Culture Wars Era - is it moving into its final phase?

[David Horn]

(02-25-2019, 12:29 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(02-25-2019, 12:12 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote:

(01-16-2017, 02:27 PM)David Horn Wrote: I don't see the 4T resolving in normal fashion, with a near stand-off between the two visions for Future America being proposed models but not actual solutions.

  The 1T will arrive, and a truce, of sorts, will quell any further action by either side.  The 1T will muddle along, with the two sides cloistered in their urban and rural settings, neither able to bring the other along, but both able to survive in their enclaves.

The next 2T will drag all this out into the public square, and a resolution will finally emerge.  If the call to the barricades is triggered by an environmental catastrophe, the resolution is predictable.  Otherwise, its up for grabs.

During the next 1T the Boomers will be dying off, leaving pragmatic Xers in charge.

If we are very lucky, the next 1T will resemble a blank turning. It certainly won't be a "High". 

More like the Gilded Age if we are unlucky.

According to the double rhythm, the next 2T should be of the Apollo type.

I generally agree. I think according to the pattern that the next 1T in the USA won't have as much consensus as the last one, and will have more activism, much like the gilded age era. The next Apollo-type 2T will nevertheless be substantially like the previous one in its concerns and activities, since it will fulfill the previous one in the 1960s-70s. It will not diverge from all the previous recent Awakenings and emphasize only a return to traditional lifestyles and religions, without the more-esoteric and new age ways. It will continue the new age awakenings. However, it will have more perspective, and the Awakening will have more intellectual elements (especially in the 2050s) and better behavior, and will be more peaceful than the last one. It could revive a post-impressionist and art nouveau style from the 1890s.

I don't see another spiritual awakening any time soon -- certainly not in the next 2T. The hard work of this now ending saeculum was focused on resolving social and cultural issues, and not well. Let's say the efforts were misdirected or merely squandered. Yes, personal enlightenment has advanced among the minority open to it, but most minds remain closed, so the results are spotty at best.

So here we are with hard problems to solve, and more than a little urgency to get started. We need a nuts-and-bolts era, but that may have to wait for some of the cultural anxiety to be resolved, because we aren't united in seeing the problems yet. That leaves the 2T to be in full Apollonian mode: all logic and problem solving. I only hope that the problems are solved in non-judgmental ways, though I suspect that won't happen this time any more than it did in the previous saeculum.