Is the new book coming or not?

[Hintergrund]

It's in this forum's description, "News about Neil Howe and his upcoming book The First Turning", but what is the deal with it? It's not listed on amazon... is this still a thing?

[pbrower2a]

(07-12-2019, 09:29 PM)Hintergrund Wrote: It's in this forum's description, "News about Neil Howe and his upcoming book The First Turning", but what is the deal with it? It's not listed on amazon... is this still a thing?

Predictions of the future bifurcate in most times -- except at the end of the Crisis era that determines practically everything for the next three decades or so. When the Axis Powers were in the ascendant, people could predict either a world without them or one in which their genocidal, slave-driving regimes established themselves forever.

Do the next two years in America repudiate or enshrine Donald Trump? The question was much more ambiguous with Barack Obama because he did not challenge legal tradition and did not foster a personality cult. Besides, Obama was clearly pre-seasonal in style, showing more how a  John Adams, a Grover Cleveland, a Harry Truman, or a Dwight Eisenhower would do things.

It is easy for Howe to say and for Strauss to have said that pre-seasonal ways are honorable while recognizing their irrelevance, or that post-seasonal behavior is suspect. Wearing Bermuda shorts on a chilly November night (clearly post-seasonal) or doing an April snowstorm (clearly pre-seasonal) is similarly foolish even if it might have felt liberating on one of the last warm days of October or will feel natural on the first summer-like day in April. Both pre-seasonal and post-seasonal behavior is out of phase. Much about Obama is admirable, but one can consider his style either sixty years before his time or twenty years ahead.

Donald Trump is post-seasonal, dredging up ideas that many of us thought were obsolete or furthering ideas of others (Mike Pence is just as obnoxious, and if anything happens to Donald Trump we get to here Mike Pence's fundamentalist anti-intellectualism instead of the crude adulation of the greed, indulgence, and power of a rentier elite).
I see the Trump-Pence agenda as a "Christian and Corporate State" in which the sole focus of the government in the economy is to foster the enrichment of the Right People while the social order promotes superstition and subordination in the Name of Jesus. Economic elites can follow the "do what thou wilt" dictum of Aleister Crowley while the proles are expected to churn out babies to become cannon fodder in wars for profit, cheap labor in industry, and people compelled to pay exorbitant rents to people like Donald Trump. The Trump agenda and the Pence agenda may seem like a hypocritical marriage of political convenience, but remember well: the norm in history has been a soft set of rules for the Master Classes and harsh rules for the proles of the time. Maximization of inequality in economic result and personal happiness is the objective of all exploitative elites from antiquity to today.

Donald Trump does not live like the ideal of the devout, humble Christian fundamentalist stereotype. Trump is practically a Marxist stereotype of a plutocrat. His economic ideals come from Ayn Rand and his sexual practice comes from the Playboy Philosophy. Note well that both Trump and Pence are both grossly anti-feminist. They do not disagree; they harmonize well even if they seem hypocritically diametric in style.

[Hintergrund]

Y'know, I really only was asking whether Neil Howe would write the sequel (so to speak) "The First Turning" or not.

[David Horn]

(07-14-2019, 10:00 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: Y'know, I really only was asking whether Neil Howe would write the sequel (so to speak) "The First Turning" or not.

I doubt it seriously.  He seems to have separated himself from his earlier work, and concentrated on his Lifecourse consulting.

[pbrower2a]

I'd love to write it. History is an obscene tale written in the blood of innocent people, but it is one in need of writing.

So where do I start? The ends of Crisis eras here and elsewhere. By elsewhere I include the losing sides. I will pay much attention to Germany and Japan in World War II -- two countries with the most shameful ends of Crisis eras.

A scene that I will use for the culmination of defeat is of German citizens getting guided tours of Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, and Mauthausen under the direction of American and British soldiers, with Nazi Party members being obliged to bury the bodies. Another will be the horrors of Soviet takeovers, including the massacre at Nemmersdorf (one of the first German towns conquered by the Red Army)... and of course Berlin, with all the rapes. The message to that? Sow the whirlwind, and the whirlwind will reap you. I will contrast Finland, one of the few Axis powers that the Allies would have liked to have had on their side. I am going to speculate that FDR and Churchill urged leniency upon Finland because Finnish leadership was clean of war crimes. Italy? Italian leadership under Mussolini was so vile that the Italians largely saw their conquerors as liberators. Japan? It was far easier for the conscience of American leaders to use the atom bomb because of atrocities by the Japanese Armed Forces. The potential for the atom bomb blasts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki began with the Bataan Death March.

It is far easier to get final, definitive victory if one gives the defeated little cause for striking back. The brutal Axis powers left the conquered people much cause for striking back even in the face of the Gestapo and Kempeitai When the Americans, british, or Free French came to town, the war was over once they advanced out of town.

The scope needs be bigger because the 1T is itself comparatively boring. People pick up the pieces, often literally as in the ruins of cities once vibrant. They start anew on aborted careers or parlay their wartime experience into very different ones. Social roles seemingly well defined before the Crisis as a permanent reality become unthinkable. In America, people of Polish and Italian ancestry were almost invariably poor before the Second World War. Many proved themselves capable of better roles in life than they had before the war. Little can so enhance a career as being a war hero as a commissioned officer, and that is one way to get entry into the American middle class. Even blacks became more assertive about their rights. Heroism in the face of the Nazis and the Japanese militarists is a good habit for facing the Klan, White Citizens' Councils, and similar brutes. .

In view of Russia and China in the early half of the twentieth century I will suggest that the very nasty time better fits a description as an extended Time of Troubles with a series of waves of Crisis that do not resolve themselves until one such wave finally does. Such Times of Trouble shatter a society until the troubles exhaust the society.

So the Crisis ends when the post-Crisis world sets much as does concrete. The world of Europe in 1949 may have been more similar on the surface to that of 1989 than to that of 1946 -- let alone 1939. Political orders of the start of 1989 were still nominally much like those settled by 1949, the most obvious exceptions being the demise of dictatorships from before World War II in Spain and Portugal. But if 1985 (forty years after the end of WWII is still post (WWII) Crisis, 1985 is clearly part of the time building to the next one.

I would start with the depraved time of the latter part of the 3T as a "Degeneracy", a time of bad politics, bad business, bad tendencies in education, and bad mass culture that steadily debases the institutions that make a society work. Speculative booms lead, as usual, to financial panics, and the biggest and most corrupt speculative boom leads to the worst financial panic.

There are other loose ends, including the tendency of people to take better care of themselves and the tendency for youth to start defining their cultural and political lives earlier. Demographics of the electorate matter greatly. I see the pattern of the Millennial Generation in the 2010s very similar to that of the GI Generation in the 1930s -- and something that would have continued, WWIi or not.

[Bill the Piper]

(07-13-2019, 09:30 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Donald Trump does not live like the ideal of the devout, humble Christian fundamentalist stereotype. Trump is practically a Marxist stereotype of a plutocrat. His economic ideals come from Ayn Rand and his sexual practice comes from the Playboy Philosophy. Note well that both Trump and Pence are both grossly anti-feminist. They do not disagree; they harmonize well even if they seem hypocritically diametric in style.

He is also a radical feminist stereotype of a man. He lurks in changing rooms during the Miss World pageant to see the participants' genitals (despite being married and able to pay for most expensive prostitutes if his wife wasn't enough). His manner of behaving is always confrontational and he brags about the size of his "nuclear button". He makes stupid remarks about a journalist menstruating. He is an essence of neoreactionary masculinity, but this kind of masculinity reflects a stereotype created by man-haters. It's sad to see men actually adopting this stereotype.

[pbrower2a]

(07-17-2019, 04:47 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(07-13-2019, 09:30 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Donald Trump does not live like the ideal of the devout, humble Christian fundamentalist stereotype. Trump is practically a Marxist stereotype of a plutocrat. His economic ideals come from Ayn Rand and his sexual practice comes from the Playboy Philosophy. Note well that both Trump and Pence are both grossly anti-feminist. They do not disagree; they harmonize well even if they seem hypocritically diametric in style.

He is also a radical feminist stereotype of a man. He lurks in changing rooms during the Miss World pageant to see the participants' genitals (despite being married and able to pay for most expensive prostitutes if his wife wasn't enough). His manner of behaving is always confrontational and he brags about the size of his "nuclear button". He makes stupid remarks about a journalist menstruating. He is an essence of neoreactionary masculinity, but this kind of masculinity reflects a stereotype created by man-haters. It's sad to see men actually adopting this stereotype.

...in that Trump is even more odious than Hefner, whose achievement in media was to offer pornography about which users could enjoy without feeling guilty. Maybe we recognize that the women whom Hefner exposed in bare beauty got promises that he would give them faster entries into the lucrative mainstream media of entertainment. Playmates of the Month seem to have made their deals for jump-starting their careers. They got publicity in return for literal exposure of their cleavage.

I do not have a daughter, but if I did I would want her to stay clear of any semblance of pornography even of the more genteel sort that Hugh Hefner or even Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions offer. But this said, I would rather have a daughter involved in a beauty contest sponsored by the media exploiter Hugh Hefner than by the perv Donald Trump. Hefner's nudes are on roughly the same plane as the voluptuous nudes of the painter William Bouguereau, differing largely in that Bouguereau's neoclassical nudes more closely fit the obsolete taste of the boudoir of the nineteenth century.

I am familiar with the worst male-chauvinist types from teenage years. The traditional male chauvinist who possesses and protects a subordinate wife at least agrees with me that rape is an abomination. That sort at the least recognizes that I will never move in on his wife or daughters for exploitative sexuality. I may see women as more equal in the economic sphere, but I also recognize that sexual freedom includes the right to say no to an advance. So what is the worst? I remember one of my classmates playing a jumbled-word game -- make a word out of a set of letters. I thought of three words that I could make out of one such combination of four letters: pear, pare, and reap. He shocked me by bringing up another word composed of the same letters. He later accused me of not being a 'real man'. I could only think that he had the insecurity and I didn't. I find that that classmate was eventually convicted of a crime relating to an alternative in arranging a set of four letters, and that arrangement did not come out as pear, pare, or reap.

Real men hate rape. The victims are their wives, sisters, girlfriends, daughters, granddaughters, mothers, and grandmothers. If the traditional male chauvinist sees rape as a violation of his interests, a more feminist man like I see rape as a gross violation of a female who has the right (that I assume that she would take) to avoid a violent exploitation.  The difference between the traditional male chauvinist and me is on who is the chief victim.

The secret hidden camera in a dressing room or a toilet stall is an abomination, a sort of virtual rape. So is lurking about in a female dressing if one is a male perv.

I have yet to see any accusation that Mike Pence  abuses women as Trump has in the past... if I am to guess anything, he is closer to being a traditional male chauvinist who fully possesses a wife. Such fits his religion of choice, which is Protestant fundamentalism (Mike Pence is a lapsed Catholic, as if that matters). The alliance between an amoral, rapacious plutocrat with the self-righteous Religious Right makes no sense to me, but it exists, so it is something that we must recognize as a current reality. A man like Trump makes the offer that in return for making a plutocrat like me even more filthy rich he will smash feminism, homosexuality, abortion, and 'intellectualism'? I see that as a marriage in Hell -- and for me, one that will make my life into a Hell of emotional amd economic poverty.

I well recognize a concern that many men have, a concern for which they often find blatant over-compensation. The size of a nuclear button matters little, and the obsession with the  big damage that a nuclear arsenal offers is one surrogate for the size of something exclusively masculine. In some places, men buy gigantic pickups even if those are simply their means of commuting. So what! I am not impressed. I may be enough of a sissy to be proud of fights that I evaded even if by running from them; then again, what does a bar-room brawl prove?

[Hintergrund]

In the past, mortality was way higher. So we probably had more men who had lost all their female relatives and didn't have a wife (anymore) either. I guess this might have to do with the fact that there was more rape in the past.

[Eric the Green]

I agree with Mr. Brower. Real men hate rape. I could never myself understand its appeal too much to guys. Maybe just frustration. But sexual relations mean nothing to another person if it's forced upon them. It's supposed to be fun, and that's not fun. Reading history, I see that victorious warriors in the past (but not really so long ago) would plunder and destroy their enemies, kill the people, burn down their city and rape their women. I guess guys just have a need to show how powerful they are, or something.

[pbrower2a]

(08-14-2019, 07:36 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: In the past, mortality was way higher. So we probably had more men who had lost all their female relatives and didn't have a wife (anymore) either. I guess this might have to do with the fact that there was more rape in the past.

No. The ravaging soldiers were usually young men promised the opportunity to loot and rape. If successful at looting they would return rich enough to attract the extremely materialistic girls, the ones most voluptuous and desirable, to become wives. 

In those times people were extremely materialistic. Wealth may have been rare and may have all either glittered or implied food (land and livestock)... paradoxically there was little commerce with which to get rich. A good marriage for a girl was one that would assure that, because her husband had adequate land, that she would never go hungry or inadequately clothed. Love was a rarity. Even among the aristocrats, including the monarchs themselves, marriages were often intended for cementing alliances -- a practice blatant enough when Louis XVI of France married Marie Antoinette of Austria in modern times.

In view of all the wars, male mortality was surely higher than that for women.

[Hintergrund]

And here I thought people were more religious in the past. ("Prophets" more so, Nomads less so, but all in all they were.)

[Anthony '58]

Hintergrund's signature is, how shall I say, totally awesome.

And I call the Silent "The Cold War Bloody Shirt Generation," because their powerful survivors are behaving as if the Cold War is still going on - reflected in their vehement opposition to everything from health care reform (which they conflate with socialism, if not out-and-out communism) to taking meaningful action on climate change (after all, the first Earth Day fell on the same date as Lenin's would-have-been 100th birthday).

That the Silent have morphed into a superannuated version of the Gilded is, to quote 1960s-era Atlanta Constitution columnist Ralph McGill, one of the most melancholy stories of our time.