I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
In their 1997 book The Fourth Turning, William Strauss and Neil Howe outline a cyclical theory of history, where American society experiences a recurring and predictable eighty- to one-hundred-year cycle of four ~twenty-year turnings (seasons) often ending in crisis.
The four turnings are:
- The first turning (high) – a period of growth and strong institutions following a crisis.
- The second turning (awakening) – a period of spiritual, cultural, and social upheaval.
- The third turning (unraveling) – a time of individualism, weakened institutions, and cynical moods.
- The fourth turning (crisis) – A season of destruction and rebirth, winter, a time of great upheaval such as the Civil War or World War II, where the old order is replaced.
Strauss and Howe believe that the current fourth turning started around 2008 following an unraveling season that began in the mid-1980s. Howe wrote a second book about it, The Fourth Turning Is Here (2023).
In our current cycle, the turnings are generally identified like this:
- The First Turning was roughly from 1946 to 1964, after World War II, as strong institutions and broad social trust created an era of peace and prosperity.
- With the Second Turning lasting to about 1984, we saw cultural and spiritual rebellion. The civil rights movement, protests against Vietnam, the rise of feminism all showed a questioning of authority.
- Then the Third Turning from approximately 1984 to 2008 saw the financialization of everything, culture wars between progressives and traditionals, declining trust, and the idea of every person for herself, as long as she had money.
- Finally, we’re in the Fourth Turning right now, says Howe. We see systemic breakdown and reconstruction: the great financial crisis, the pandemic, political polarization, geopolitical fractures, and monetary regime stress.
This seems to me something like a dialectic between opposing tensions — order vs freedom, institutions vs individuals. It’s not three phases like a true Hegelian dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) but it does progress as actions of opposites. The first turning provides the thesis, the starting point. The second turning offers its opposite. The third turning seems like a synthesis of sorts, but it’s not, because there are culture wars between conservatives (representing the first turning) and progressives (representing the second turning).
In a way, the third turning could be considered the process of thesis and antithesis confronting each other, and then only in the fourth turning is there not a synthesis but more a sublation (Aufhebung, to use Hegel’s term). In sublation, there is a destructive synthesis of the thesis and antithesis.
Thinking of it like a dialectic helps detach from particular reactions or biases around the current situation, I think. I see that the current presidential administration does have some reasonable goals, even if I am disgusted by their behavior and actions.
For example, the dollar’s role as reserve currency for the world has left our country fat, financialized, and full of ego. A move towards a more multipolar currency world and a return to gold as the real store of value could help us to stop consuming so much and absorbing all the world’s wealth so we could instead participate more as peers to the rest of the world, rather as its potential savior. Maybe I’ll write about that on Reckless Investing today.