Why do S&H start Civic generations so early?

[Anthony '58]

This was one of the best Star Trek episodes of all time.

[galaxy]

warning: longpost

(08-09-2021, 11:04 AM)galaxy Wrote:

(08-09-2021, 09:28 AM)David Horn Wrote: Have at it! 

Well, how about population growth? The apparent shortening of the saeculum corresponds pretty well to the start of the huge population spike of the last 200 years. Perhaps when each successive generation is larger than the one before it, the generations find it easier to sweep their predecessors out of the way as they enter the next phase of life. The best thing to point to as an example of this is probably how the small size of the Lost Generation allowed the Missionary Generation to remain "in power" unusually long, though this didn't seem to affect the boundaries of the relevant turnings much.

Every generation, influenced by its own lived experience, believes itself to be "the best" or "the one that's got it right," so it stands to reason that every generation would hold on to what power it has as long as possible and would "rule" either until becoming simply too old to do so or until being forced out by the following generation in a large cultural shift. Seemingly because of population growth, being forced out has (with a single exception) been the norm for two saecula now, and it seems like 15-20 years is about the fastest that that can happen.
 
The question then becomes this: as countries finish the demographic transition and return to stable or even declining populations, will the saeculum lengthen again? Or has forced replacement become the norm, which will be held in place by the fast pace of modern society and the memory of those living currently? I don't know, but Japan seems like the place to watch in the coming decades for any hints.

You know, I've thought about this for a while, and I really do think I've got it.

When events occur in history, the way a society reacts is far more important than the nature of the event itself. S&H are a broken record about this, for good reason.

A turning, therefore, begins when enough of a new generation has entered society, and the living generations have aged (and therefore changed) enough, that society's reaction is substantially different from what has come before.

So, the reason the 4T didn't begin with 9/11 is that there were not enough Millennials in society yet (the oldest of them being only 19) and not enough members of the older generations had reached the stage of life in which they react in the Crisis manner. Because of this, the reaction to that event was very similar to what it likely would have been if it had happened in 1995 (though it was still different - I have no memory of it, but my subjective impression is that it seems almost like society jumped into a 4T mood very briefly and then "snapped out of it." Perhaps this is part of the reason for the sort of "3.5T" that occurred from 2001 to 2020**).

When each generation is larger than the one born before it, its members accumulate in society more rapidly and are more impactful and influential, earlier. A large generation hits adulthood with a big wave, rather than slowly trickling in - that is, society goes from having no adult members of that generation to having millions of them, extremely quickly.

Doing some very sloppy estimation here: using the 1982 start date, when 9/11 occurred, there were likely about 7 million adult Millennials. That was 2% of the population.
When the 2008 financial crash occurred, their numbers were likely close to 40 million. That was 13% of the total population...which makes 2007 the likely tipping-point year in which adult Millennials began to outnumber Silents (actually, all over-65s, including the remaining GIs at that point), switching the "missing" archetype from Hero to Artist and forming the Crisis generational stack. All that was needed after that point was the spark.

If the Millennial generation had been smaller - that is, roughly equal in size to the Silent generation rather than larger - this likely would have happened several years later.

So, the way society reacts to something can change quickly and suddenly, and can do so after relatively short periods of time. 15-20 years seems like it must be the "hard limit" - the fastest a turning can go - because that's how long it takes for a new younger generation to become influential enough to change society's reactions enough to begin a new turning. Therefore, "history itself" has accelerated to the point of being unable to accelerate any more, having literally run up against the limits of human biology.


I've also just realized that this math can probably point us to a likely range of dates for the end of this turning, which is, uh...2024 to 2032. So that's not actually very helpful. Never mind.


**Just realized that Millennials overtook Boomers as the nation's largest generation in 2019. I guess that's where the transition from "3.5T" to "true 4T" in 2020 comes from.

I guess I'd describe it, by the way, as:

1984-2001: 3
2001-2008: 3.5, more 3 than 4
2008-2020: 3.5, more 4 than 3
2020-present: 4

So it took three sparks, three big events, to fully reach the turning. As life expectancy continues to increase, I wonder if gradual and "multi-step" turning transitions will become the new norm, instead of a deceleration of the saeculum (which I theorized earlier and suggested looking to Japan and its declining population for indications).

[pbrower2a]

(08-28-2021, 03:31 PM)galaxy Wrote: warning: longpost

(08-09-2021, 11:04 AM)galaxy Wrote:

(08-09-2021, 09:28 AM)David Horn Wrote: Have at it! 

Well, how about population growth? The apparent shortening of the saeculum corresponds pretty well to the start of the huge population spike of the last 200 years. Perhaps when each successive generation is larger than the one before it, the generations find it easier to sweep their predecessors out of the way as they enter the next phase of life. The best thing to point to as an example of this is probably how the small size of the Lost Generation allowed the Missionary Generation to remain "in power" unusually long, though this didn't seem to affect the boundaries of the relevant turnings much.

Every generation, influenced by its own lived experience, believes itself to be "the best" or "the one that's got it right," so it stands to reason that every generation would hold on to what power it has as long as possible and would "rule" either until becoming simply too old to do so or until being forced out by the following generation in a large cultural shift. Seemingly because of population growth, being forced out has (with a single exception) been the norm for two saecula now, and it seems like 15-20 years is about the fastest that that can happen.
 
The question then becomes this: as countries finish the demographic transition and return to stable or even declining populations, will the saeculum lengthen again? Or has forced replacement become the norm, which will be held in place by the fast pace of modern society and the memory of those living currently? I don't know, but Japan seems like the place to watch in the coming decades for any hints.

You know, I've thought about this for a while, and I really do think I've got it.

When events occur in history, the way a society reacts is far more important than the nature of the event itself. S&H are a broken record about this, for good reason.

You have it! How society acts upon a critical event is largely the result of the position of the event in the Saeculum.  The 9/11 attack occurred during an Unraveling, and the Pearl Harbor attack came during the latter part of a Crisis Era. Within a few weeks of the Pearl Harbor attack the USA had practically shut down the consumer economy and became the Arsenal of Democracy. Gasoline rationing began, and people quit doing pleasure travel. Propaganda ads asked "is this trip necessary?" and showed a solo driver in a car with ghostly images of Hitler and Tojo riding along. People were expected to share the commute to war work. 

The gangster powers overestimated the power of economic hedonism in America... and found to their dismay that the USA was getting weapons and supplies to troops. Maybe not fast enough to prevent the calamity at Corregidor, but that was as far as American military disasters went.  Americans would have adequate food and fuel, and they were told to "make it do or do without". To be sure, the stock market crash put a veritable end to speculative end to real estate speculation, but had that been going on, that would have stopped. 

Fast forward sixty years and what does Dubya say in response to 9/11? "Go shopping! Travel!" America went on a speculative binge parallel to that of the 1920's. If you are familiar with Sinclair Lewis novel Babbitt  set in the 1920's it is absurd in any subsequent decade... until the Double-Zero Decade. The Double-Zero Decade would be parallel in many ways to the Roaring Twenties, the wrong time for any great moral crusade (aside from Fundamentalist hustles) or any great national project.   
  

Quote:A turning, therefore, begins when enough of a new generation has entered society, and the living generations have aged (and therefore changed) enough, that society's reaction is substantially different from what has come before.

Much changes. I have seen suggestions that the generations are shorter in duration because of teen involvement in mass culture, and their tastes shape them for life. When the older "youth" generation (like the Boomers in the late 1970's) starts rejecting the pop culture made for their juniors (Lost "bubblegum" rock), then we are approaching a change of Saeculum. On the other hand we have expanding life expectancies (at least until COVID-19) that result from older people remaining active and taking care of themselves -- eschewing smoking, heavy drinking, and obesity. There were typically three active adult generations  late in any Saeculum; there are now typically four. It is not that people are expanding the extreme life spans; it is instead that people are attaining old age and handling it well. 

Something different has happened since the last Crisis era that makes this one different; an active, influential Adaptive generation acting deep into the Crisis Era. Generations as late as the Lost did not hve the longevity that one associated with GI's and the Silent.. and there's no reason to believe that the Boom generation won't fit the pattern. Even if they did reach old age, the Lost were the generation for whom nursing homes started to be built in large numbers because they could not easily make the moves that their children were making across country in an era in which Big Business was moving employees about as did the military. (The Lost probably drank more heavily than did other generations during Prohibition, and unlike GI's they were more likely to drink very bad booze; they also smoked like chimneys compared to younger generations and had no idea of how bad smoking was because they were already old when the Surgeon General's report came out connecting smoking with cancer and other diseases. Also generally with much less formal education than GI's on the whole they were less able to adapt to a world built by and for GI's than the GI's and those who lived in their midst. 

We now have four active adult generations. In the usual Crisis Era, meaning any before this one, at least toward its end there might be two Adaptive generation, but one is typically retired from public life and the other is still short of full adulthood. This time we have plenty of high-profile late-wave Silent figures (Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and Joe Biden) in key roles in public life. We still have Clint Eastwood making films. But this is the Last Act of this generation. Generation Z will be taking over open roles that the Silent leave open as a gap. During World War II America acted with a ferocity that it had not known since the Civil War because there was no active Adaptive generation to stop the incarceration of Americans of Japanese ancestry or the horrific incendiary raids on German and Japanese cities. I'm not saying that the Progressive Generation of Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft would have negotiated a settlement with the Axis Powers, but I also can't imagine German or Japanese equivalents of our Progressive generation letting the (largely) Lost leadership of Germany or Japan from doing large-scale genocide and mistreatment of Allied prisoners.    

Quote:So, the reason the 4T didn't begin with 9/11 is that there were not enough Millennials in society yet (the oldest of them being only 19) and not enough members of the older generations had reached the stage of life in which they react in the Crisis manner. Because of this, the reaction to that event was very similar to what it likely would have been if it had happened in 1995 (though it was still different - I have no memory of it, but my subjective impression is that it seems almost like society jumped into a 4T mood very briefly and then "snapped out of it." Perhaps this is part of the reason for the sort of "3.5T" that occurred from 2001 to 2020**).

At first I saw the near-repetition of the Pearl Harbor Attack as a social shock, but as I said above things proved different. Can you imagine the high-profile stars of music, sport, and cinema putting lucrative careers on hold so that they could fight for their country in 1941? Hank Greenberg, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Ralph Kiner, and Warren Spahn all did military service. Those are Baseball Hall-of-Famers. That's when baseball was America's Pastime, and the NBA barely existed and the NFL did not. Hockey was more Canadian... Canada was at war earlier and longer than the USA.   

Quote:When each generation is larger than the one born before it, its members accumulate in society more rapidly and are more impactful and influential, earlier. A large generation hits adulthood with a big wave, rather than slowly trickling in - that is, society goes from having no adult members of that generation to having millions of them, extremely quickly.

... but with limitations. No person has yet attained a verifiable age in excess of 122 years. People are living into their eighties and nineties to a far greater extent than before, putting off that last encounter with the Grim Reaper longer than possible because they still have something to live for... but there are no living persons over 120 years old. Remember that the GI generation is the last undeniable Civic generation since the Republican generation of Thomas Jefferson. The Gilded may have taken on some Civic-like traits after the Civil War, but they also had plenty of bad habits from a Reactive/Nomad childhood that they could not cast off early enough. They may have created their own world of high technology (by nineteenth-century standards) but that high technology also put the vast majority on the Industrial Scrap-Heap.       

Quote:Doing some very sloppy estimation here: using the 1982 start date, when 9/11 occurred, there were likely about 7 million adult Millennials. That was 2% of the population.
When the 2008 financial crash occurred, their numbers were likely close to 40 million. That was 13% of the total population...which makes 2007 the likely tipping-point year in which adult Millennials began to outnumber Silents (actually, all over-65s, including the remaining GIs at that point), switching the "missing" archetype from Hero to Artist and forming the Crisis generational stack. All that was needed after that point was the spark.

If the Millennial generation had been smaller - that is, roughly equal in size to the Silent generation rather than larger - this likely would have happened several years later.

In 2008, much of America was ready for Barack Obama. Before 2008 it wasn't. It took the financial meltdown, the consequence of a speculative boom ending as it usually does, in a financial panic. 

It is worth remembering that it took until 2021 -- yes, January 6, in one of the two elections of Senators from Georgia, coincidentally on the day of the disgraceful Capitol Putsch -- for America to elect its first Millennial (Jon Ossoff) to the US Senate. Older generations were able to hold onto power longer to block off the US Senate and most Gubernatorial office, but that is likely coming to an end. Older GI's already were prominent in significant numbers in upper levels of American politics on Pearl Harbor Day, but first-wave Millennial adults were slower to achieve the highest offices. I see moral failures and a changing world greasing the skids for some middle-to-late-wave Boomers and many X -- and of course the inevitable visits of the Grim Reaper for people in their seventies -- to create openings for Millennial pols in high offices. Millennial adults are starting to vote in big numbers, and politicians ignore them at risk of failure. The tip-off will be electoral victories in unlikely places as Millennial adults change the political culture. 

Quote:So, the way society reacts to something can change quickly and suddenly, and can do so after relatively short periods of time. 15-20 years seems like it must be the "hard limit" - the fastest a turning can go - because that's how long it takes for a new younger generation to become influential enough to change society's reactions enough to begin a new turning. Therefore, "history itself" has accelerated to the point of being unable to accelerate any more, having literally run up against the limits of human biology.

Late-teens shape the mass culture, but it takes until age 25 to become professionals in commerce and until one's thirties to have peers in high political office in significant offices. 

Quote:I've also just realized that this math can probably point us to a likely range of dates for the end of this turning, which is, uh...2024 to 2032. So that's not actually very helpful. Never mind.

That depends upon the behavior of the key actors in political life. An Idealist leader can get everything right (Churchill) or get everything wrong (Trump). Trump gravely bungled the response to COVID-19 with callow partisanship, despotic behavior inappropriate in American political life, and arrogant contempt of expertise.  I could watch The Darkest Hour  in 2017 and see again how great Churchill was... and how Donald Trump falls as short as is possible short of being a Hitler-like monster. 

COVID-19 could be the Crisis of 2020. Go ahead. Feel free to hate:




Three serial mass-killers to be hated for centuries. 

Quote:**Just realized that Millennials overtook Boomers as the nation's largest generation in 2019. I guess that's where the transition from "3.5T" to "true 4T" in 2020 comes from.

I guess I'd describe it, by the way, as:

1984-2001: 3
2001-2008: 3.5, more 3 than 4
2008-2020: 3.5, more 4 than 3
2020-present: 4

So it took three sparks, three big events, to fully reach the turning. As life expectancy continues to increase, I wonder if gradual and "multi-step" turning transitions will become the new norm, instead of a deceleration of the saeculum (which I theorized earlier and suggested looking to Japan and its declining population for indications).

We have yet to fully understand the consequences of the Capitol Putsch upon electoral politics in America. Truly-long sentences have yet to be handed out. The Michigan plot, in which militia types plotted to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, has had its first long federal sentence (75 months) as one of the defendants pleaded guilty to serious crimes. The Michigan plot is itself a serious event in American history.

[galaxy]

Addendum to my earlier posts here: perhaps in the hyper-connected modern world, a spark does not have to be so intense to cause a turning change, and turnings were so long in the past because even after the necessary generation arrangement had been reached, it took several years for a powerful enough spark to occur (one that could "hit" an entire society in a much-less-connected world).

[pbrower2a]

(09-04-2021, 03:12 PM)galaxy Wrote: Addendum to my earlier posts here: perhaps in the hyper-connected modern world, a spark does not have to be so intense to cause a turning change, and turnings were so long in the past because even after the necessary generation arrangement had been reached, it took several years for a powerful enough spark to occur (one that could "hit" an entire society in a much-less-connected world).

It may be even more basic. Children do not have coherent memories of major events until they are about five years old. What would be obvious and memorable to a five-year-old child (let us say the Great Stock Market Crash for a five-year-old child (part of the 1924-birthyear and last of the GI Generation) might not be so obvious to a four-year-old child (part of the 1925-birthyear and first of the Silent). To recognize the severity of that event requires a certain level of sophistication too much for a four-year-old and adequate for most five-year-olds. The Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 marks a difference in the world for someone  born in 1924, but it is incomprehensible for a child born in 1925. If one was a GI kid, one can connect the 1929 Crash to a time in which the adult world got very bad very fast and everything following it was a consequence. The Great Stock Market Crash was the critical event starting the Crisis of 1940, and even the rise of Hitler in 1933 in Germany is  obviously impossible without it.  

But even with that caveat the difference between GI's and the Silent may be between events around the start of adulthood. 20 or younger at the end of the Second World War, some Silent may have done some combat, but they could not have made rank from combat as GI's could do. Figure that the American GI who enlisted immediately after Pearl Harbor typically became one of the longest-serving soldiers in world history because he was more likely to survive not only battles but also (unless he ended up as a "guest" of the gangster regime of the Japanese Evil Empire of the time) the usual conditions of war such as famines and epidemics. There would be plenty of opportunity for a GI to make rank for someone with competence and a good work ethic.. and courage short of self-destructive bravado. The Silent included those whose involvement in the war and its aftermath was typically occupation duty that did not prove hazardous.  (possible exceptions: if it involved the Berlin Airlift or turned into the Korean War for which American soldiers were ill prepared at first). Even in the Korean War, GI's were typically the commissioned officers and the Silent were the NCO's or foot soldiers.     

The divide between the Silent born in 1942 and Boomers born in 1943 relates to VJ-Day, an event that even a three-year-old recognizes in sudden changes of behavior of adults, but that means little to a two-year-old.  Thus the divide between Silent and Boomers is within World War II -- but late. The division between GI's and the Silent is the result of sharp events identifiable if one was not a toddler and by the end of World War II.