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

by Neil Howe

We might dynamically rephrase Kissinger thus: Each new generation, as it assumes leadership, redefines a nation’s history according to its own collective experience.

All our lives we remain a prisoner of the generation we belonged to at age twenty. —CHARLES AUGUSTIN SAINTE-BEUVE

What these archetypal myths illustrate is this: Your generation isn’t like the generation that shaped you, but it has much in common with the generation that shaped the generation that shaped you. Or, put another way: Archetypes do not create archetypes like themselves; instead, they create the shadows of archetypes like themselves.

However—and this must be emphasized—progress is not the purpose of the saeculum. If the saeculum has a purpose, it is rather to push a society that always anticipates something better into phases of creative self-adjustment where it must, from time to time, confront something worse. It is to steer a people resolved to avoid cycles into participating in a cycle that will spare it from dissolution or stasis and therefore from social death. The saeculum contributes to long-term progress only to the extent that it keeps society alive and adaptive. In this sense, its purpose resembles that of natural evolution: The saeculum may or may not make us better, but it does foster our survival. It may not give any generation what it wants. But, over time, it usually gives society what it needs so that more generations will follow.