09-09-2016, 11:15 AM
(09-08-2016, 12:12 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: It seems to me Strauss & Howe do not delineate the fourth turnings consistently. The key feature in each is generally a major war, but sometimes they they extend the turning ahead of the war, sometimes behind, sometimes only including the war.
Instability? Political breakdown? Social unrest or its imminence? Economic failure?
I can already suggest one possible cause of the next Crisis Era: dramatic, disruptive changes in weather patterns as a consequence of global warming. An open Arctic might pull moisture-bearing winds from the middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere , at least during the summer, into the Arctic basin where strong thunderstorms roil under the intense heating of the summer sun of the high latitudes. An icy Arctic Ocean simply absorbs heat into the futile melting of the thin ice sheet above the ocean. An open ocean warms the Arctic waters intensely and forces convection while evaporating surface water.
Guess where go the summer rains for the midwestern grain crops grow? A hint: it won't be upon Iowa corn fields of wheat fields of the Canadian Prairie Provinces. Winters will also be weaker, and paradoxically it is the harsh winter blizzards that allow excellent grain crops by protecting the soil moisture and supplying more ground moisture. When the unpleasant fire-and-ice climates of the American Midwest give way to the dry-summer, mild-winter climates typical of the Sacramento Valley of California, then the grain crops of the American Midwest could crash. Add to that inundated of some of the heavily-populated farmlands of some poor countries, and just imagine the political instability that comes from people finding exaggerated nationalism as a solution to their distress. In times far less severe than that, Germany went under the rule of a leader with many demonic qualities. Even we Americans might not be safe from such a leader from among ourselves.
But I get ahead of myself here. We are in a Crisis Era, and we have yet to have any indication of how we get through this one. Howe and Strauss tell us how successful emergence from a Crisis Era looks. America in all such successes (all but the Civil War Crisis) did major reforms that worked well. The Civil War Crisis ended with mixed results (and it could have been far worse had the leaders of the Union and Confederate sides acted with fewer principles. Just imagine how badly the Crisis could have gone had the opposing sides been as vicious as the Reds and Whites in the Russian Civil War following the Bolshevik coup of 1917. Slaves killing their masters and setting up collectives on what had been plantations? Confederates killing slaves to prevent such in the chaos that appears as Union forces advance? (I hope that you haven't been eating when you read this... sorry!)
We could end up, due to the polarization of recent years, an equivalent of the Spanish Civil War, after which the vanquished not fortunate enough to leave the scene due to death or emigration are compelled to suffer for the greed and indulgence of the winners. Just imagine an America with a Franco-like caudillo as the victorious warlord: America becomes a morgue of the mind, a worker's nightmare of poverty for all but the ruling elites. On the surface America seems OK to a foreigner who gets cheap holidays -- after all, someone can ski in Colorado for much less than one can in Switzerland because service labor is so cheap. Americans get good at foreign languages if they want the best chance for improvement in their lives: seducing a foreigner and marrying one's way into a new life in Warsaw. And I don't mean Warsaw, Indiana! (I don't know the place, so I can't judge it). Just think about it, liberals -- a conformist, repressive, grossly-unequal America. That could be a good reason to learn a Slavic language. No, Slovak and Slovene are not the same language.
Quote:Personally I think the most consistent delineation of the "mood" of civilization would be at the end of the war. The end of the civil war ended the crisis and began reconstruction; Victory in Japan day ended the crisis and again introduced a period of rebuilding. Likewise construction of the new nation of the United States really began in earnest after the Revolutionary War was won, starting with development of the Constitution.
Much of that mood was already being set in the late 1930s. America was growing its way out of the Great Depression, and would have done so had it not been for the Second World War which got in the way. America was already solving many of its problems with institutional change. People already had a rosy vision of the future, often brought back from the New York World's Fair of 1939 and 1940 (or broadcast in the movie theaters, which had far more dominance in cultural life in the late 1930s than television ever had). Television has dominance only if the networks are showing the same thing, as with the Moon landings. It is safe to say that the America of 1939 was already a rejection of the preceding 3T and in many ways a portent of the upcoming American High.
We do not need a great war to define this Crisis. We may end up with significant reforms of our political system. Maybe we can get what Abraham Lincoln called for in his "new birth of Freedom" without Antietam, Shiloh, General Sherman's "march through Georgia", the siege of Petersburg, and the surrender at Appomattox. Will undoing the tendencies to government by lobbyist be easy? Hardly! Ruthless elites do not divest themselves of corrupt power without harsh resistance. America today is no exception.
Quote:In this view, the fourth turning ought properly be seen as the period leading up to and including the crisis war, when signs of problems become clear but have not yet been resolved. Throughout the 1930s, it was clear that war was coming; similarly there were clear stresses before the Civil War and the Revolutionary War.
We can have a Crisis Era without a war. The last complete Crisis Era showed the near-certainty of apocalyptic war with the rise of the political figure who best fit the description of the Antichrist in Revelation -- a cunning, ruthless, reckless, unprincipled gangster devoid of any ethics. We could have side wars as with ISIS, Boko Haram, and offshoots of al-Qaeda.
Just remember: the rise of Donald Trump indicates the fragility of American democracy today. Unlike those who voted for Barry Goldwater and George McGovern, many Trump supporters will see outright fraud in the electoral process as the cause of their chosen candidate's inability to achieve election. The temper of 1964 (early Awakening Era) and 1972 (just past the middle of an Awakening Era) could hardly be more different from the temper of this time. Institutions weaken greatly during a 3T and start showing their weaknesses in a 4T. American institutions were strong enough that the counterculture and some minor uprisings of minorities could break nothing important. Today our institutions are much more compromised.
The idea that we can get through the current Crisis without major changes to political and educational institutions and without major change in economic practice is pure bosh.
Quote:If the current fourth turning started with 9/11, we ought to expect the crisis to come to a head by 2020. If it started with the crash, the crisis might be later.
Did you see George W. Bush tell people to cut back on fuel consumption, buy defense bonds, apply for work in defense plants, or sign up for military service? He told people to travel and go shopping, the antithesis of what FDR told people to do just after the Pearl Harbor Attack! Whether such is poor leadership by Dubya or the temper of the time is moot: America was not in a Crisis mood. The Double-Zero Decade has obvious parallels to the 1920s, and not to the 1930s. America would go on a speculative binge as in the 1920s, and that binge would end in much the same way as the one in the 1920s.
The two terms of Barack Obama look like an attempt to emulate the first two terms of FDR... at the end of FDR's second term. America was not yet a participant in World War II. Four years later the American army had just won the Battle of the Bulge and made the swift demise of the Devil's Reich a certainty. Things weren't looking so great for Hitler's Japanese partners in crime, either. This Crisis could end around 2025; it could also end around 2035. That has nothing to do with whether one holds that the Crisis began on 9/11 or began with the collapse of the financial fraud in 2008. We do not know. Crisis eras typically end abruptly with the losing sides thinking that they can hold on indefinitely or even win -- until reality hits them as inevitability, as when General Robert E. Lee realized that the trap was sprung on his Army of Northern Virginia or when Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel found no viable alternative than to surrender what remained of the German Army to the Soviet Union in occupied Berlin.
Crisis Eras do not follow rigid timetables. Even if FDR adopted Lincoln-like rhetoric for World War II, the wars were not the same. The Confederates, with few exceptions, were gentlemen in contrast to the Nazis and the thuggish leaders of Japan in WWII.
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.
