03-21-2019, 07:31 AM
(03-20-2019, 05:53 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: [quote pid='42140' dateline='1553114097']
(redacted for brevity)
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).
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The Civil War messed up the generational cycle. Howe and Strauss see the Transcendental Generation more as a cultural generation due to its writers than as a political generation (people born in the 1810's effectively shut out of the Presidency, having been cast off by the Lost war-heroes). The cultural and political cycles themselves clashed.
I interpret the slave system as an attempt to commercialize a feudal order of subjection of those who really did the work. In medieval times, lords sold land, but the peasants went with it; in American chattel slavery, slaves could be sold without land being sold. This was even worse for the slave. Note also that the technologies of communication were changing due to low costs of disseminating information. Inexpensive books and broadsheet newspapers could push such an agenda as Temperance -- or Abolition.
Contradictions do not harmonize. Human rights and property rights can go along when publishing and economic power are somewhat separate. They cannot reconcile when property rights imply the gross subjection of people. To save slavery in the United States, the slave-masters would need to destroy democracy in America as a whole.
One explanation of how America would be if the slave interests had prevailed is a cinematic satire, a so-called "mockumentary" as alternative history (and it would be offensive to many):
Quote: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.
Howe and Strauss suggest that younger Americans put an end to the Transcendental mission to make a 'righteous' America fitting Transcendental ideals by shoving the Transcendental generation aside in politics. The Gilded war-heroes who survived the war, at least in the North, took on many Civic traits -- secularism, conformity, public prudery, cultural staleness, male chauvinism, long political tenure, a love for doing things on a big scale, and social cohesion -- without having the intellectual prowess of a civic generation such as the Republican, GI, or Millennial generations. They also tended to a Civic-like indulgent style of child-raising, which would rush an Idealist generation upon America as it was too late to call the Transcendental Generation back into influence. Meanwhile the Progressive Generation, which had initially been brought up with many Civic characteristics, found its proclivities blunted as the Gilded took on the Civic role. The Progressive Generation took on an Adaptive character. So if one saw how generations seemed likely to turn out in 1855 we would have seen (Idealist - I, Reactive - R, Civic - C, Adaptive - A)
Compromise (A) rapidly fading
Transcendental (I)
Gilded ®
Progressive ©
next unborn generation -- probably (A)
and push forward to 1870
Transcendental (I ousted, and having taken on some R traits)
Gilded (C in practice but with some residual R traits)
Progressive (A in practice, but with some residual C traits)
Missionary (I, with little ambiguity)
By 1890, the Lost ® would be undeniably a Reactive generation and basically complete a C-A-I-R cycle.
Quote: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.
Cultural and political figures contemporary to America's Transcendental Generation seem Idealist enough -- Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, Garibaldi, Juarez, Bismarck, Chopin, Verdi, Wagner, Marx, and Dostoevsky -- seem Idealist enough. Howe and Strauss suggest that the American Civil War came too early, with America still polarized into hostile and exclusive camps of extreme, collective self-righteousness. For timing I see an analogue in the Russian Civil War between the Reds and Whites, both sides seeing each other as demons intent on annihilating anything in their way, consummately ruthless and intolerant.
Young soldiers in the American Civil War did not go into the Civil War with civic virtues; they developed them as the war continued. The government enticed soldiers with money to entice them to put off settling the West because with a war bonus for a skirmish that would be over by Christmas they could settle in the West in style. For the Union that was everything from western Minnesota and eastern Nebraska to California, with the American way of life of banks, shops, newspapers, and schools. For the Confederates such would be western Texas (Dallas was a rough frontier community, and Fort Worth was a literal fort) to Arizona as a paradise for slave-owning planters in return for protecting the Dixie way of life.
Quote: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.
No time is perfect. It is only what recent events have prepared people for. What GI soldiers experienced gave them a taste for a conformist culture. Alan Watts adopting Zen Buddhism and the fictional Jerry Milligan (Gene Kelly) in the film An American in Paris were extreme anomalies. Unless 'ethnic', GI adults liked their food insipid, their vegetables boiled down to a gruel-like mush that barely indicated that they had been carrots or peas except for some residual color and shape. White GI adults bought into Suburbia with its tract houses. (Black GI veterans usually got turned down due to the infamous red-lining). GI taste in music was for Muzak-like arrangements -- gimmicky orchestrations with perhaps one wind or brass instrument and a string section with an etherial sound demonstrating the rejection of violas -- and no troubling counterpoint or only rarely a minor key.
Most of us would now chafe under the GI culture of the 1950s, indicating that we are not quite ready for a 1T. But once we go through the wringer of a really-nasty economic downturn or an ugly war, we will be ready.
Quote: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.
I concur.
Quote: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.
The Irish immigration at the time of the Great Famine and the flight of many Germans from the failed revolutions of 1848 contributed to a time of cynicism. Consider how difficult assimilation was for the Irish. Just imagine the cynicism that comes from having been seen as expendable because a crop failed.
Quote: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).
...and when the indecisive figures got swept from the state, there was nobody to check the ruthlessness of the opposing camps. Had the South successfully seceded (which probably means that some of it would have maintained independence -- I can't imagine the Texas Panhandle or the Arkansas Ozarks being compatible with plantation slavery, and eastern Tennessee would have seceded from the South. I figure that southeastern Missouri, a little piece of Mississippi, would have gone Confederate, then I can imagine the two areas going off in different directions for a while.
The Middle Ages? There were far fewer people., and there was little pressure on th land. Feudalism sounds horrible now, but typically the Lord and Master originated as a relative of the peasants, exchanging organization and defense (against the Vikings or Saracens) in return for free-hold property that one could easily lose to marauders. The printing press brought cheap dissemination of ideas, and it made a difference between the doom of the Hussites and the contrasting success of Luther, Calvin, Knox, Zwingli, and even Menno Simons in reshaping minds.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.