The Fourth Turning

by William Straus & Neil Howe

(http://www.fourthturning.com/html/fourth_turning.html)

The reward of the historian is to locate patterns that recur over time and to discover the natural rhythms of social experience.

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 80 to 100 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:

Each turning comes with its own identifiable mood.  Always, these mood shifts catch people by surprise.

This is a book that turns history into prophecy.  After years of examining the cycles of American history, we have reached this startling conclusion: Starting about ten years from now, America will enter an era of crisis - an era of political and social upheaval - that will extend until the late 2020s.  We call this era a Fourth Turning.  And we believe it will be a major threshold in the nation's history, climaxing with events on par with the Revolution, the Civil War, or World War II.

  We discovered this prophecy while looking for something else.  The Fourth Turning is the product of a decade-long collaboration extending back to when we started writing our first book, Generations.  We were both deeply interested in generational issues, and at the time, we presumed that the relationship between our generation and others unlike anything that had ever occurred before.  But the more deeply we reviewed American history, the more we realized that only the details were new.  The underlying rhythms were not.   While we wrote Generations primarily as a history book, with chapter-length biographies of the eighteen generations from the first Puritans to today’s young children, we also observed how generations tend to come in cycles of four types.  In a closing chapter, we applied these cycles to offer predictions about America's near-term future.  We suspected that, amid all the buzz about Information Ages and New World Orders, the seasonal patterns observed by the ancients might be hard-wired into the inner nature of our modern society.  We predicted in 1990, for example, that America would split into competing culture wars camps; that politics would become moralistic and mean; that “family values” would become a new vogue; and that the emergence of a hardened and alienated youth generation would provoke caustic media reaction.  When the 1990s did in fact unfold as the cycles would suggest, we felt a pressing need to alert people about where the nation appears to be headed.

Winter Is Coming-America feels like it’s unraveling.

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.

Not long ago, America was more than the sum of its parts.  Now, it is less.  Around World War II, we were proud as a people but modest as individuals.  Fewer than two people in ten said yes when asked “Are you a very important person?”  Today, more than six in ten say yes.  Where we once thought ourselves collectively strong, we now regard ourselves as individually entitled.

Yet even while we exalt our own personal growth, we realize that millions of self-actualized persons don’t add up to an actualized society.  Popular trust in virtually every American institution—from businesses and governments to churches and newspapers—keeps falling to new lows.  Public debts soar, the middle class shrinks, welfare dependencies deepen, and cultural wars worsen by the year.  We now have the highest incarceration rate, and the lowest eligible-voter participation rate, of any major democracy.  Statistics inform us that many adverse trends (crime, divorce, abortion, scholastic aptitudes) may have bottomed out, but we’re not reassured.

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 mid-thirties 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.

While we grope for answers, we wonder if analysis may be crowding out our intuition.  Like the anxious patient who takes 17 kinds of medicine while poring over his own CAT scan, we find it hard to stop and ask: What is the underlying malady really about?  How can we best bring the primal forces of nature to our assistance?  Isn’t there a choice lying somewhere between total control and total despair?  Deep down, beneath the tangle of trend lines, we suspect that our history or biology or very humanity must have something simple and important to say to us.  But we don’t know what it is.  If we once did know, we have since forgotten.

Wherever we’re headed, America is evolving in ways most of us don’t like or understand.  Individually focused yet collectively adrift, we wonder if we’re heading toward a waterfall.
Are we?

Seasons of History

During the Middle Ages, travelers reported an unusual custom among illiterate villagers in central France.  Whenever an event of local importance occurred, like the marriage of a seigneur or the renegotiation of feudal dues, the elders boxed the ears of a young child to make sure he remembered that day—and event—all his life.

In today’s world, the making of childhood memories remains a visceral practice.  Grand state ceremonies box the ears with the thunder of cannons, roar of jets, and blast of fireworks.  Teenagers’ boomboxes similarly etch young aural canals with future memories of a shared adolescent community.  Like medieval French villagers, modern Americans carry deeply-felt associations with what has happened at various points in our lives.  We memorialize public events (Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy or King assassinations, the Challenger explosion) by remembering exactly what we were doing at the time.  As we grow older, we realize that the sum total of such events has in many ways shaped who we are.

…Exactly how these major events shaped us had much to do with how old we were when they happened.  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.

…Human history is comprised of lives, coursing from birth to death.  All persons who are born must die, and all who die must first be born.  The full sweep of human civilization is but the sum of this.  Of all the cycles known to man, the one we all know best is the human lifecycle.  No other societal force—not class, not nationality, not culture, not technology—has as predictable a chronology.  The limiting length of an active lifecycle is one of civilization’s great constants: In the time of Moses, it was eighty to a hundred years, and it still is, even if more people now reach that limit.  Biologically and socially, a  full human life is divided into four phases: childhood, young adulthood, midlife, and elderhood.  Each phase of life is the same length of the others, capable of holding one generation at a time. And each phase is associated with a specific social role that conditions how its occupants perceive the world and act on those perceptions.

A generation, in turn, is the aggregate of all persons, 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: Its members understand that in time they all must perish.  Hence, a generation feels the same historical urgency that individuals feel in their own lives.  This dynamic of generational aging and dying enables a society to replenish its memory and evolve over time.  Each time younger generations replace older ones in each phase of life, the composite lifecycle becomes something altogether new, fundamentally changing the entire society’s mood and behavior.

History creates generations, and generations create history.  This symbiosis between life and time explains why, if one is seasonal, the other must be.

….Americans’ chronic failure to grasp the seasonality of history explains why the consensus forecasts about the national direction so often turn out so wrong.

Back in the late 1950s, forecasters widely predicted that America’s future would be like Disney’s Tomorrowland.  The experts foresaw well-mannered youth, a wholesome culture, an end of ideology, an orderly conquest of racism and poverty, steady economic progress, plenty of social discipline, and uncontroversial Korea-like police actions abroad.  All these predictions, of course, were wildly mistaken.  It’s not just that the experts missed the particular events that lay just ahead—the Têt Offensive and Apollo 11, Watts and Kent State, Summer of Love and Watergate, Earth Day and Chappaquiddick.  It’s that they missed the entire mood of the coming era.

Why were their predictions so wrong?  When the forecasters assumed the future would extrapolate the recent past, they expected that the next set of people in each phase of life would behave just like the current occupants.  Had they known where and how to look, the experts could have seen history-bending changes about to occur in America’s generational lineup: Each generation would age through time as surely as water runs to the sea.  Over the ensuing two decades, the current elder leaders were due to disappear, a new batch of kids to arrive, and the generations in between to transform the new phases of life they were entering.

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:

 

Viewed through the prism of generational aging, the mood change between the late 1950s and the late 1970s becomes not just comprehensible, but (in hindsight) predictable: America was moving from a First Turning constellation and into a Second.  Replace the aging Truman and Ike with LBJ and Nixon.  Replace the middle-aged Ed Sullivan and Ann Landers with Norman Lear and Gloria Steinem.  Replace young Organization Men with Woodstock hippies.  Replace Jerry Mathers with Tatum O’Neal.  This top-to-bottom alteration of the American lifecycle tells much about why and how America shifted from a mood of consensus, complacency, and optimism to one of turbulence, argument, and passion.

….What about the most recent twenty years?  The most prevalent late-‘70s forecasts of late-‘90s America assumed that the trends of the ‘60s would continue along a straight line.  This led to predictions of an acceleration of government planning, ongoing protests against social conformity, more “God is Dead” secularism, delegitimized family life, less emphasis on money and weapons in a “post-materialist” age, and spectacular economic growth which would either allow unprecedented leisure--or plunge the planet into a huge ecological catastrophe.

None of that came to pass, of course.  But in their triumphal enthusiasm, virtually all the late-‘70s forecasters made a more fundamental error: Whether their visions were utopian or apocalyptic, veering toward Epcot Center or Soylent Green, they all assumed that America was heading somewhere in a hurry.  No one imagined what actually happened: that through the ‘80s and ‘90s, while different societal pieces have drifted in different directions, America as a whole has gone nowhere in particular.

As before, these forecasters missed the target because they failed to look at lifecycle trajectories.  They failed to realize that all the generations were poised to enter new phases of life—and that, as they did, people up and down the lifecycle would think and behave differently.  In elderhood, the confident G.I.s were due to be replaced by the more hesitant Silent, who would prefer a more complex, diverse, and individuated social order.  In midlife, the conciliatory Silent were ready to give way to the more judgmental Boomers, who would enforce a confrontational ethic of moral conviction.  In young adulthood, the passionate Boomers were set to vacate for the more pragmatic 13ers, whose survivalism would be born of necessity.  In childhood, the neglected 13ers were about to be replaced by the more treasured Millennial Generation (born 1982-2002?) amid a resurgent commitment to protect and provide for small children.  As a result of all these lifecycle shifts, the national mood would change into something new.  Back in the 1970s, the experts could have envisioned what this mood would be.  How?  By looking at an earlier Awakening era with a similar generational constellation—and inquiring into what happened next.

….And what about today?  Forecasters are still making the same mistakes.  Best-selling books envision a post-millennial 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 inquiring into what happened next.

Each archetype is an expression of one of the enduring temperaments—and lifecycle 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.

 

 

A generation is composed of people whose common location in history lends them a collective persona.  The span of one generation is roughly the length of a phase of life.  Generations come in four archetypes, always in the same order, whose phase-of-life positions comprise a constellation.

 

The 4- Archetypes

….To inquire correctly, we must link each of today’s generations with a recurring sequence of four generational archetypes that have appeared throughout all the saecula of our history.  These four archetypes are best identified by the turning of their births:

1) The Prophet archetype is born in a High, enters young adulthood in an Awakening, midlife in an Unraveling, and elderhood in a Crisis.
We remember Prophets best for their coming-of-age passion (the excited pitch of Jonathan Edwards, William Lloyd Garrison, William Jennings Bryan) and for their principled elder stewardship (the sober pitch of Samuel Langdon at Bunker Hill, President Lincoln at Gettysburg, or FDR with his “fireside chats”).  Increasingly indulged as children, they become increasingly protective as parents.  Their principal endowments are in the domain of vision, values, and religion.  Their best-known leaders include: John Winthrop and William Berkeley; Samuel Adams and Benjamin Franklin; James Polk and Abraham Lincoln; and Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt.  These have been principled moralists, summoners of human sacrifice, wagers of righteous wars.  Early in life, none saw combat in uniform; late in life, most came to be revered more for their inspiring words than for their grand deeds.

A lifecycle outline:

·         As PROPHETS replace Artists in childhood during a High, they are nurtured with increasing indulgence by optimistic adults in a secure environment.
 

·         As self-absorbed PROPHETS replace Artists in young adulthood during an Awakening, they challenge the moral failure of elder-built institutions, sparking a society-wide spiritual awakening.
 

·         As judgmental PROPHETS replace Artists in midlife during an Unraveling, they preach a downbeat, values-fixated ethic of moral conviction.
 

·         As visionary PROPHETS replace Artists in elderhood during a Crisis, they push to resolve ever-deepening moral choices, setting the stage for the secular goals of the young

 

2) The Nomad archetype is born in an Awakening, enters young adulthood in an Unraveling, midlife in a Crisis, and elderhood in a High.

We remember Nomads best for their rising-adult years of hell-raising (Paxton Boys, Missouri Raiders, rumrunners) and for their midlife years of hands-on, get-it-done leadership (Francis Marion, Stonewall Jackson, George Patton).  Underprotected as children, they become overprotective parents.  Their principal endowments are in the domain of liberty, survival, and honor.  Their best-known leaders include: Nathaniel Bacon and William Stoughton; George Washington and John Adams; Ulysses Grant and Grover Cleveland; Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.  These have been cunning, hard-to-fool realists—taciturn warriors who prefer to meet problems and adversaries one-on-one.  They include the only two Presidents who had earlier hanged a man (Washington and Cleveland), one governor who hanged witches (Stoughton), and several leaders who had earlier led troops into battle (Bacon, Washington, Grant, Truman, and Eisenhower).

A lifecycle outline:

3) The Hero archetype is born in an Unraveling, enters young adulthood in a Crisis, midlife in a High, and elderhood in an Awakening.
 We remember Heroes best for their collective coming-of-age triumphs (Glorious Revolution, Yorktown, D-Day) and for their hubristic elder achievements (the Peace of Utrecht and slave codes, the Louisiana Purchase and steamboats, the Apollo moon launches and interstate highways).  Increasingly protected as children, they become increasingly indulgent as parents.  Their principal endowment activities are in the domain of community, affluence, and technology.  Their best-known leaders include: Gurdon Saltonstall and “King” Carter; Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.  They have been vigorous and rational institution builders.  All have been aggressive advocates of economic prosperity and public optimism in midlife; and all have maintained a reputation for civic energy and competence even deep into old age.

A lifecycle outline:

 

4) The Artist archetype is born in a Crisis, enters young adulthood in a High, midlife in an Awakening, and elderhood in an Unraveling.

We remember Artists best for their quiet years of rising adulthood (the log-cabin settlers of 1800, the plains farmers of 1880, the new suburbanites of 1960) and during their midlife years of flexible, consensus-building leadership (the “Compromises” of the Whig era, the “good government” reforms of the Progressive era, the budget and peace processes of the current era).  Overprotected as children, they become underprotective parents.  Their principal endowment activities are in the domain of pluralism, expertise, and due process.  Their best-known leaders include: William Shirley and Cadwallader Colden; John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson; Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson; Walter Mondale, and Colin Powell.  These have been sensitive and complex social technicians, advocates of fair play and the politics of inclusion.  With the single exception of Andrew Jackson, they rank as the most expert and credentialed of American political leaders.

A lifecycle outline:

The 4- TURNINGS

 

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:

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 —an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.  Old Prophets disappear, Nomads enter elderhood, Heroes enter midlife, Artists enter young adulthood—and a new generation of Prophets is born.

A HIGH brings a renaissance to community life.  With the new civic order in place, people want to put the Crisis behind them and feel content about what they have collectively achieved.  Any social issues left unresolved by the Crisis must now remain so.

The need for dutiful sacrifice has ebbed, yet the society continues to demand order and consensus.  The recent fear for group survival transmutes into a desire for investment, growth, and strength--which in turn produces an era of commercial prosperity, institutional solidarity, and political stability.  The big public arguments are over means, not ends.  Security is a paramount need.  Obliging individuals serve a purposeful society—though a few loners voice disquiet over the spiritual void.  Life tends toward the friendly and homogeneous, but attitudes toward personal risk-taking begin to loosen.  The sense of shame (which rewards duty and conformity) reaches its zenith.  Gender distinctions attain their widest point, and child-rearing becomes more indulgent.  Wars are unlikely, except as unwanted echoes of the recent Crisis.

Eventually, civic life seems fully under control but distressingly spirit-dead.  People worry that, as a society, they can do everything but no longer feel anything.

The post-World War II American High may rank as the all-time apogee of the national mood.  The Gilded Age surge into the industrial age was supported by a rate of capital formation unmatched in U.S. history, symbolized by the massive turbines in the Centennial Exposition’s Hall of Machines.  In the early 19th century, the geometric grids of the District of Columbia and Northwest Territory townships projected a mood of ordered community that culminated in the Era of Good Feelings, the only time a U.S. President was re-elected by acclamation.  In the upbeat 1710s, poetic odes to flax and shipping conjured up a society preoccupied (in Cotton Mather’s words) with “usefulness” and “good works.”

Recall America’s circa-1963 conception of the future: We brimmed over with optimism about Camelot, a bustling future with smart people in which big projects and “impossible dreams” were freshly achievable.  The moon could be reached, and poverty eradicated, both within a decade. Tomorrowland was a friendly future with moving skywalks, pastel geometric shapes, futuristic Muzak, and well-tended families.  In the Carousel of Progress, the progress remained fixed while the “carousel” (what moved) was the audience.  The future had specificity and certainty but lacked urgency and moral direction.

   The Second Turning is an Awakening —a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.  Old Nomads disappear, Heroes enter elderhood, Artists enter midlife, Prophets enter young adulthood—and a new generation of child Nomads is born.

An AWAKENING arrives with a dramatic challenge against the High’s assumptions about benevolent reason and congenial institutions.  The outer world now feels trivial compared to the inner world.

New spiritual agendas and social ideals burst forth, along with utopian experiments seeking to reconcile total fellowship with total autonomy.  The prosperity and security of a High are overtly disdained though covertly taken for granted.  A society searches for soul over science, meanings over things.  Youth-fired attacks break out against the established institutional order.  As these attacks take their toll, society has difficulty coalescing around common goals.  People stop believing that social progress requires social discipline.  Any public effort that requires collective discipline encounters withering controversy.  Wars are awkwardly fought and badly remembered afterward.  A euphoric enthusiasm over spiritual needs eclipses concern over secular problems, contributing to a high tolerance for risk-prone lifestyles.  People begin feeling guilt about what they earlier did to avoid shame.  Public order deteriorates, and crime and substance abuse rise.  Gender distinctions narrow, and child-rearing reaches the point of minimum protection and structure.

Eventually, the enthusiasm cools—having left the old cultural regime fully discredited, internal enemies identified, comity shattered, and institutions delegitimized.

Many Americans recall this mood on the campuses and urban streets of the Consciousness Revolution.  Earlier generations knew a similar mood in Greenwich Village around 1900, in utopian communes around 1840, in the Connecticut Valley nearly a century earlier, and in the Puritans’ New Jerusalems in the post-Mayflower decades.

Recall America’s circa-1984 conception of the future: Tomorrowland had evolved through Space Odyssey to Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a spiritual future in which human consciousness triumphs over machines.  The visions alternated between perfection and disaster—between utopias celebrating “love” and dystopias annihilating everything.  We believed that self-expression took precedence over self-control—even if we still assumed that big institutions would continue to cohere and function without much difficulty.


    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.  Old Heroes disappear, Artists enter elderhood, Prophets enter midlife, Nomads enter young adulthood—and a new generation of child Heroes is born.
An UNRAVELING begins as a society-wide embrace of the liberating cultural forces set loose by the Awakening.  People have had their fill of spiritual rebirth, moral protest, and lifestyle experimentation.  Content with what they have become individually, they vigorously assert an ethos of pragmatism, self-reliance, laissez faire, and national (or sectional or ethnic) chauvinism.

While personal satisfaction is high, public trust ebbs amid a fragmenting culture, harsh debates over values, and weakening civic habits.  The sense of guilt (which rewards principle and individuality) reaches its zenith.  As moral debates brew, the big public arguments are over ends, not means.  Decisive public action becomes very difficult, as community problems are deferred.  Wars are fought with moral fervor but without consensus or follow-through.

Eventually, cynical alienation hardens into a brooding pessimism. During a High, obliging individuals serve a purposeful society, and even bad people get harnessed to socially constructive tasks; during an Unraveling, an obliging society serves purposeful individuals, and even good people find it hard to connect with their community.  The approaching specter of public disaster ultimately elicits a mix of paralysis and apathy that would have been unthinkable half a saeculum earlier.  People can now feel, but collectively can no longer do.

The mood of the current Culture Wars era seems new to nearly every living American but is not new to history.  Around World War I, America steeped in reform and fundamentalism amidst a floodtide of crime, alcohol, immigration, political corruption, and circus trials.  The 1850s likewise simmered with moral righteousness, shortening tempers, and multiplying “mavericks.”  It was a decade, says historian David Donald, in which “the authority of all government in America was at a low point.”  Entering the 1760s, the colonies felt rejuvenated in spirit but reeled from violence, mobs, insurrections, and paranoia over the corruption of official authority.

Look at how Americans today conceive the future: Think-tank luminaries exult over the history-bending changes of the Information Age, while the public glazes at expertise, cynically disregards the good news, and dwells on the negative.  The pop culture rakes with futuristic images of Total Recall dysfunction, Robocop crimes, Terminator punishments, and Independence Day deliverance.

 

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.  Old Artists disappear, Prophets enter elderhood, Nomads enter midlife, Heroes enter young adulthood—and a new generation of child Artists is born

A CRISIS arises in response to sudden threats that previously would have been ignored or deferred, but which are now perceived as dire.  Great worldly perils boil off the clutter and complexity of life, leaving behind one simple imperative: The society must prevail.  This requires a solid public consensus, aggressive institutions, and personal sacrifice.

People support new efforts to wield public authority, whose perceived successes soon justify more of the same.  Government governs, community obstacles are removed, and laws and customs that resisted change for decades are swiftly shunted aside.  A grim preoccupation with civic peril causes spiritual curiosity to decline.  A sense of public urgency contributes to a clampdown on “bad” conduct or “anti-social” lifestyles.  People begin feeling shameful about what they earlier did to absolve guilt.  Public order tightens, private risk-taking abates, and crime and substance abuse decline.  Families strengthen, gender distinctions widen, and child-rearing reaches a smothering degree of protection and structure.  The young focus their energy on worldly achievements, leaving values in the hands of the old.  Wars are fought with fury and for maximum result.

Eventually, the mood transforms into one of exhaustion, relief, and optimism.  Buoyed by a new-born faith in the group and in authority, leaders plan, people hope, and a society yearns for good and simple things.

Today’s older Americans recognize this as the mood of the Great Depression and World War II, but a similar mood has been present in all the other great gates of our history, from the Civil War and Revolution back into colonial and English history.

Recall America’s conception of the future during the darkest years of its last Crisis: From “Somewhere over the Rainbow” to the glimmering Futurama at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, people felt hope, determination, and a solid consensus about where society should go: toward spiritual simplicity (home and apple pie) and material abundance (bigger, better, and more homes and pies).  All this seemed within reach, conditioned on a triumph that demanded unity from all, sacrifices from many.

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Like the four seasons of nature, the four turnings of history are equally necessary and important.  Awakenings and Crises are the saecular solstices, summer and winter, each a solution to a challenge posed by the other.  Highs and Unravelings are the saecular equinoxes, spring and autumn, each coursing a path directionally opposed to the other.  When a society moves into an Awakening or Crisis, the new mood announces itself as a sudden turn in social direction.  An Awakening begins when events trigger a revolution in the culture, a Crisis when events trigger an upheaval in public life.  A High or Unraveling announces itself as a sudden consolidation of the new direction.  A High begins when society perceives that the basic issues of the prior Crisis have been resolved, leaving a new civic regime firmly in place.  An Unraveling begins with the perception that the Awakening has been resolved, leaving a new cultural mindset in place.

The gateway to a new turning can be obvious and dramatic (like the 1929 Stock Crash) or subtle and gradual (like 1984’s Morning in America).  It usually occurs two to five years after a new generation of children starts being born.  The tight link between turning gateways and generational boundaries enables each archetype to fill an entire phase-of-life just as the mood of an old turning grows stale and feels ripe for replacement with something new.

The four turnings comprise a quaternal social cycle of growth, maturation, entropy, and death (and rebirth).  In a springlike High, a society fortifies and builds and converges in an era of promise.  In a summerlike Awakening, it dreams and plays and exults in an era of euphoria.  In an autumnal Unraveling, it harvests and consumes and diverges in an era of anxiety.  In a hibernal Crisis, it focuses and struggles and sacrifices in an era of survival.  When the saeculum is in motion, therefore, no long human lifetime can go by without a society confronting its deepest spiritual and worldly needs.

Modernity has thus far produced six repetitions of each turning, each repetition lasting roughly the duration of a phase of life and corresponding to an identical constellation of generational archetypes.  Each sequential set of four turnings constitutes a saeculum. 

The Anglo-American saeculum dates back to the waning of the Middle Ages in the middle of the fifteenth century.  In this lineage, there have been seven saecula:

 

America

 

is presently in the Third Turning of the Millennial Saeculum and giving birth to the 24th generation of the post-medieval era…

 

By looking at history through this saecular prism, you can see why the American mood has evolved as it has during your own lifetime.  Reflect back as far as you can, and recall how the persona of people in any phase of life has changed completely every two decades or so.  Every time, these changes have followed the archetypal pattern

….Consider the generational transitions of the past decade—which are once again proving the linear forecasters wrong:

As the Silent have begun reaching retirement age, national leaders have shown less interest in making public institutions do big things—and more interest in making them flexible, fair, expert, nuanced, and participatory.  Why?  The elder Artist is replacing the elder Hero.

As Boomers have begun turning fifty, the public discourse has become less refined and conciliatory—and more impassioned and moralistic.  Why?  The midlife Prophet is replacing the midlife Artist.

As 13ers have filled the “twentysomething” bracket, the pop culture has become less about soul, free love, and feeling at one with the world—and a lot more about cash, sexual disease, and going it alone in an unforgiving world.  Why?  The young-adult Nomad is replacing the young-adult Prophet.

As Millennials have surged into America’s elementary and junior high schools, family behavior has reverted toward greater protection.  Why?  We are now raising the child Hero, no longer the child Nomad.

When you compile these four archetypal shifts through the entire lifecycle, you see how  America’s circa-1970s constellation has transformed into something new, from top to bottom, in the ‘90s.  That is why the nation has shifted from a mood of Awakening to one of Unraveling.  When you apply this saecular logic forward into the Oh-Oh decade and beyond, you can begin to understand why a Fourth Turning is coming—and how America’s mood will change when the Crisis hits.