08-07-2020, 03:51 AM
(08-04-2020, 03:23 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(08-03-2020, 04:16 PM)Mikebert Wrote: The Armada doesn't even look like a 4T. Have you ever seen anyone use examples from THAT crisis to illustrate 4T issues. A few of theorists did talk about the Glorious and WotR 4Ts, but I cannot recall anyone comparing anything to the Armada. It's so forgettable of a 4T because it isn't a 4T at all. There were no structural changes made. It was just a war, one of the dozens that happened all the time back then.
Chas and I derived pre-1435 turnings for England going back the mid-9th century. I used generations as one of the structural elements, as well as empirical data and Bob's concept of "spirals of violence" a "spiral" that fizzled out means it was not a social moment turning. One that did not indicates one. I also used Chas's idea of archetypical generations playing roles in history analogous to archetypical characters playing roles in a drama, sort of a riff on "all the world's a stage". Using all these tools I managed to cobble together turnings and running them by Chas for input.
Anyways not all 4T's are equal. Some are obvious, like the Viking crisis. the Norman invasion and the WotR. Others like the 12th century crisis (its not the Anarchy, it simply happened too early) seem stretched, and the 10th and 13th century 4Ts are pretty small beer, like the Armada.
I don't take the extended crises before the beginning of the Industrial Age seriously. Sure, you can find where people are less enthusiastic about crisis wars when lots of folks remember the last one. Also when people can't afford a big war, a little time goes by as the economy recovers. That much is there. However you are often not changing the culture. One bunch of autocrats is fighting another with not much difference between them. Only later did the rural - urban divide form as some people wanted to continue with power based on land ownership while the other favored urban life and building stuff. Things started to get a little more hot.
History has operated by slightly-different rules in the Industrial Age than in the Agrarian Age, and may operate differently in the post-Industrial age. Cultural, commercial, and technological change were all r-e-a-l-l-y, r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w in western Europe before, at the latest, Johann Gutenberg introducing his printing press. Political change could be abrupt with such events as the rapid spread of Islam into the Levant and North Africa, waxing and waning of the Crusades, Mongol invasions, and of course the demise of the Byzantine Empire. before that one is in the era of classical civilization south of Hadrian's wall, the Rhine and Danube Rivers, and the Caucasus in a time far out of the discussion of Howe and Strauss and probably interesting in its own right.
Generations define themselves earlier in life, at least in cultural values, in their teens instead of their thirties. Taking on the economic responsibilities of adults does not bring maturity; child labor on the farm or plantation or being cannon-fodder in the war (infantry was originally child soldiers too immature for horse-based warfare) does not cause one to mature. Becoming scarred and cynical is not growing up. It is in modern times that teenagers such as Juan Crisostomo Arriaga and Anne Frank could develop middle-aged competence so early due to formal education and excellent training. (We all know who Anne Frank was, but we would certainly know who Juan Crisostomo Arriaga was had he lived to thirty. He wrote some impressive music as a teenager, as did Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Chopin. Regrettably he died a teenager due to an infection, or music lovers would be speaking of him in the same sentence as Beethoven without failing the "laugh test". One can learn much by reading, whether books or musical scores; it is with the printing press that such became possible.
It's when kids started having some disposable income that they could influence the culture of their time through their purchases. Adults had to accommodate, and they often did by letting kids read books with adult concepts accessible to smart kids. It may date me, but I read To Kill a Mockingbird, Nineteen Eighty-Four , The Tin Drum, and Bertrand Russell's Why I am Not a Christian as a teenager with the thought that such was slightly rebellious. Silly me! Those were made available with little prompting, and I could not put them down. The educational experts wanted people like me to read them while thinking that I did so on the sly. Until some canon becomes the rigid norm, as when kids are all reading the same material based on their intellectual skill and listening to the same music or seeing the same images, history can move fast.
How things will change in a post-industrial era is yet to be shown, and this may color events. So of course does the lengthening of life-spans. Having four active adult generations in public life at once suggests the possibility of more cultural and moral balance that could mute the dangers of the generational cycle. That the leaders of both Houses of Congress are Silent and that the next President of the United States seems likely to be Silent suggests that the rule that people completely drop out of influence at age 80 is no longer the case. Having active Adaptive adults in positions of great influence deep into a Crisis Era (as I see it we are likely far closer to the end of this one than to its beginning) may frustrate some of the expected ferocity of a Crisis. Or perhaps this Crisis will end without catastrophic wars, this Crisis exposing any warrior not only to the sensible danger of projectiles and mines but the more pointless menace of a virus like COVID-19. As a writer under the employ of Gene Roddenberry put into the mouth of a Klingon who ordinarily had a proclivity to wage war, "only a fool fights in a burning house". Pandemics can destabilize a world, and even if COVID-19 does not kill on the level of the Black Death or even the Spanish Influenza of a century ago, COVID-19 will shape images of our time significantly. Maybe the images of bodies stacked like cord-wood at Nazi concentration camps or the devastation of great cities in Europe and Japan will have an even longer-lasting effect; maybe our rapacious plutocrats know that a war for profits will destroy their assets and put them at risk for harsh judgment in the aftermath of a war even if the victors are their own side.
If anyone thinks that this Crisis Era is nasty, then it is a paper tiger in contrast to the Crisis of 1940 and the Crisis of 2100 stands to have global warming as its focus with the cataclysm of inundation of huge swaths of prime farmland and changes of thermal regimes that will make some places close to the equator nearly intolerable and make deserts out of places where people now live in large numbers. No technological fix can shield us from hunger as technological fixes can meet basic human needs not those of hunger and shelter today.
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.