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

by William Strauss

Were history pure chaos, every expression of human will could be undone at any time. Were there no intelligible connection between past intention and future result, we could do nothing to assist our children or posterity. We might as well drain the treasury, ruin the atmosphere, ravage the culture, and consume the seed corn of civilization. Were history purely linear, humanity would also find itself degraded. Even the most noble of societies would become no more than a means to an end. Generations not present at the end of time would become mere building blocks, their members mere sacrifices on the altar of progress. Along the great highway of history, nothing would be eternal. The only free choice anyone might make would be to speed or slow a foreordained juggernaut. As linear history develops ever narrower standards of perfection, any generation not measuring up to that standard must look on itself (and be looked on by others) as a bad seed, useless to humanity except as a source of harm. The same would be true for any individual. Recent Western experiments with totalitarian regimes provide an object lesson: Societies that deify history’s destination typically have no respect for the moral autonomy of the people making the journey. When history is viewed as seasonal, by contrast, each generation can discover its own path across time, its own meaningful linkage to ancestors and heirs. Whoever we are—G.I.s, Silent, Boomers, 13ers, Millennials—we can locate our rendezvous w...