Current anomaly: Five generations alive!

[Eric the Green]

(03-20-2019, 03:34 PM)Marypoza Wrote:

(03-20-2019, 11:28 AM)Mikebert Wrote:

(03-19-2019, 09:38 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(03-18-2019, 01:00 PM)jleagans Wrote: There are always five generations alive, this isn't an anomaly.  The archetype that is being born is the oldest archetype alive, right now our artists are dying and being born.

When turnings were longer and life expectancy shorter, that was not really true.  Yes, have always been a few superannuated people, but not enough to count as a generation … until now.

Yes, but that was 200 years ago. The problem is the missing Civil War civic generation. Obviously for the theory to have even facial plausibility there has to have been this generation. This was pointed out at the T4T site nearly 20 years ago, and several posters came up with alternate turnings that reflected this. Dave Krein posited a 4T ending at the same time as did Reconstruction in 1877. This would leave a 1T featuring the boom to 1881, and then the period of oscillating Republican-Democratic administrations of the 1880's and early 1890's with the end coming at Panic of 1893. David McGuiness argued for a 2T beginning with the Columbian Exposition in 1893 and ending with the Titanic disaster that contained the Populist and Progressive movements and the rise of the Social Gospel and German higher criticism and the reactionary response in Fundamentalism and the Pentecostal movement. This makes the 3T 1912-1929.

This gives the set of Artists, Prophets, Nomads and Civic present for the last 4T born in 1857-1874, 1875-1889, 1890-1908, and 1909-1924. This makes the youngest Artists about 72 at the end of the 4T, compared 77 for Artists today.  With dating that doesn't skip an entire generation, last cycle's artists are a lot younger and plenty of them were still around during the last 4T.

-- ok but what would the dates 4 the Civics be in the Civil War cycle? (pre 1857)

I was one of those who suggested an alternative cycle as well 20 years ago, and later so did Chas '88. Unlike Mike and the posters he quotes, I thought the dates should be put back earlier, not later. 

The civil war anomaly arose because the United States was half composed originally of a feudal as well as a modern nation. The feudal nation was Dixie, dependent on slavery supporting an aristocracy of planters. The modern North, or Yankee nation, was pushing things forward, but was held back by the South (as still is happening today between blue and red states). The authors extended the prophet generation of the Transcendentals forward as if it were a generation like those that preceeded the Revolution, in other words medieval and renaissance-era in nature, when the saeculum lasted over 100 years. That prophet generation they said was 30 years long, from 1792 to 1822, and they eliminated the civic generation that followed altogether, in order to give the civil war saeculum a more-modern length (1794 to 1865). I always thought that was an un-natural way to conceive of the cycle, and that they probably extended the Transcendentals so that it would include Abraham Lincoln (b.1809).

The most obvious fix is to say that there really was a civic civil war generation, and/or to shorten this exaggerated Transcendental prophet generation, and change the turning dates accordingly. That's what Chas did in a very thorough fashion. I forget his exact dates but they may be posted here somewhere.

I took a somewhat different approach, and redated the turnings, but not the generations; instead saying that the civil war era generations were hybrids. I admit I liked doing the latter because the S&H generation starting dates coincided with Neptune entering a cardinal sign (a cardinal sign is one that begins at the equinox or solstice signs, Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn) with the Transcendental Generation coinciding with Neptune entering Scorpio in 1792.

So I thought of the Transcendentals as including the later cohorts as nomad hybrids. I use the sub-generation idea, so this would fit that idea. The Gilded, said to begin in 1822, is thus a nomad-civic hybrid generation, and the Progressive Generation, said to start in about 1842, is a civic-artist hybrid generation. The Missionaries are a prophet generation that started in 1860, and keeping the S&H dates from then onward. Shelby Foote in Ken Burns' Civil War TV series related how the young soldiers of the civil war had civic virtues.

The turnings as I see them reflect some important transition points. The Revolution 4T could be extended back to 1765 with the Stamp Act, and end with the constitution in 1787. This is how Chas sees it, I believe, and he sets the following turnings as starting earlier from then on until after the Civil War. The First Turnings, as I see it, are not all consensus and light; their early portion contains a lot of dissension and persecution of factions in the country, as well as reconstruction after the great war. So the unrest of the early 1790s and the persecution of aliens and seditions in the late 1790s fit this pattern, and so would the age of hate, the founding of the KKK and the controversy over Reconstruction in the late 1860s, which I see as being correctly designated as 1T, and this was repeated in the McCarthy era of the late 1940s and early 1950s 1T period. With my hybrid Transcendental Generation, though, the 1T would start in 1794 as S&H dated it.

The 2T can be said to begin in 1815, because this was a period of revolutionary revival in Europe after Napoleon's defeat, and a similar upsurge in the anti-slavery movement happened then after the War of 1812, in which the USA entered the war as Napoleon's ally. This anti-slavery movement suffered a reversal in 1834-35 in both Europe and America. The South began to consolidate its opposition by repressing the movement, and it also went underground in many places in the North due to repression. So I date the 3T from 1834-35.

The late 1840s featured a famine in Europe which sparked revolutions there in 1848 and a mass migration to America including the Gold Rush to California. The Mexican War of 1846 ignited sectional disputes after 1848 due to the proposed entry of the newly conquered Gold Rush state of CA and possibly of New Mexico. So I date the onset of the 4T to 1848 or 1850. President Taylor threatened to hang the southern rebels as traitors in the dispute over the NM territory in 1850, and thus almost started the civil war, just as the wars of national liberation in Europe almost started in the same year. The Compromise of 1850 was the result of this bitter dispute, but then right afterward, Uncle Tom's Cabin was published. When Lincoln later met the author, she said to her "so you're the little lady who made this great war." It re-ignited the movement against slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska Act followed in 1854, igniting Bleeding Kansas in 1856.

I often point out that the civil war was put off by indecisive leadership and muddled affairs in the 1850s, and that's why the authors said it was still the 3T, and the similar muddle today is why Mike and some others think today that the 4T hasn't quite started yet, or only began in 2016. We are 1850s redux, I have said.

There is still something of the anomaly in this scheme, since the later civil war saeculum's turnings were shorter, and the generations were hybrids. The fact remains that the United States had to unshackle itself from the slavery state of Dixie before it could become a modern nation (or industrial rather than agricultural, as Bob Butler says), with the faster 80-84 seacula they bring, as opposed to the 100+ year saeculum of ancient and medieval times when there were only 2 active generations at any one time and most people did not participate in historic events or generational changes. The anomaly reflects the modern Revolution, which opened affairs and changes up to the masses. The saeculum could be said to be stronger and sharper now, like a hurricane with a sharper eye as opposed to a tropical storm. Modern times feature faster change, metaphorically with more and warmer water circulating through them (more people with more life open to them).