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RE: Report Card for Donald Trump - Mikebert - 02-14-2017
Generation/turning length was long (ca. 27 yrs.) up until the 18th century and shortened after that. More recently length has crept back up, although not back to its old length. The first downward shift in length is associated with the transition between what Sean Love called saeculum I and saeculum II.
I've constructed a simple generational model where you assume a generation is created out of those aged 21 during one turning, who then go on to create a new generation when they reach age AL. AL is the average of the mean ages of governors, congressmen, senators, and SC Justices. So, you start with a turning and add AL-21 to the dates to make the next one. I employ this for a political version of the cycle that is a consensus of the ideas of Daniel Elazar, Arthur Schlesinger Sr., and S&H. If we start with the consensus awakening over 1621-1647 here is what the model generates:
1621-1647 - A
1648-1670 - U
1671-1694 - C
1695-1716 - H
1717-1741 -A
1742-1765 -U
Note the history being created occurs in the very next turning. I now re-start the model using the Revolutionary secular crisis social moment over 1773-1789 as the seed:
1773-1789 -C
1801-1817 Liberal Era
1830-1846 -A
1861-1879 -C
1895-1914 -A
1932-1948 -C
1967-1983 -A
2006-2024 -C
These dates are quite close the political cycle of Elazar/Schlesinger, and match up with S&H after the 1830-46 period. Note there are gaps between each of these periods, within which conservative eras reside. Here we have a generation who comes of age in a liberal era and then creates the next liberal era. Operating in between these generations there is a generation coming of age in a conservative era who then goes on to create the next conservative era. Except for the 1790-1829 period (most of which S&H cram into an unusually long 1T along with the “giant” Transcendental generation) the “liberal” generations are what S&H call dominant generations, while the “conservative” generations are the what S&H call the recessive generations.
So, we have an interesting transition at the time of the Revolution. Before the Revolution (i.e. saeculum I) there were no dominant or recession gens, each gen was created in one turning and then created the next one. At the revolution, there was a split, the older Revolutionaries (those who were age 21 during the pre-war conspiracy era and who reached age AL right after the 4T followed the saeculum I plan and created a conservative era in the aftermath of the 4T.
The younger Revolutionaries (those had been age 21 during the war and its aftermath) and who reached age AL after 1800) created a dominant/liberal gen that went to create history TWO eras down (in ca. 1830-46) when they reached AL. That is, saeculum II had emerged from a split in the Revolutionary generation reflecting the difference between the early Revolutionaries (e.g. those who had come of age working with Sam Adams, Joseph Warren and other seditionists, or who had served in a senior role in the war) and later Revolutionaries who had fought in the war as soldiers or junior officers.
As lifespans have risen, so has AL, and the turning created grew longer and more spread out, which explains shorter eras in the 19th century and the longer ones today.
There is a hiccup. The Revolution to Civil War saeculum has six eras, rather than the standard four. Essentially there are two liberal eras with Awakening properties. The first ca. 1801-1817 was the start of the second great awakening (1800-1830) and featured events like the Cane Ridge Revival (1801), Alexander Campbell begins preaching at Bull Run Church in 1811 (both are precursors to the Disciples of Christ) and the 1817 founding of the Swedenborgian Church of North America. The second is the politically-relevant Abolitionist awakening which occurs outside the larger awakening. The Abolitionist awakening had its spiritual component: it sees the birth of the Mormons, Millerites (Seventh Day Adventists), Primitive Baptists, New Thought, the spiritualism of Andrew Jackson Davis, etc.
Most of the abolitionist era was incorporated into an Awakening by S&H while the first period was rolled into a 1T.
RE: Report Card for Donald Trump - SomeGuy - 02-21-2017
Quote:1742-1765 -U
Note the history being created occurs in the very next turning. I now re-start the model using the Revolutionary secular crisis social moment over 1773-1789 as the seed:
1773-1789 -C
You're missing a few years in between.
I still think the turning boundaries in the CW saec look suspect.
RE: Report Card for Donald Trump - Mikebert - 02-21-2017
(02-21-2017, 01:10 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:Quote:1742-1765 -U
Note the history being created occurs in the very next turning. I now re-start the model using the Revolutionary secular crisis social moment over 1773-1789 as the seed:
1773-1789 -C
You're missing a few years in between.
I still think the turning boundaries in the CW saec look suspect.
It's a model, its not going to fit the data exactly. That's what comes out.
Of course the output during the CW saec doesn't match S&H, they have four turnings while the political cycle has six eras. The model is explicitly political (it is based on concepts of generational imprinting taken from political science) and so you would expect it to model the political cycle. The S&H is an archetypical cycle, which is something I am not even sure is an actual concept.
The reason I focus on what I call the political cycle, which is a consensus of three scholars: Elazar, Schlesinger and S&H is because the political cycle is a reasonable approximation for Turchin's fathers and sons cycle, which is an empirical cycle, like the Kondratiev price cycle. If you plot sociopolitical instability or a price index you can see the cycles in the data, they are a real thing. Archetypes aren't a real thing, they are a model for or representation of an ill-defined set of behavioral attributes and habits of thought we call personality.
If you use the political cycle to explain the sociopolitical instability data it works--the correspondence between the two is statistically significant (p < 0.032). If you do the same using the S&H turnings, it doesn't work--there is no significant correspondence (p < 0.17). In other words, the political cycle fits empirical data, while the S&H cycle doesn't fit anything that I have been able to find.
I used to think S&H were really on to something. Although I could not get statistical significance with sociopolitical instability and adding crime and alcohol consumption as additional indicators did not cut it, I did find a statistically significant correlation with spiritual event frequency (here I was trying to match 2Ts to the data). I used a very long baseline (12th century on) and employed David McGuinness's dates for the pre-1435 turnings. With this I could then relate the saeculum to empirical price cycles (K-cycles) and so establish a relation between generational cycles and a range of social, economic, political and cultural group behavior. In other words I thought I had established some evidence that the saeculum was a real cycle.
But pope John Paul II ruined it all
One of the elements in my spiritual database (the glue that made it all work) was Roman Catholic saints as examples of "spiritual persons". Presumably, if archetypes are real, spiritual people should fall into the prophet generaton more frequently than Nomads, Heroes. or Artists. In my first analysis that had been the case. When I went to redo it with larger and better sourced database I encountered a large number of additional saints from the 17th and 18th centuries (periods for which my spiritual database had been kinda thin) which allowed me to get a much bigger sample about which I could feel more confident. These were saints that JP II had canonized. When I repeated the analysis with the expanded the correlation vanished. Saints show up roughly equally in all generations, there is no evidence of a spiritual archetype that shows up in large samples of people specifically selected for their spiritual prowess.I tried a similar analysis with a database of 1000 composers with their birth dates. Their seems to be no "artist" archetype that shows up in musical arts. Lis Lebengood tried an analysis along these lines working with popular music. She got bupkis. If archetypes are a real thing it shouldn't be so hard finding statistically significant evidence of their existence.
RE: Report Card for Donald Trump - SomeGuy - 02-21-2017
Fair enough.
RE: Report Card for Donald Trump - Mikebert - 02-24-2017
I haven't given up yet. I still believe generational cycles are an important element of historical analysis. Too many scholars, working in different disciplines have noted it: in economics, Kondratieff (and the current generation of K-cycle scholars), in domestic politics, Schlesinger (and the current generation of political cycle scholars), in international relations, Wright (and the current generations of scholars in this tradition), Mannheim and his heirs (S&H) in sociology, and now Turchin in new field of cliodynamics.
I no longer think that the S&H cycle can serve as a useful organizing framework for this sort of analysis. Like the others, it offers its own "take" on events, but it's view is no longer foremost in my thinking.
RE: Report Card for Donald Trump - SomeGuy - 02-24-2017
(02-24-2017, 02:35 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I haven't given up yet. I still believe generational cycles are an important element of historical analysis. Too many scholars, working in different disciplines have noted it: in economics, Kondratieff (and the current generation of K-cycle scholars), in domestic politics, Schlesinger (and the current generation of political cycle scholars), in international relations, Wright (and the current generations of scholars in this tradition), Mannheim and his heirs (S&H) in sociology, and now Turchin in new field of cliodynamics.
I no longer think that the S&H cycle can serve as a useful organizing framework for this sort of analysis. Like the others, it offers its own "take" on events, but it's view is no longer foremost in my thinking.
I hope it works out for you. I definitely think there is *something* there, but I am not and have never been all that wedded to any particular interpretation.
I don't think anyone cornered the market on the "truth" of the subject, yet.
RE: Report Card for Donald Trump - Eric the Green - 02-24-2017
(02-21-2017, 04:20 PM)Mikebert Wrote:(02-21-2017, 01:10 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:Quote:1742-1765 -U
Note the history being created occurs in the very next turning. I now re-start the model using the Revolutionary secular crisis social moment over 1773-1789 as the seed:
1773-1789 -C
You're missing a few years in between.
I still think the turning boundaries in the CW saec look suspect.
It's a model, its not going to fit the data exactly. That's what comes out.
Of course the output during the CW saec doesn't match S&H, they have four turnings while the political cycle has six eras. The model is explicitly political (it is based on concepts of generational imprinting taken from political science) and so you would expect it to model the political cycle. The S&H is an archetypical cycle, which is something I am not even sure is an actual concept.
The reason I focus on what I call the political cycle, which is a consensus of three scholars: Elazar, Schlesinger and S&H is because the political cycle is a reasonable approximation for Turchin's fathers and sons cycle, which is an empirical cycle, like the Kondratiev price cycle. If you plot sociopolitical instability or a price index you can see the cycles in the data, they are a real thing. Archetypes aren't a real thing, they are a model for or representation of an ill-defined set of behavioral attributes and habits of thought we call personality.
If you use the political cycle to explain the sociopolitical instability data it works--the correspondence between the two is statistically significant (p < 0.032). If you do the same using the S&H turnings, it doesn't work--there is no significant correspondence (p < 0.17). In other words, the political cycle fits empirical data, while the S&H cycle doesn't fit anything that I have been able to find.
I used to think S&H were really on to something. Although I could not get statistical significance with sociopolitical instability and adding crime and alcohol consumption as additional indicators did not cut it, I did find a statistically significant correlation with spiritual event frequency (here I was trying to match 2Ts to the data). I used a very long baseline (12th century on) and employed David McGuinness's dates for the pre-1435 turnings. With this I could then relate the saeculum to empirical price cycles (K-cycles) and so establish a relation between generational cycles and a range of social, economic, political and cultural group behavior. In other words I thought I had established some evidence that the saeculum was a real cycle.
But pope John Paul II ruined it all
It could be argued that the 17th and 18th centuries were the Age of Reason and thus not a fertile time for "saints." Pope John Paul II was made a saint, but does he really qualify? He's not the kind of spiritual leader who is key to "spiritual events." If the "spiritual events" correlation you found still works, then that's still good. The leaders and inspirational sources of those events and movements are the folks who matter; were THEY "Prophets"? But John Paul II? He was just a powerful pope with very retrograde approaches and very institution-driven. He was not a fount for a spiritual movement or event at all.
Quote:I tried a similar analysis with a database of 1000 composers with their birth dates. Their seems to be no "artist" archetype that shows up in musical arts. Lis Lebengood tried an analysis along these lines working with popular music. She got bupkis. If archetypes are a real thing it shouldn't be so hard finding statistically significant evidence of their existence.
"Artist" may be an inappropriate name for adaptive generations. The key traits are not their artistic abilities, but their adaptive ones. Compromisers, inheriters of bureacratic systems, conformity in youth and mid-life rebellion, interest in helping people, "people who love people are the luckiest people in the world." The Jungian Feeling function. A database of 1000 composers might also be insignificant. There's lots of composers, but the best ones like Bach and Beethoven were artists. choosing the best composers might be relevant; not just one man's choice, but generally-accepted opinion of critics and scholars.
That approach in itself goes against the "Artist" archetype, which tends to equalize people and oppose prejudice and "judgmental" attitudes; that's why Strauss said that "anybody Silent" was likely to disagree with their archetypal scheme. Archetypes are for Prophets. But a little judgment pays off in empirical analysis. It all depends on the definitions you are testing. So archetypes cannot really be dispensed with. In a larger sense, they are any axiom or proposition you are testing for.
RE: Report Card for Donald Trump - Eric the Green - 02-24-2017
That is an interesting idea, mikebert, that seaculum II was shorter because the (Average Length) of those in power was shorter in the 19th century, or at least most of it, because of shorter lifespans. The transition from seaculum I to II makes some sense. It is hard to make a 100-year plus cycle out of Saeculum I, since this only creates an alternate pendulum swing between two dominant generations that each live about 50+ years.
The dates don't fit for me though, because it is clear that an Awakening was going on starting in 1885-86. And you can't start the Crisis in 1932; 1929 was clearly the start of it. Later dates for an ending of the civil war and depression/WWII crises are plausible though, for those who subscribe to them. These eras which S&H call 1Ts are very similar to the aftermath of the Revolution that S&H included in that 4T.