Political Cycle Model for Saeculum

[Warren Dew]

(09-30-2016, 01:57 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I will try to clarify what I am trying to say.  S&H introduced two concepts in their thinking about how generations are created.  One is social moments the eventful periods that constitute the history that creates Heroes and Prophets, what they call dominant generations. The other is phases of life.  People are forged into a generation by their experience of life as mediated by their current role on life, which is a function of the phase of life.  On the surface this seems to make sense. But social movements are long periods of time (the last one ran from 1967 to 1980—13 years).  Many people will occupy different phases of life over this period.  For example, a carefree single twenty-something during the Summer of Love would be nearly middle age with a spouse, family and mortgage by 1980, that is they would be in two different phases of life.  Would they respond to the experience of living through an Awakening by becoming a Prophet (emphasizing their youthful experience) or an Artist (emphasizing their experience as a mature adult with family responsibilities).  

One solution is to narrow the generation-creating episode.  John Xenakis does this with his concept of a crisis war that plays a critical role as a 4T in his conception of the generational mechanism.  WW II is an example of such a war.  The period from Pearl Harbor to D-day spans only 2.5 years. During this time most people occupied a single phase of life. Those who were in the rising adult phase of life played the role of war-fighter (GI) or support staff (Rosie the Riveter). They were forged into what S&H call the GI generation. Those who managed the war effort whether on the front (Eisenhower, Bradley) or at home (the middle-aged managers at OPA, WPB or NWLB) were forged into the Lost generation.  Those too young to get into the action (think of the teens in A Separate Peace) became the Silent generation. For John, as long as those generations forged by the last crisis war are still in charge another crisis war is unlikely.  Once they are gone a new crisis war will occur as soon as the opportunity arises. This means once every saeculum, a new crisis war arrives (4T) starting a new cycle.
 
Another approach is to narrow the phase of life during which generational imprinted can happen. For example, we can assume that the only period that matters for becoming a generation is “coming of age” which happens over a narrow span of years centered at age 22.  In this case, a generation is forged by coming of age over a the “core years” of a turning.  Those who come of age near the edges--what we call “cuspers”--sometimes imprint into the adjacent generation.  So, the generation who comes of age during the core years of a 2T or 4T (that is, a social moment) are forged into a dominant generation. For example, the Prophet generation created by the 1967-1980 spiritual awakening was born 22 years earlier in 1945-1958.  On both sides of this “core” are cuspers, some of who will end up Prophets and some as Silent or Gen X. S&H add two years of cuspers up from and two years at the end to obtain the Boom generation born 1943-60.

S&H invoke both of these approaches in their descriptions of how the cycle works.  In the Appendix to Generations they describe a mechanism along the lines of John’s.  Yet in the main text they invoke concepts like social moments and dominant/recessive generations and emphasize coming of age as particularly important to forming generations, which shows they had read Mannheim and so are also using the second kind of mechanism in their thinking.

These two approaches are mutually incompatible mechanistically, but on superficial reading seem to make sense.  In their books after Generations, S&H never expanding on their thinking about how the cycle works—so it was sort of left up to the T4Ters to do it.  And that is where we are a quarter-century after the publication of Generations.

Thanks for the clarification.  With regard to the problem, if I understand your argument correctly, the issue is that Strauss & Howe's limited statements on generational propagation would imply that the temporal "pulses" represented by generations would broaden and become less distinct over the course of time without some mechanism to reinforce the boundaries between generations.  Is that accurate?  If so, I agree that's an unresolved issue in Generations.

Narrowing of either the historically formative periods or of the ages of imprinting could ameliorate the issue, I agree.  However, they aren't necessarily the only possible mechanism for generational sharpening.  For example, solitons in optics retain their sharpness because of nonlinear effects that balance the tendency toward dispersion of the wave.  Some similar effect could be occurring with generational cohorts.

To me, a narrow duration of the imprinting phase of life seems implausible:  people get married at widely differing ages; people have their first children at widely differing ages; people shift from education to work over a broad band of ages.  Why would generational imprinting happen in a narrow band of ages, in contrast to all of those?  That is, unless the imprinting happens very early, say as a toddler, perhaps at the same time as actual biological imprinting, but then it's hard to understand why the children would react to the broad societal situation rather than just their own family.

Temporally narrow social moments seem more plausible.  Certainly the crisis wars don't tend to last more than a few years.  The whole hippie period lasted a while, but if the midcycle moment was the Reagan Revolution, that was a pretty rapid shift.

I guess I should look more into Xenakis' writing.  Based on a brief investigation, the main issue I think I have with his approach is the idea that generational cycles can so easily remain distinct in different geographic areas.  I would think that crisis wars would tend to synchronize generational cycles.