Generational Dynamics World View

[Bob Butler 54]

I have a three scheme way of looking at history. You have the familiar S&H turnings: high, awakening, unraveling and crisis. You have Ages if Civilization: hunter-gatherer, agricultural, industrial and information. Finally, you have civilizations: Western, Orthodox, Chinese, Islamic, etc…

This is clearly a broader picture than S&H alone. I look at more in both time and space. This is not to say that S&H is not extremely useful. They are very good at illustrating how cultures and values change. I found myself against conservatives over in the current events section defending S&H orthodoxy. I found myself in the position of defending the books avidly.

But what is often missing is that if you cross a border in one of the three systems, you have to question what you learned from the other two. S&H is very good at finding patterns in Western Civilization during the Industrial Age. That is where they were focused. That is where they have my greatest respect.

But, if you cross a border, you have to verify. A pattern that you found in one time and one place, and applied to another time and place, you had best double check.

Unfortunately for some S&H fans, the border to the Information Age comes with computer information, renewable energy and insurgency and nuclear weaponry in conflict. Those things are as great any other leap between previous ages. It means everything S&H said about the Industrial Age has to be double checked for validity here in the Information Age. You can still look for an observed trend, but you cannot assume it. Turning theory thus comes with a big asterisk.

I put the start of the Industrial Age to Information Age boundary at World War II, with Hiroshima for conflict and Bentley Park for computers. Others put it as late as the 1960s awakening and the personal computer. That seems to be as firm a boundary as one might expect among historians.

Thus, I am not impressed by a claim to orthodoxy. S&H did very well in one time and place, and I will often defend much that they noted, but no theory stands fixed and unchanging forever. There comes a time to note where their theory breaks down, and to try to work out what went wrong.

One change to the theory I associate (perhaps wrongly) with my meeting with S&H a long time ago. Originally they viewed their theory as non-partisan. You could supposedly be conservative or progressive and support it. I pointed out that in each crisis, there was a conflict between what existed prior to the crisis and an improvement that came with the crisis. There were conservatives who were the bad guys, and progressives that got to write the history books. Kings came to have no power. Slaves were freed. The government started regulating the economy and working for the people. Fascism was defeated and crisis war ended.

From that meeting on, the crisis was portrayed by S&H as much darker. Part of that is right. Nobody in their right mind wants to live through the heart of a crisis. Oh, an elite might want to profit from making arms, but you would not want to be a soldier in a crisis war. The Coronavirus is reinforcing that lesson in the last few months. You can understand why the culture is locked down to no changes in the high.

Part of that is partisan. Conservatives as bad guys and progressives as heroes was something the conservative authors did not seem to want to acknowledge. Crises became bad rather than shaping what was wonderfully American. While they stopped advocating their theory as non-partisan, they avoided noting how the progressives generally came out ahead.

Of course, crises are both a severe pain and a way of progressing. It seems hard to have one without the other.

My casual observation is that Generational Dynamics tries to mix orthodox S&H with a traditional conservative perspective. My view is that you can’t do that. S&H’s system as extended explains how societies can grow and change. How is the cultural inertia of no change overturned with a sudden crisis period where many problems get solved after long resistance?

In order to continue all the S&H memes beyond the age boundary, you have to ignore all the changes that occur in the Information Age. Thus the change in the effectiveness and utilization of war is ignored. The changes in race affiliation with parties is ignored. You respond to criticism with personal attacks rather than pertinent logic.

This becomes problematic. All pretenses at being scientific go away if you have to throw away data to sustain your hypothesis. With it goes the quality of your result. Garbage in, garbage out.

But I am also recognizing partisan values lock. In short, partisans don’t change. You need something like Atlanta in the Civil War or Hiroshima in World War II to force a mass values change. That hasn’t happened yet for a lot of people. It may never happen for some.

We’ll have to see if somehow COVID 19 turns the trick. Part of where it might come from is a need to abandon political fantasies in favor of the science. Those who see the massive deaths by the current conservative system of fantasies and lies will demand politicians who hew to the science, who acknowledge reality.

Not sure if that will effect Generational Dynamics.