Thursday 23 November 2017

The Fourth Turning is Identity War



Strauss and Howe in The Fourth Turning describe the historical concept of the saeculum, a period of four generations which repeat themselves through history. Each generation goes through a certain phase of life during the four different stages, or turnings, of the saeculum. The turnings last around 20 to 25 years normally, so a saeculum usually lasts around 80 to 100 years.

The turnings are named High, Awakening, Unraveling, and Crisis. They can best be imagined as equivalent to spring, summer, autumn and winter. A High is when life is improving after the last Crisis, political institutions have been reformed and life is good. An Awakening is when a moral reformation occurs, while, or perhaps because, the political order remains stable. During an Unraveling, the political order starts to destabilise, usually related in some way to the changes that occurred during the Awakening. A Crisis occurs thereafter, leading to a political re-organisation. The Anglo-American Crises they list go back a half a millennium: Great Depression and World War Two (1929 - 1946); Civil War (1860 - 1865); American Revolution (1773 - 1794); Glorious Revolution (1675 - 1704); Armada Crisis (1569 - 1594); Wars of the Roses (1459 - 1487).

The saeculum is usually specific to a society or culture. There is no requirement that the saecula of different nations or peoples align. However, the closer any two nations are to each other, politically or geographically or socially or however, the more their saecula will align. Much like women's cycles. The most recent Crisis affecting the European peoples, the Great Depression and World War Two, synchronised all of their saecula. All white nations of the world seem to have started their most recent High somewhere around the mid to late 1940's.

Strauss and Howe wrote their book in 1997, and predicted the next American Crisis would start around 2005, with it possibly being sparked off by a financial crash, a presidential election, or an action along the lines of the Boston Tea Party. Well, in 2007 the Global Financial Crisis happened. In 2008 America elected Obama, who holds the record for most children killed by a Nobel Peace Prize winner. And around 2009 the Tea Party movement arose. Sparks aplenty for a Crisis, and we see how the political landscape is changing dramatically.

Trump is the polar opposite of Obama. The identity cracks, barely noticeable in the 1990's and early 2000's, widened under Obama and became gaping chasms during the 2016 election. Which, in hindsight, is definitely a result of the moral reformation which occurred during America's last Awakening, from 1964 to 1984 by Strauss and Howe's reckoning. The mid 1960's brought the Immigration and Nationality Act and Johnson's Great Society. Whether the goals were noble, self-serving or something else, these seminal events were definitely about identity. The Immigration and Nationality Act reformed the idea of what it means to be an American, allowing in non-Americans in such numbers that they would not be able to assimilate, even if they wanted to. It brought in foreigners from cultures totally alien to America's, making assimilation even less likely. And the Great Society tried to eliminate poverty and racial injustice, using programmes that only an academic could convince himself to believe effective. The moral reformation said people are all the same, and where they are unequal it must be rectified.

In the wake of the conquering ethnic nationalism of the WWII bad guys, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, it is perhaps unsurprising that the moral reformation which followed was about equalising all peoples. The political re-organisation of the Crisis moved the world from many heterogeneous nations to two competing globalist systems, relatively homogeneous internally: the capitalist First World and the communist Second World. After the ease and comfort of the High, came the moral reformation of the Awakening. The world did not long stay divided into First World and Second World spheres of influence; soon the Third World became a focus. Decolonisation made the savage nations of the world the moral equivalent of the civilised nations. Equality became the goal, even though there were some like Enoch Powell who foresaw "Rivers of Blood" in the forthcoming Crisis because of this. And others, like Kurt Vonnegut, who mocked the idea.

The First World nations now all have identity at the root of their incipient wars. America is full of blacks, Hispanics and Muslims who don't consider themselves American. They have leftists whites who see whites as bad, and they have right wing whites who see whites as the in-group. Europe is full of Muslims and Africans, who the native Europeans increasingly see as invaders, and who increasingly want to change Europe into something else. The Second World has largely escaped this, as Russia and the Visegrad Group seem to have resisted equalism - perhaps the horrors of equalist communism taught them enough to dampen their Awakening turning, and thus their Crisis turning.

In South Africa, the white population's saeculum remains closely timed to the First World's. After WWII came the High of the start of apartheid, great wealth and stability. From the 60's through the 80's came the Awakening, with anti-apartheid uprisings and the Bush War and international sanctions all reforming morally to say the races are equal. From around 1989 to 2009 was our Unraveling. De Klerk, Mandela and Mbeki presided over the end of apartheid and the start of the rainbow nation. The equality of the races was enforced, with compromises and negotiations. But since shortly after Zuma was elected, the inherent tensions have been pulling the country apart along racial lines. Whites are no longer accepting of second class political status due to affirmative action and BEE, not after the innocent white Born Free generation came of age. Blacks are no longer accepting of second class economic status, not after decades of being told the only reason they weren't as wealthy as whites was white oppression. And the violent crime rampant in the country gets blamed by both on the other: whites say blacks are violent criminals by nature; and blacks say their white-caused poverty is the root of the problem.

The Civil War saeculum in America was anomalous and abbreviated. It caused America to skip over their Hero generation. The Civil War was the bloodiest war America has fought. It pitted brother against brother. It was a short and extremely violent Crisis, and it is not surprising that there was no Hero generation following it. But from this we learn that our choices still matter. History is not foretold. The future is not set in stone. The saeculum will keep turning, no matter what. It is the nature of the world. It is the nature of mankind. But man is not a machine. There is freedom to choose. The choices we make can cause a Crisis to be better or worse. The choices we make can determine which side wins the war, and shapes the next saeculum. As biologists can predict the life cycle of a bee colony, without knowing where they will build their hive or where they will find food, so the saeculum can predict the cycle of history without knowing how it will turn out or which side of a war will win.


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