Morality and the Saeculum

[sbarrera]

Some time ago I wrote this essay about the saeculum and morality. Specifically it aligns the generational cycle (archetypes and turnings) with Aristotle's four moral characters. 

http://home.mindspring.com/~saecularpages/Morality.html

I present it here for the forum's consideration. Would love to know what people think.

[sbarrera]

(11-24-2016, 03:42 PM)taramarie Wrote: Steve, have you shared this with the group on fb? You should if you haven't.

Tara,
I thought this might be a more suitable forum. It's hard to track a comment chain on fb. But I guess it also gets more traffic there.

[Eric the Green]

(11-24-2016, 09:26 AM)sbarrera Wrote: Some time ago I wrote this essay about the saeculum and morality. Specifically it aligns the generational cycle (archetypes and turnings) with Aristotle's four moral characters. 

http://home.mindspring.com/~saecularpages/Morality.html

I present it here for the forum's consideration. Would love to know what people think.

It's not hard to see that I could not agree with your analysis, good idea though it may be.

The 4 archetypes are not supposed to range from moral to immoral. Each generational archetype has its good and challenging traits. No one is better than another, and clearly Aristotle's moral characters range from best to worst.

Similarly with the turnings. The difference between them is not a breakdown of moral values, as if obedience to moral standards determine whether the times are good or not. The difference is between whether individualist or collective values are more or less prominent, with individualism strongest in the 3T and collective in the 1T. The 2T is a cultural awakening crisis and the 4T is an institutional crisis. Clearly, the first turning is not the best one, as your view would suggest. Not at all.

[Warren Dew]

(11-25-2016, 04:21 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(11-24-2016, 09:26 AM)sbarrera Wrote: Some time ago I wrote this essay about the saeculum and morality. Specifically it aligns the generational cycle (archetypes and turnings) with Aristotle's four moral characters. 

http://home.mindspring.com/~saecularpages/Morality.html

I present it here for the forum's consideration. Would love to know what people think.

It's not hard to see that I could not agree with your analysis, good idea though it may be.

The 4 archetypes are not supposed to range from moral to immoral. Each generational archetype has its good and challenging traits. No one is better than another, and clearly Aristotle's moral characters range from best to worst.

Similarly with the turnings. The difference between them is not a breakdown of moral values, as if obedience to moral standards determine whether the times are good or not. The difference is between whether individualist or collective values are more or less prominent, with individualism strongest in the 3T and collective in the 1T. The 2T is a cultural awakening crisis and the 4T is an institutional crisis. Clearly, the first turning is not the best one, as your view would suggest. Not at all.

Thanks for saving me the trouble of reading.  For people with such opposing political views, you and I see eye to eye on a lot of things. If he's a millennial, I can believe he'd think the first turning was the "best", though.

[pbrower2a]

There's a far simpler explanation, and it has nothing to do with rural people being unsophisticated hicks. Rural voters are less sophisticated only to the extent that the Mountain and Deep South are more rural than America on the whole.  High-school completion rates are very high in the rural North. Why shouldn't they be?  There just aren't many distractions in northern rural areas to cause someone to drop out of school. Unless one wants to stay on the family farm, one will need a college education, so college attendance rates are  above average.

It's the difference in  the costs of public services and infrastructure. Such basic needs of education and law enforcement are much more expensive in cities than in rural areas. Anyone trained to be a teacher or a cop in rural areas has few alternatives, and will almost certainly be paid far less than his urban counterparts. Cost of living? that's not the whole story, although the cost of living in part reflects the cost of public services and taxes for paying them. An urban teacher has typically a skill set well fitting sales, professional white collar jobs, and blue-collar management.  Those opportunities are rare in rural areas. The best predictor of pay is pay in comparable work -- if it is available. Rural areas might have sweat-shop manufacturing or retail and restaurant work, so the farmer's wife who teaches fifth grade doesn't get paid well. Police? Urban police departments must pay the police well so that they do not become de facto employees of gangsters. Law enforcement is thus much more expensive in big cities than in rural areas. Think also of tax collection, courts of law, and the welfare system.

Look also at infrastructure. A four-lane expressway in the Dakotas is typically far less costly to build than a similar expressway in northeastern New Jersey; in fact, such an expressway might be woefully inadequate in northeastern New Jersey, where expansion of a ten-lane expressway to twelve lanes requires expensive condemnation of real estate and dislocation of people and costly relocation of utilities. , . But a two-lane blacktop (US 83) is apparently adequate for connecting the  state capitals of North and South Dakota. An expressway is not built because it is a bargain to build in comparison to a superficially-similar highway somewhere else.

Now another point: government is necessarily much more intrusive in urban areas. If your pet dog craps at the edge a corn field, then nobody knows. If your dog craps on an urban sidewalk, then everyone knows. If the police see you walking away from the scene of the fouling of a sidewalk, then you will get ticketed and you may pay a very steep fine. Government is more intrusive in urban areas, and such is expected, because it is far easier to get in someone else's way. People expect their government to be more costly and intrusive in rural areas. People in rural areas don't like paying taxes to support the higher cost of city dwellers. The low-tax pols, low-service pols are now Republicans.

[sbarrera]

(11-25-2016, 04:21 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(11-24-2016, 09:26 AM)sbarrera Wrote: Some time ago I wrote this essay about the saeculum and morality. Specifically it aligns the generational cycle (archetypes and turnings) with Aristotle's four moral characters. 

http://home.mindspring.com/~saecularpages/Morality.html

I present it here for the forum's consideration. Would love to know what people think.

It's not hard to see that I could not agree with your analysis, good idea though it may be.

The 4 archetypes are not supposed to range from moral to immoral. Each generational archetype has its good and challenging traits. No one is better than another, and clearly Aristotle's moral characters range from best to worst.

Similarly with the turnings. The difference between them is not a breakdown of moral values, as if obedience to moral standards determine whether the times are good or not. The difference is between whether individualist or collective values are more or less prominent, with individualism strongest in the 3T and collective in the 1T. The 2T is a cultural awakening crisis and the 4T is an institutional crisis. Clearly, the first turning is not the best one, as your view would suggest. Not at all.

Thanks for saying it's a good idea. :-)

I meant to find a correspondence between the moral characters and the turnings. With that goal, it was inevitable that one turning would be chosen as 'virtuous', and the 1st Turning made the most sense to me in that it is the time of maximal conformity to a norm. 

I agree that the archetypes are not supposed to range from moral to immoral. But in wanting to find a correspondence (ie. to align four with four) I went with the idea of considering the moral characters with respect to the values regime of the particular saeculum - that is, the moral standards forged into the social order in the Fourth Turning and treated as the norm in the First Turning, then challenged and ultimately transformed again in the next cycle.

[sbarrera]

(11-25-2016, 08:33 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(11-25-2016, 08:30 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(11-25-2016, 04:21 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(11-24-2016, 09:26 AM)sbarrera Wrote: Some time ago I wrote this essay about the saeculum and morality. Specifically it aligns the generational cycle (archetypes and turnings) with Aristotle's four moral characters. 

http://home.mindspring.com/~saecularpages/Morality.html

I present it here for the forum's consideration. Would love to know what people think.

It's not hard to see that I could not agree with your analysis, good idea though it may be.

The 4 archetypes are not supposed to range from moral to immoral. Each generational archetype has its good and challenging traits. No one is better than another, and clearly Aristotle's moral characters range from best to worst.

Similarly with the turnings. The difference between them is not a breakdown of moral values, as if obedience to moral standards determine whether the times are good or not. The difference is between whether individualist or collective values are more or less prominent, with individualism strongest in the 3T and collective in the 1T. The 2T is a cultural awakening crisis and the 4T is an institutional crisis. Clearly, the first turning is not the best one, as your view would suggest. Not at all.

Thanks for saving me the trouble of reading.  For people with such opposing political views, you and I see eye to eye on a lot of things.  If he's a millennial, I can believe he'd think the first turning was the "best", though.

I think he is an xer.

Warren,

I wish you would at least read it not go by someone else's review alone!

And yes, I am an Xer.