Brace yourself America: History repeats
In his novel Kalki, the late Gore Vidal invents a doomsday cult led by a charismatic blond American who claims to be the tenth and final avatar of Vishnu, a destroyer of filth whose arrival on a White Horse heralds the apocalypse. He turns out to be a con man whose scheming wipes out humanity all the same.
As a political story told through the cycles of Hindu mythology, Kalki clashed with the culture when it was published in 1978, just as the dawn of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” was about to break. Boomer readers, then in their youthful prime, did not warm to these ideas about an eon ending in a violent orgy of purification, clearing the way for a new golden age. They did not feel they were at an ending. With war behind them, an undervalued stock market and a rising dollar, they were just getting started on the 1980s. The book sold poorly.
One reason is that Americans, unlike Hindu mystics, see time as linear and incremental. Manifest Destiny, the founding myth of America, only works in one direction: forward. History may be progressive or conservative, but it is not cyclical. Measuring time by cycles in the stars or the seasons, let alone in mythology, is a historical throwback, only relevant today for farmers and astrologers. Modern history does not repeat. It is just one damn thing after another.
The year just passed has turned that view completely upside down. Today, at the end of 2016, as a blond American con man with a messianic air prepares to take the oath of office in Washington, there is an unsettling sense of déjà vu. The omens speak of a familiar doom. Political conversation seizes on similarities with the Fall of Rome, or 1930s Germany, or Cold War Russian ascendance, or fears about Americans rashly detonating nuclear bombs, as in Vidal’s novel.
An old era is ending, and a new one is beginning. Politics is apocalyptic, and things are looking more Hindu by the day.
As it turns out, this was all predicted in scripture long ago.
“History is seasonal, and winter is coming,” says Neil Howe, a political economist best known for his demographic study of American generations and their moods.
As a director of an investment risk management firm, Howe makes an unlikely doomsday prophet. But as Donald Trump takes office, Britain cleaves itself from Europe, Putin gloats, the Arctic melts, social inequality grows, terrorism rises, racism gains political influence, and the global economy struggles to recover in a climate of anxious protectionism, that is the role in which he finds himself.
Different times create different people who see the world in different ways, he says. More than that, certain types of generations always seem to follow other types. There is a cyclicality to the mood of generations, its timing governed by the average human lifespan.
“The reward of the historian is to locate patterns that recur over time and to discover the natural rhythms of social experience,” he wrote with the late William Strauss in their book, The Fourth Turning, which made a dramatic prophecy in 1997 that today is coming true.
First, they noticed patterns in the great turning points of history, beginning with the War of the Spanish Succession, the first global war in western European history.
Move forward about one human lifespan, and there is another great crisis, the American Revolution. Move another lifespan on from that, and you have the American Civil War. Another, and you are in the Great Depression and Second World War. Another, and you are smack in the middle of the 2008 global financial crisis.
The key to what has come to be known as Strauss-Howe generational theory is not just that crises follow patterns, but that in between the crises there are predictable shifts in the public mood, known as turnings, each about 22 years long.
“At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future,” Howe said.
After a crisis, the First Turning is a “high,” as a new order takes root, individualism declines and institutions are strengthened. Then, roughly halfway between crises, come Second Turnings, which are great awakenings, “passionate eras of spiritual awakening,” as Howe puts it, when a new “values regime” challenges the civic order. This leads to the Third Turning, the “unravelling,” when old institutions weaken, individualism grows, and order decays.
The Fourth Turning is the cataclysm, the arrival of Kalki. It is a decisive era of upheaval as the old order is replaced.
“The Fourth Turning is history’s great discontinuity,” Howe says. “It ends one epoch and begins another.”
Applying this theory to the last cycle in American history, for example, the postwar years up to the Kennedy assassination were the high; the consciousness revolution and campus revolts of the 1960s through to the tax revolts of the early 1980s were the awakening; the bitter culture wars of the 1990s were the unravelling; leading to a crisis that Howe predicted would arrive in 2005. Three years later, the economy went bust.
“Fourth Turnings have a morphology. They typically move from catalyst to regeneracy to climax to resolution. And they take a full generation to play out,” Howe said in an interview.
In every historical case over the last few centuries, the Fourth Turning has turned out to be a crucible of something new and good. The American Revolution created the world’s first democratic republic. The Civil War united the nation with guarantees of liberty and equality. The Second World War laid the foundation for the great 20th-century American superpower. Each time, America skirted disaster and engaged in war, but managed to land on peace and glory.
“What happens in Fourth Turnings is the future feels extremely contingent. It’s either this future, which is incredibly bleak, or that future, which is incredibly great and bright and alluring. And suddenly history seems dichotomous in a way that it doesn’t in other eras. The people who worked on the Manhattan Project (to develop the nuclear bomb) knew that history was at this crossroads. Either we lost to fascism, and night would come over the world. Or we would win, and out of the ruins we could forge this entirely new liberal democratic world order, which we did,” Howe said.
“Imagine getting everyone we know in Silicon Valley, all the tech wizards of America, and having them create a weapon of mass destruction. Well, that’s what we did in the last Fourth Turning.”
People who read political moods and predict history are vulnerable to being dismissed as kooky sidewalk preachers. For example, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama will never live down his “end of history” thesis, the notion that liberal democracy, once established, cannot be replaced by any other political system. It was a catchy idea as communism collapsed, but has not aged well.
The Fourth Turning, on the other hand, was first published in 1997, but feels uncannily relevant today. A turning’s length is about 22 years, so the current Fourth Turning could last well into the 2020s, and the possible second term of President Trump.
“So, we’re still not halfway through yet, and I think there’s a lot more history to come, a lot bigger history,” Howe said. “Because history suggests that Fourth Turnings are creative destruction in the public sector and the institutional sector, in political and economic institutions. We’re likely to see things get worse before they get better.”
Kalki would be proud.
WHAT HAPPENS IN FOURTH TURNINGS IS THE FUTURE FEELS EXTREMELY CONTINGENT.