05-31-2021, 12:50 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-31-2021, 01:19 PM by Eric the Green.)
(05-30-2021, 03:32 PM)David Horn Wrote:(05-30-2021, 12:48 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Obviously rationalwiki tends to look for things to knock that don't fit their narrow worldview. Sometimes they may hit a target, but sometimes they miss. The clearly have no idea what the S&H generations/turning theory says, and they have no idea what a Crisis is, still less what an Awakening is, or what happened in the late sixties. Even the existence of an Awakening is itself beyond the scope of their narrow worldview.
Scary times don't all come in the same flavor. A Crisis is an exercise that will change the political and social structure of the country and even the world perhaps. An Awakening is the call to arms that won't be embraced for 20+ years. So why is the one urgent and present while the other is only engaging but not urgent? That seems to be the question being asked by rationalwiki, and the answer is actually rather simple. Ideas are ripe or they aren't. Crises are the fully ripe ideas that need resolution and they need it soon. Awakenings are less answers than questions. Are we resolving the questions asked in the last 2T? I would say yes and no. Yes, because we recognized the effects of the majority imposing itself on the minority. We didn't get that at the time -- not as a society at least. Do we now? I hope we do. Of course, other issues have intruded that are also urgent. We'll see how well we address the mall in the next few years.
That is substantially correct. The larger point though is that a site like rationalwiki is locked into a "rational" worldview, and anything that does not fit is disregarded or debunked. As Howe explains, an Awakening is mainly a spiritual revival of some kind, and is expressed through culture and religion. In Awakenings, the need is felt to restore faith and/or connection to spirit, which in the previous 1T was subjected to "spirit death." It is also political, in that causes and protests are enunciated, and many of these are taken up in large part during the Crisis for actual institutional change, although some reforms are made during the Awakening as well.
The spiritual awakening brings up the points about our lifestyle, culture and our connection to life and spirit which needs, ideally, to inform some of the revisions made later, either in the next 4T or the next 2T. For example, in the last 2T considerable attention was paid to depersonalization, alienation, reduction of life and soul to computer cards and bureaucratic procedures, scientific reductionism of life into things and commodities, and disregard of Nature, among other concerns. Nowadays, in some cities this is bearing fruit in the way they are being redesigned, and in changes to our educational system and our workplace, as well as in environmentalism.
X Marks the Spot exaggerates and over-simplifies the description of and contrast between civic GIs/Millennials and prophet Boomers. The GIs remained a liberal-democratic-voting generation for the most part, although they and Boomers were opposed to each other over the Vietnam War and the peace movement. But liberal GIs and liberal Boomers agreed on the need for social spending such as the New Deal, the Great Society, and similar ideas (supported now by Millennials and liberal Boomers) being proposed now and effected by Democrats like Biden and proposed by such figures as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang. Some Millennials volunteered for duty after 9-11, but the vast majority of Millennials supported Kerry and Obama in the elections because they did not want to go to war or see their friends massacred in what Obama called "a stupid war." As I posted, Obama won the Millennial Generation by a more than 2 to 1 margin in 2008, the largest by any younger generation in USA history.