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March 11 - August 1, 2021
Where we once thought ourselves collectively strong, we now regard ourselves as individually entitled.
The reward of the historian is to locate patterns that recur over time and to discover the natural rhythms of social experience.
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 ...
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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...
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As a new social contract was created, people overcame challenges once thought insurmountable—and used the Crisis to elevate themselves and their nation to a higher plane of civilization:
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.
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.
Was 2020 our "great gate"... the Covid-19 pandemic, civil unrest, or do we have several more years of this leading to something bigger?
Today's Third Turning problems—that Rubik's Cube of crime, race, money, family, culture, and ethics —will snap into a Fourth Turning solution.
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.
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).
linear time—time as a unique (and usually progressing) story with an absolute beginning and an absolute end.
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 we dam a river or industrialize a society, for example, we might eliminate the cycle of floods or wars; then again, we might just ensure that the cycle is both less frequent and more devastating. Often, “progress” ends up generating entirely new cycles. Just ponder them all: business cycles, financial cycles, electoral cycles, fashion cycles, opinion cycles, crime cycles, traffic cycles, and so on.
The society that believes in cycles the least, America, has fallen in the grip of the most portentous cycle in the history of mankind.
What are these rhythms?
The Etruscans ritualized it and the Romans first gave it a name: the saeculum.
Today, it loosely goes by the name of siecle, or “century.”
The other rhythm beats to the four phases of a human life, each about twenty years or so in length. What the ancient Greeks called genos, and what we call the generation, has been known, named, and respected as a force in history by practically every civilization since the dawn of time.
The saeculum lends history its underlying temporal beat. Generations, and their four recurring archetypes, create and perpetuate history's seasonal quality. Together, they explain how and why cycles occur.
As we grow older, we realize that the sum total of such events has in many ways shaped who we are.
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.
Biologically and socially, a full human life is divided into four phases: childhood, young adulthood, midlife, and elderhood.
A generation, in turn, is the aggregate of all people born over roughly the span of a phase of life who share a common location in history and, hence, a common collective persona.
Like a person (and unlike a race, religion, or sex), a generation is mortal:
History creates generations, and generations create history. This symbiosis between life and time explains why, if one is seasonal, the other must be.
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.
Dating back to the first stirrings of the Renaissance, Anglo-American history has traversed six saecular cycles, each of which displayed a similar rhythm. Every cycle had four turnings, and (except for the anomalous U.S. Civil War) every cycle produced four generational archetypes. We are presently in the Third Turning of the Millennial Saeculum, the seventh cycle of the modern era.
Try to unlearn the linear need to judge change by one-dimensional standards of progress.
saeculum. The word carried two meanings: “a long human life,” and “a natural century,” approximating one hundred years. The word's etymology may be related to the Latin senectus (old age), sero (to plant), sequor (to follow), or some lost Etruscan root. Much of what we know about the saeculum comes from Varro (Augustus's librarian) via Censorinus, a Roman historian of the third century a.d. By then, Etruria had become a distant memory to a Rome that was itself weakening.
through a similarly seasonal cycle of history—of growth, maturation, entropy, and death.
Yet even if the Etruscans and Romans vanished from history, the saeculum did not. A millennium later, it appeared again, boosted by Renaissance philosophers who rediscovered the classical insight of cyclical time. In due course, modern man redefined the practice of saecular games—in the form of major wars and new balances of power that have recurred roughly once every hundred years.
Late each December, many Americans place large circles of sculpted evergreens over their front doors. Most of us think of this year-end wreath as a Christmas decoration, but the ritual is originally pagan. It dates back to the Roman Saturnalia and totems used by other ancients to protect themselves from winter. Consider the natural symbolism: The wreath's circle symbolizes an eternity of unbrokenness; its evergreens, the persistence of light and life through the death and darkness of winter; its location on the home portal, the conviction that the family will survive; its postsolstice timing,
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The ritual year endures in modern America, especially around the time of the “winter break” between the old year and the new. The baby Jesus symbolizes hope for the soul, while the New Year's baby symbolizes hope for the world. In the week between the two holidays, many modern Americans feel unfocused, much like the ancients did after the solstice.
Each cycle is represented by a circle, symbolizing perfect and unbreakable recurrence.
Overlapping with two-phase time, and surpassing it in popularity among the ancients, was fourfold time.
Usually, the ruling prototype was the fourfold seasonality of annual time: spring to summer to fall to winter. Similar quaternities were also applied to days or nights (the Romans' four vigilia), to months (the four phases of the moon), and to people (the four phases of life).
quaternities
Each circle of time has a great moment of discontinuity.
In the ancient view, a new round of time does not emerge gradually from the last but only after the circle experiences a sharp break.
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.
The Crisis ends one saeculum and launches the next.
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.
An Awakening thus serves as a cycle marker, reminding a society that it is halfway along a journey traversed many times by its ancestors.
