Notes
The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997) by William
Strauss and Neil Howe
This book claims to have discerned generational cycles in American
history, then extends those cycles forward, prophesying impending
perilous changes over the next twenty years.
Fourth Turning of the Stomach
This book got the most amazing (and embarrassing) hype on the
Extropian mail list. I responded with these notes on March 5,
1997.
________
Why wasn’t this book stacked in the Astrology/New Age section in
bookstores? This book is basically Hari Seldon’s (from Isaac
Asimov’s Foundation series) hot date with Gail Sheehy
(authoress of Passages) - psychohistory meets
psychobabble.
Books like this on historical cycles have as much validity as
calculating the positions of the planets when you are born, and then
concocting interesting generalized theories about what’s going
to happen next. I’ll grant that the authors are a cut above the
usual conjurer’s tricks, they use more sophisticated smoke and
mirrors than Madame LaRue the Fortuneteller. Their market-targeted
readers are the tried-and-true gullible aging yuppies with the
narcissistic urge to read about their life, have their palms read and
have money to waste.
The fallacy of analysis like this, is that you can start arbitrarily
anywhere in history, in any given year, and make historical facts fit
whatever cycle you choose, whether generational, sunspots, comet
appearances, meteor showers, radioactive decay, climatological, you
name it. The Elliot Wave, the Kondratieff Cycle, business cycles in
general fall into this type of false prophecy. The authors of this
particular book bend over backwards to mischaracterize historical
events to include as “evidence” of some magic cycle, but
completely ignore major events that fall outside of their
“theory.” They clearly hope their readers have had an
Outhouse Based Education in history to not know any better.
History is continuous, one year after another, no one year any
different than any other year, every year of equal length. No year is
to be given a privileged position when starting a cyclical analysis.
There is no “generation” identifiable anywhere except in
relation to yourself and yourself alone. To arbitrarily assert
otherwise is to commit a category error in analysis, unless simply
telling a non-analytical story, such as “the Depression
generation.” No allowance is made for demographic changes
produced by technology, such as increasing lifespans or postponement
of child-bearing. If history has any pattern at all, it might be of a
fractal nature, self-similarity on different geo-temporal scales of
periods of activity vs. quiescence. I doubt anyone will ever make a
rigorous analytical case for it; too many variables, it’s an
open system, not closed.
Individuals aren’t pistons in an engine, they never recycle.
Individuals make history and individuals never recur, so why should
history recur? History in the modern sense only arose when the
individual was taken to be of supreme worth, the dignity of man. This
was specific to Greco-Roman culture and Western Christianity, no
other cultures, anywhere or any time, ever developed this notion.
Attempts to make history into quasi-deterministic recurrent cycles
are therefore attempts to degrade the worth of the individual, to
strip the dignity from the lone human. Indeed, it flushes the notion
of history down the toilet and takes science along with it.
In writing this book, I have the feeling the authors consulted the
highest authority possible on their subject: P.T. Barnum.
Reilly Jones
© 2001