Were Strauss & Howe Wrong?

[Anthony '58]

Dr. Ravi Batra was wrong, in that his Great Depression of 1990 never materialized.

In a similar vein, where is The Fourth Turning that S&H promised?

When 9/11 happened, everyone was sure that at the absolute least a "Second Cold War" had started - but after the shockingly facile "regime change" in Iraq in 2003, the idea of such a protracted conflict soon vanished.

Indeed, the Third Turning has not only stubbornly persisted, but gotten even more intense, with the transgender issue serving as gasoline getting poured on the 3T fire.

The home mortgage meltdown of 2007-08, which cost John McCain the 2008 Presidential election, was the next false alarm - and we have just heard another one, as the feared default never happened.

Has the saecular clock in effect stopped?

[pbrower2a]

Batra did call attention to even bigger cycles (that of Prabhat Sarkar, 1921-1990) in history, on in which certain people become or try to become the elites. Historical patterns start with the soldier deputed to protect the hunter-gatherer community from marauders who come for the seasonal surplus (should there be some planting and harvesting) or the nubile young women. The soldiers establish discipline necessary for fashioning weapons, organizing troops, or building palisades -- or building boats for getting to strike an enemy where it isn't looking. With more sophistication in different times, add barracks, naval docks, and air bases and technologies that go from bows and arrows to firearms to missiles. The soldiers become builders of fixed objects with civilian uses, like barracks that might become houses, docks suited for fishing boats, and in later times airports.

But -- the Soldier becomes the chieftain, king, or emperor and can't do everything himself. He needs people able to think: tax collectors to ensure that soldiers have food, a criminal code to establish acceptable and unacceptable behavior (priests to establish the code and judges to order its enforcement), record-keepers to monitor where the stores are. He may need artists and musicians to laud him, and teachers to teach the youth how to do things. In some places he may need astronomers for knowing what the season is for planting and harvesting or for exploiting such food sources as fish. For that one needs the Intellectual.

Intellectuals can become extremely powerful, but they also can bicker -- and their bickering becomes more sophisticated, but also more ferocious. The priests (and later academics) develop their own heresies and divide society over those. Much of intellectual activity becomes death struggles over seemingly-trivial issues as "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" People find that they need turn their intellects to something else to avoid trouble.

Intellectuals often look with disdain upon 'base' activities such as commerce, money-lending, entertainment, and manufacturing, but where such has been ignored such is lucrative. The Acquisitor class of bankers, merchants, manufacturers, landlords, and providers of low-brow entertainment cone to the fore. Such activity requires less intellect than does law or medicine and no pretense of devotion. The Acquisitor class takes over the legal system and enforces harsh terms for workers; slaves may be in use. Violators of the property rights of Acquistors face draconian laws. Such comes at the cost of great disparity of wealth and poverty. Much of the economic activity devolves into economic rents -- charges against working people just for living in the domain of capitalists. Money-making from commerce and industry looks easy to laborers paid badly... and laborers get the delusion that they can cast off their workplace exploiters and the gouging landlords and merchants and take over things themselves.

Following the Acquisitor class one might expect -- if one has taken Karl Marx seriously at any time in life -- the working class (proletariat) to seek to overthrow the Acquisitors and create a workers-and-peasants state. This creates a set of problems. The toilers rarely have the courage of soldiers, the imagination and intellectual power of Intellectuals, or the canniness of Acquisitors. They put an end to the power of capitol, only to discover that they can't maintain the productivity without some sort of regimentation. They have destroyed the legal system by killing off the lawyers as well as the merchants, landlords, and proprietors. So what happens?

Love him or hate him, Lenin showed how it is done. Let the revolution take place and then start paying the police, jailers, and soldiers. Any revolution ends when those who have the guns and the authority to shoot wayward people get paid. OK, the same can be said of Corazon Aquino, Vaclav Havel, and Nelson Mandela, too.

The proletariat has never had the skills for ruling a society. Those who come from it and prove competent at anything from organizing troops in combat to writing fine poetry or building housing tracts do not remain in the proletariat. Most likely the soldiers, jailers, and police (the Soldier class) take over.

That is about where we are. Note that people on the Left on civil liberties, the environment, and labor-management relations are increasingly sympathetic to law enforcement, the Armed Forces, and the Intelligence services. Those can be useful. That Obama and Biden have gone that way and that Trump has been a failure demonstrates such.

[Anthony '58]

Walt Rostow's scheme is somewhat different.

In the beginning, there were the laborers - most of whom were agricultural, but if a country is fortunate enough to have natural resources, there could be extractors (miners) as well. Rostow called this a "traditional society" - Stage 1 of his five stages of economic growth.

At some point, a country might start to engage in "secondary" economic activity - primarily manufacturing, enabling the country to export manufactured goods. This is Rostow's Stage 2, or "preconditions for takeoff."

Stage 3, should a country get that far, is the "takeoff" itself, when "tertiary" economic activity; i.e., services, which could range from anything like McDonald's etc. to something resembling modern professions like law and medicine, join the mix of available jobs.

After that come Stages 4 and 5, where "quaternary" economic activity, generally involving things like transportation, communication, and information technology, and highly sophisticated "quinary" economic activity, respectively, come upon the scene.

No purely laissez-faire country has ever advanced beyond Stage 3.

[pbrower2a]

Sarkar has more a history of institutions than of economic activities and technology. If anything the institutions determine what activities are possible. Poetry praising trees, portraits of attractive women, fugues,  elaborate jurisprudence, and economic derivatives are impossible in a primitive society (or one that has just gone through a stage of atavistic hedonism and is at risk of obliteration from an enemy seeking to smash it). Let us remember that the Indian subcontinent has among the oldest of historical records in existence, and Sarkar could compare that to the West.

No country enduring apocalyptic war can survive on laissez-faire. It is arguable that during the Blitz, Britain had economic controls at least as tight as those of the Soviet Union. Britain could not have survived as a laissez-faire society because under laissez-faire, everybody-for-himself (a logical conclusion) means that nearly everyone gets killed and that everyone is broke after the conquerors loot and enslave.  

We have libertarian ideologues, but libertarianism has proved utopian. The sixty-page soliloquy of Ayn Rand's fictional John Galt in Atlas Shrugged is more than a literary absurdity; it is also an economic absurdity and a political impossibility. People will not exchange a freedom that allows themselves some hedonistic delights for the sake of economic growth that fails to improve their lives. (My brother tells me that everyone that he has seen to have read Atlas Shrugged becomes an insufferable asshole for six months; that is not how one keeps one's job in the servile world of retailing or restaurant work).

The third stage that Rostow suggests obviously depends upon streets to define where traffic goes, sewers to keep people from getting sick, schools to teach what the economic elites deem necessary for children, courts to mediate disputes, police to enforce the law, and jails to deter overt wrong-doing. All of that requires taxes. A true laissez-faire society would encourage vice, child labor, and the abandonment of the elderly and handicapped, all of which might offend the religious values of the vast majority.  Maybe it is necessary that our educational system teach such values as "don't be an asshole" and "don't hurt your customer".