles

we don’t even eliminate the natural cycle of floods or wars. We simply ensure that the original cycle is both less frequent and more devastating.

“progress” succeeds in generating a proliferating variety of entirely new cycles. Just ponder them all: business cycles, financial cycles, building cycles, electoral cycles, fashion cycles, opinion cycles, budget cycles, crime cycles, power cycles, traffic cycles, and so on.

by disabling their capacity to achieve day-to-day homeostasis with their environment, moderns have created entirely new cycles or have deepened existing ones. We build a car or factory or city or state that works perfectly—until it doesn’t work at all.

consequential of modern cycles are those that are driven by periodic shifts in the public mood.

As Alexis de Tocqueville first explained after his tour of America in the 1830s, a popular consensus in a democratic republic exerts a compulsive power that absolute monarchs can only dream about.

younger groups are arriving, older groups are departing. At any given moment more than one group probably share governing tasks. Other complications are possible. But there’s nothing complicated about how this dynamic can generate a regular long-term cycle of action and reaction, of innovation and compensation.

There is, accordingly, something paradoxical about history’s long cycle. It is almost entirely ancient in its terminology and perspective. Yet it is almost entirely modern in its behavioral consequences.

the term saeculum dates back over two millennia. Generation, as both a word and concept, dates back even earlier,

annus magnus of the Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans). Almost always, this giant calendar was depicted as a circle

sometimes divided into dualities (yin/yang) but most often into a quaternity

This circle was punctuated by one or two breaks (solstices), moments of discontinuity, at which time the priests or gods would n...

For many of us, the concept of a long-term cycle of history is unfamiliar and exotic.

The society that believes in cycles the least, America, has fallen into the grip of the most portentous cycle in the history of mankind.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who (along with his father, another eminent historian) saw strong evidence that American political moods shift according to a cycle that is driven by generational turnover.

Peace makes plenty, plenty makes pride, Pride breeds quarrel, and quarrel brings war; War brings spoil, and spoil poverty, Poverty patience, and patience peace So peace brings war, and war brings peace. —JEAN DE MEUN (FL. 1280−1305)

old sibyl issued a prophecy that their civilization would last for ten lifetimes, at which time finem fore nominis Etrusci: Etruria was doomed.

In De Die Natale, Censorinus described “the natural saeculum” as “the time span defined by the longest human life between birth and death”—and

Censorinus sometimes identifies the saeculum with what the ancients called their “great year” (annus magnus).

In the end, as chance would have it, Etruria’s ten-saeculum prophecy proved alarmingly accurate: The last vestiges of their culture were buried under the advance of Rome during the reign of Augustus, nearly one full millennium after the Etruscan year zero.