The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny

by William Strauss

Though we live in an era of relative peace and comfort, we have settled into a mood of pessimism about the long-term future, fearful that our superpower nation is somehow rotting from within. Neither an epic victory over Communism nor an extended upswing of the business cycle can buoy our public spirit. The Cold War and New Deal struggles are plainly over, but we are of no mind to bask in their successes. The America of today feels worse, in its fundamentals, than the one many of us remember from youth, a society presided over by those of supposedly lesser consciousness. Wherever we look, from L.A. to D.C., from Oklahoma City to Sun City, we see paths to a foreboding future. We yearn for civic character but satisfy ourselves with symbolic gestures and celebrity circuses. We perceive no greatness in our leaders, a new meanness in ourselves. Small wonder that each new election brings a new jolt, its aftermath a new disappointment.

Where we once thought ourselves collectively strong, we now regard ourselves as individually entitled.

Optimism still attaches to self, but no longer to family or community. Most Americans express more hope for their own prospects than for their children’s—or the nation’s. Parents widely fear that the American Dream, which was there (solidly) for their parents and still there (barely) for them, will not be there for their kids. Young householders are reaching their midthirties never having known a time when America seemed to be on the right track. Middle-aged people look at their thin savings accounts and slim-to-none pensions, scoff at an illusory Social Security trust fund, and try not to dwell on what a burden their old age could become. Seniors separate into their own Leisure World, recoiling at the lost virtue of youth while trying not to think about the future.

We perceive our civic challenge as some vast, insoluble Rubik’s Cube. Behind each problem lies another problem that must be solved first, and behind that lies yet another, and another, ad infinitum. To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that we have to fix welfare, and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can’t do that without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing the inner cities, and that’s impossible unless we fix crime. There’s no fulcrum on which to rest a policy lever. People of all ages sense that something huge will have to sweep across America before the gloom can be lifted—but that’s an awareness we suppress. As a nation, we’re in deep denial.

In fact, at the core of modern history lies this remarkable pattern: Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era—a new turning—every two decades or so. At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction: ■ The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays. ■ The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime. ■ The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants. ■ The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one. Each turning comes with its own identifiable mood. Always, these mood shifts catch

In the current saeculum, the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies. As World War II wound down, no one predicted that America would soon become so confident and institutionally muscular, yet so conformist and spiritually complacent. But that’s what happened. The Second Turning was the Consciousness Revolution, stretching from the campus revolts of the mid-1960s to the tax revolts of the early 1980s. Before John Kennedy was assassinated, no one predicted that America was about to enter an era of personal liberation and cross a cultural divide that would separate anything thought or said after from anything thought or said before. But that’s what happened. The Third Turning has been the Culture Wars, an era that began with Reagan’s mid-1980s Morning in America and is due to expire around the middle of the Oh-Oh decade, eight or ten years from now. Amid the glitz of the early Reagan years, no one predicted that the nation was entering an era of national drift and institutional decay. But that’s where we are. Have major national mood shifts like this ever before happened? Yes—many times. Have Americans ever before experienced anything like the current attitude of Unraveling? Yes—many times, over the centuries.

The Fourth Turning is history’s great discontinuity. It ends one epoch and begins another.

The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation, and empire. Yet this time of trouble will bring seeds of social rebirth. Americans will share a regret about recent mistakes—and a resolute new consensus about what to do. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.

Yet Americans will also enter the Fourth Turning with a unique opportunity to achieve a new greatness as a people. Many despair that values that were new in the 1960s are today so entwined with social dysfunction and cultural decay that they can no longer lead anywhere positive. Through the current Unraveling era, that is probably true. But in the crucible of Crisis, that will change. As the old civic order gives way, Americans will have to craft a new one. This will require a values consensus and, to administer it, the empowerment of a strong new political regime. If all goes well, there could be a renaissance of civic trust, and more: Today’s Third Turning problems—that Rubik’s Cube of crime, race, money, family, culture, and ethics—will snap into a Fourth Turning solution. America’s post-Crisis answers will be as organically interconnected as today’s pre-Crisis questions seem hopelessly tangled. By the 2020s, America could become a society that is good, by today’s standards, and also one that works.

We cannot stop the seasons of history, but we can prepare for them. Right now, in 1997, we have eight, ten, perhaps a dozen more years to get ready. Then events will begin to take choices out of our hands. Yes, winter is coming, but our path through that winter is up to us.

This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.” The cycle remains mysterious, but need not come as a total surprise. Though the scenario and outcome are uncertain, the schedule is set: The next Fourth Turning—America’s next rendezvous with destiny—will begin in roughly ten years and end in roughly thirty.

Over the millennia, man has developed three ways of thinking about time: chaotic, cyclical, and linear. The first was the dominant view of primitive man, the second of ancient and traditional civilizations, and the third of the modern West, especially America.

In chaotic time, history has no path. Events follow one another randomly, and any effort to impute meaning to their whirligig succession is hopeless. This was the first intuition of aboriginal man, for whom change in the natural world was utterly beyond human control or comprehension. It is also how life and time appear to a small child. Yet pathless time has also become a supreme spiritual goal, the “knowing beyond knowing” of many Eastern religions. Buddhism teaches that a person reaches nirvana by ritually detaching himself from any connection to the meaning of space or time or self-hood. Over the last century, various strains of chaoticism have gained influence in our own society—from the Just Do It popular culture to the deconstructive nihilisms of academe. The practical shortcoming of chaotic time is that it dissolves society’s connective tissue. If cause and effect have no linkage in time, people cannot be held morally accountable for their choices. Nothing would legitimize the obligations of parents to children or neighbors to community. This is why no society or religion has ever given more than a very limited endorsement to chaotic time—not even Buddhism, in which all who fail to reach nirvana remain subject to the orderly reign of karma.

Cyclical time originated when the ancients first linked natural cycles of planetary events (diurnal rotations, lunar months, solar years, zodiacal precessions) with related cycles of human activity (sleeping, waking; gestating, birthing; planting, harvesting; hunting, feasting). Cyclical time conquered chaos by repetition, by the parent or hunter or farmer performing the right deed at the right moment in the perpetual circle, much as an original god or goddess performed a similar deed during time’s mythical first circle. Eventually, great cycles came to mark the duration of kingdoms and prophecies, the coming of heroes and shamans, and the aging of lives, generations, and civilizations. Cyclical time is endless, yet also endlessly completed and renewed, propelled by elaborate rituals resembling the modern seasonal holidays. Unlike chaotic time, cyclical time endowed classical societies with a prescribed moral dimension, a measure by which each generation could compare its behavior with that of its ancestors. Those who believed in cycles could engage in what anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl calls a “participation mystique” in the divine recreation of nature’s eternal round. The power th...

Enter the third option: linear time—time as a unique (and usually progressing) story with an absolute beginning and an absolute end. Thus did mankind first aspire to progress. In Greco-Roman civilization, the cyclical view of time was punctuated by inklings of human improvement. The Greeks sometimes hoped that Promethean reason might deliver mankind from perpetual destitution, while the Romans believed that a powerful polity could endow its citizens with a glorious destiny. Most important, the rise and spread of the great Western monotheisms inspired the hope that mankind was fated for more than just fortune’s wheel. The Persian, Judaic, Christian, and Islamic cosmologies all embraced the radically new concept of personal and historical time as a unidirectional drama. Time begins with a fall from grace; struggles forward in an intermediate sequence of trials, failures, revelations, and divine interventions; and ends with redemption and reentry into the Kingdom of God. Linearism required hundreds of years to catch on, but when it did, it changed the world. In medieval Europe, unidirectional time as outlined by the early Christians remained a relatively arcane idea, fully understo...

More recently, the West began using technology to flatten the very physical evidence of natural cycles. With artificial light, we believe we defeat the sleep-wake cycle; with climate control, the seasonal cycle; with refrigeration, the agricultural cycle; and with high-tech medicine, the rest-recovery cycle.

Before, 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 power of time-outside-nature.

When we deem our social destiny entirely self-directed and our personal lives self-made, we lose any sense of participating in a collective myth larger than ourselves.

When you recall your personal markers of life and time, the events you remember most are suffused with the emotional complexion of your phase of life at the time. Your early markers, colored by the dreams and innocence of childhood, reveal how events (and older people) shaped you. Your later markers, colored by the cares of maturity, tell how you shaped events (and younger people). When you reach old age, you will remember all the markers that truly mattered to you. Perhaps your generation will build monuments to them (as today’s seniors are now doing with the new FDR and World War II monuments in Washington, D.C.), in the hope that posterity will remember your lives and times in the preliterate way: as legends. It is through this linkage of biological aging and shared experience, reproduced across turnings and generations, that history acquires personal relevance.

This dynamic has recurred throughout American history. Roughly every two decades (the span of one phase of life), there has arisen a new constellation of generations—a new layering of generational personas up and down the age ladder. As this constellation has shifted, so has the national mood. Consider what happened, from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, as one generation replaced another at each phase of life: ■ In elderhood, the cautionary individualists of the Lost Generation (born 1883–1900) were replaced by the hubristic G.I. Generation (born 1901–1924), who launched America into an expansive era of material affluence, global power, and civic planning. ■ In midlife, the upbeat G.I.s were replaced by the helpmate Silent Generation (born 1925–1942), who applied their expertise and sensitivity to fine-tune the institutional order while mentoring the passions of youth. ■ In young adulthood, the conformist Silent were replaced by the narcissistic Boom Generation (born 1943–1960), who asserted the primacy of self and challenged the alleged moral vacuity of the institutional order. ■ In childhood, the indulged Boomers were replaced by the neglected 13th Generation (born 1961–1981), who were left unprotected at a time of cultural convulsion and adult self-discovery. Known in pop culture as Generation X, its name here reflects the fact that it is literally the thirteenth generation to call itself American. Viewed through the prism of generational aging, the mood change betwee...

Forecasters are still making the same mistakes. Best-selling books envision a postmillennial America of unrelenting individualism, social fragmentation, and weakening government—a nation becoming ever more diverse and decentralized, its citizens inhabiting a high-tech world of tightening global ties and loosening personal ones, its Web sites multiplying and its culture splintering. We hear much talk about how elder life will improve and child life deteriorate, how the rich will get richer and the poor poorer, and how today’s kids will come of age with a huge youth crime wave. Don’t bet on it. The rhythms of history suggest that none of those trends will last more than a few years into the new century. What will come afterward can be glimpsed by studying earlier Unraveling eras with similar generational constellations—and by inquiring into what happened next.

These four archetypes are best identified by the turnings of their births: ■ A Prophet generation is born during a High. ■ A Nomad generation is born during an Awakening. ■ A Hero generation is born during an Unraveling. ■ An Artist generation is born during a Crisis. Each archetype is an expression of one of the enduring temperaments—and life-cycle myths—of mankind. When history overlays these archetypes atop the four turnings, the result is four very different generational constellations. This explains why a new turning occurs every twenty years or so and why history rolls to so many related pendular rhythms. One turning will underprotect children, for example, while another will overprotect them. The same is true with attitudes toward politics, affluence, war, religion, family, gender roles, pluralism, and a host of other trends.

Each cycle is represented by a circle, symbolizing perfect and unbreakable recurrence.

Each circle is divided into phases—sometimes two, nearly always four.

Each circle requires that time be restarted, at the moment of each creation.

Each circle is presumed to repeat itself, in the same sequence, over a period of similar length.

Wright uncovered this pattern not only in modern American and European history but also in Hellenistic and Roman times, and noted that others had glimpsed it before him. He attributed this pattern mainly to generational experience. “The warrior does not wish to fight against himself and prejudices his son against war,” he observed, “but the grandsons are taught to think of war as romantic.” While Wright also pondered over more epochal “long-wave” cycles of warfare, his saecular rhythm has drawn the most interest from later historians.

better word is crisis. Its Greek root krisis refers to a decisive or separating moment. In disease, the krisis is when physicians know whether a patient will recover or die; in war, it is the moment in battle that determines whether an army (or nation) will triumph or fall. Thomas Paine attached the word to political revolution in 1776, when he began publishing his renowned American Crisis pamphlets. From Metternich to Burckhardt to Nietzsche, a host of nineteenth-century thinkers applied it to the periodic total wars that Marx called “express trains of history.” By World War I, historian Gerhard Masur explains, the word was widely understood to mean “a sudden acceleration of the historical process in a terrifying manner,” sufficient to “release economic, social, and moral forces of unforeseen power and dimensions, which often make return to the status quo impossible.” The Crisis ends one saeculum and launches the next. Yet if it denotes the cycle’s maximum moment of yang, or strife, a curious asymmetry seems to arise: What denotes the cycle’s opposite extreme, the maximum moment of yin, or love? If we can locate and describe history’s winter solstice, we should be able to do likewise with its summer solstice.

An Awakening is the other solstice of the saeculum: It is to Crisis as summer is to winter, love to strife. Within each lies the causal germ of its opposite. In the second quarter of the saeculum, the confidence born of growing security triggers an outburst of love that leads to disorder; in the fourth quarter, the anxiety born of growing insecurity triggers an outburst of strife that reestablishes order. An Awakening thus serves as a cycle marker, reminding a society that it is halfway along a journey traversed many times by its ancestors. Wurthnow observes that “periods of religious unrest…have, of course, been regarded as portents of change—as historical watersheds—at least since Herodotus.”

If Awakenings are the summers and Crises the winters of human experience, transitional eras are required. A springlike era must traverse the path from Crisis to Awakening, an autumnal era the path from Awakening to Crisis. Where the two saecular solstices are solutions to needs eventually created by one another, the saecular equinoxes must be directional opposites of one another. Where the post-Crisis era warms and lightens, the post-Awakening era chills and darkens. Where the cyclical spring brings consensus, order, and stability, the autumn brings argument, fragmentation, and uncertainty.

While a Crisis rearranges the outer world of power and politics, an Awakening rearranges the inner world of spirit and culture. While a Crisis elevates the group and reinvents public space, an Awakening elevates the individual and reinvents private space. While a Crisis restarts our calendar in the realm of politics, an Awakening does something similar with the culture.

In a Crisis, older people give orders while the young do great deeds; in an Awakening, the old are the deed doers and the young are the order givers.

Pythagoras was among the first Western thinkers to interpret life as a cycle of four phases, each roughly twenty years long and each associated with a season: the spring of childhood, the summer of youth, the harvest of midlife, and the winter of old age. The Romans likewise divided the biological saeculum into four phases: pueritia (childhood), iuventus (young adulthood), virilitas (maturity), and senectus (old age).

The phases, and social roles, of the modern American life cycle can be summarized as follows: ■ Childhood (pueritia, ages 0–20); social role: growth (receiving nurture, acquiring values) ■ Young Adulthood (iuventus, ages 21–41); social role: vitality (serving institutions, testing values) ■ Midlife (virilitas, ages 42–62); social role: power (managing institutions, applying values) ■ Elderhood (senectus, ages 63–83); social role: leadership (leading institutions, transferring values) ■ Late Elderhood (ages 84+); social role: dependence (receiving comfort from institutions, remembering values) The first four (childhood through elderhood) comprise the quaternity of the human life cycle. The combined length of these four phases, roughly eighty-four years, matches the span of the American saeculum dating back to the Revolution.

The stress of the Great Event leaves a different emotional imprint according to the social role each is called on to play—differences reinforced by the social interaction within each group. Children mirror each other’s dread, youths each other’s valor, midlifers each other’s competence, and seniors each other’s wisdom.

If the Great Event is successfully resolved, its enduring memory imparts to people in each phase of life a unique location in history—and a generational persona. In particular, it marks young adults as collective heroes, around whom grand myths later arise. When this hero generation reaches midlife, its leaders show greater hubris than their predecessors. As elders, they issue more demands for public reward. Meanwhile, the generation following them—the trembling children of the Great Event—bring a more deferential persona into later life-cycle phases, altering their social roles accordingly. The generation born just after the Great Event will likely be seen in hopeful colors as the golden-age children for whom the triumph was won. And, as the Great Event echoes still further through time, this generation may, in turn, judge later generations according to whether they measure up to its own standards.

Generational aging is what translates the rhythm of the past into the rhythm of the future. It explains why each generation is not only shaped by history but also shapes later history. It regulates the velocity of social change. It connects life in its biographical intimacy to history in its social or political grandeur. In all these ways, the generation lies at the root of the saeculum.

To apply these lengths to real birth years, you have to locate an underlying generational persona. Every generation has one. It’s a distinctly human—and variable—creation, with attitudes about family life, gender roles, institutions, politics, religion, lifestyle, and the future. A generation can think, feel, or do anything a person might think, feel, or do. It can be safe or reckless, individualist or collegial, spiritual or secular. Like any social category (race, class, or nationality), a generation can allow plenty of individual exceptions and be fuzzy at the edges. But unlike most other categories, it possesses its own personal biography. You can tell a lifelong story about the shared experiences of the Silent Generation in ways you never could for all women, all Hispanics, or all Californians. The reason, to quote Ferrari, is that a generation “is born, lives, and dies.” It can feel nostalgia for a unique past, express urgency about a future of limited duration, and comprehend its own mortality.

There is no fixed formula for identifying the persona of a real-life generation. But it helps to look for three attributes: first, a generation’s common location in history; second, its common beliefs and behavior; and third, its perceived membership in a common generation.

Common location refers to where a generation finds itself, at any given age, against the background chronology of trends and events. Location...

Common beliefs and behavior of a generation show its members to be different from people born at another time. They are the means by which a generation moves history.

These myths suggest that for any generational differences to arise at all, a quaternity of opposing archetypes becomes a logical necessity. How else could young heroes emerge, if not in response to the worldly impotence of self-absorbed elder prophets? How else could young prophets emerge, if not in response to the spiritual complacency of hubristic elder heroes? This in turn requires that each generation exert a dominant formative influence on people who are two phases of life younger, that is, on the second younger generation.

A key consequence of these cross-cycle shadow relationships is a recurring pattern that lies at the heart of the saeculum: an oscillation between the overprotection and underprotection of children. During a Crisis, Nomad-led families overprotect Artist children; during an Awakening, Artist-led families underprotect Nomad children. Following a Crisis, Hero-led families expand the freedoms of Prophet children; following an Awakening, Prophetled families curtail the freedoms of Hero children.

These powerful cross-cycle phenomena explain why myths always depict the archetypes in one fixed order, the only order that is possible in the seasons of time: Hero to Artist to Prophet to Nomad. Recurring in this order, the four archetypes produce four possible generational constellations.

Once a generation fully occupies the leadership role of midlife, it succeeds in reshaping the social environment to reflect that orientation. Meanwhile, knowingly or not, it nurtures a new child generation as its shadow, equipping it to challenge its own ruling mentality. As the parental generation enters elderhood blind to its shadow, the child generation comes of age, emerges as the shadow, and reacts against its elders’ perceived excesses.

A Prophet generation grows up as increasingly indulged post-Crisis children, comes of age as the narcissistic young crusaders of an Awakening, cultivates principle as moralistic midlifers, and emerges as wise elders guiding the next Crisis. ■ A Nomad generation grows up as underprotected children during an Awakening, comes of age as the alienated young adults of a post-Awakening world, mellows into pragmatic midlife leaders during a Crisis, and ages into tough post-Crisis elders. ■ A Hero generation grows up as increasingly protected post-Awakening children, comes of age as the heroic young teamworkers of a Crisis, demonstrates hubris as energetic midlifers, and emerges as powerful elders attacked by the next Awakening. ■ An Artist generation grows up as overprotected children during a Crisis, comes of age as the sensitive young adults of a post-Crisis world, breaks free as indecisive midlife leaders during an Awakening, and ages into empathic post-Awakening elders.

Exodus is, at root, the story of four generations. 1. The holy peers of Moses. As young adults, they awakened their people to the spirit of God. Rejecting worldly privilege, they defied the authority of Pharaoh’s Egypt. Later in life, they led the Hebrews on a miracle-filled journey across the Red Sea and through the wilderness to the threshold of Canaan, the Promised Land. 2. The worshipers of the Golden Calf. It was for the sins of these wanderers and “men of little faith” that God punished the Hebrews with extra trials and tribulations. They were too young to join Moses’ challenge against the Pharaoh, yet old enough to remember the enticing fleshpots of Egypt. 3. The dutiful soldier peers of Joshua. Born after the Exodus, they came of age waging victorious battles and were thereafter anointed for leadership by the patriarch Moses. As they entered Canaan (none older was allowed to do so), their unity and martial discipline enabled them to conquer the natives and bring substance to Moses’ dreams. 4. The original generation of Judges. Overshadowed by Joshua’s battles, these “inheritor” youths were reminded by the dying Joshua that they enjoyed “land for which ye did not labor, and cities which ye built not.” Their exercise of power was marked by political fragmentation, cultural sophistication, and anxiety about the future.

A turning is an era with a characteristic social mood, a new twist on how people feel about themselves and their nation. It results from the aging of the generational constellation. A society enters a turning once every twenty years or so, when all living generations begin to enter their next phases of life. Like archetypes and constellations, turnings come four to a saeculum, and always in the same order: ■ The First Turning is a High. Old Prophets disappear, Nomads enter elderhood, Heroes enter midlife, Artists enter young adulthood, and a new generation of Prophets is born. ■ The Second Turning is an Awakening. Old Nomads disappear, Heroes enter elderhood, Artists enter midlife, Prophets enter young adulthood, and a new generation of child Nomads is born. ■ The Third Turning is an Unraveling. Old Heroes disappear, Artists enter elderhood, Prophets enter midlife, Nomads enter young adulthood, and a new generation of child Heroes is born. ■ The Fourth Turning is a Crisis. Old Artists disappear, Prophets enter elderhood, Nomads enter midlife, Heroes enter young adulthood, and a new generation of child Artists is born.