I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
My least favorite subject when I was in school was history. As presented to me in high school, it seemed like just one event after another, without any unifying structure or way of understanding it. Also, it was always about men and their interactions, their drives, their achievements. As a young woman, I felt left out and insignificant.
Lately, however, I find myself wanting to learn more history, and write about it too, only I want to do it in the context of some sort of theoretical construct that makes sense of it. I found a likely theoretical framework in the Strauss-Howe generational theory, which underpins the idea of the four turnings I’ve been learning about lately.
I realize many academics find this framework lacking in rigor and evidence, and call it “unfalsifiable” making it unscientific. Philosophers of science suggest that scientific theories must make falsifiable predictions and claims. Then you can test those predictions and claims, and either disprove the theory or show that it describes the world in some accurate way (which, I would note, doesn’t prove it, just means it’s consistent with what we observe, and can go on to survive another day in the scientific testing mines).
A New York Times review from 1997 of Strauss and Howe’s book The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy calls it pseudoscience:
The idea that history moves in cycles tends to be viewed with suspicion by scholars. Although historians as respected as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and David Hackett Fischer have made cases for the existence of rhythms and waves in the stream of events, cyclical theories tend to end up in the Sargasso Sea of pseudoscience, circling endlessly (what else?). ”The Fourth Turning” is no exception.
The reviewer Michael Lind scoffs at some of Strauss and Howe’s predictions:
The ”final boomer leaders,” Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe predict, will be ”authoritarian, severe, unyielding”; ”the same boomers who in youth chanted ‘Hell no, we won’t go!’ will emerge as America’s most martial elder generation in living memory,” they warn.
And yet we see this right now in the current presidential administration, led by an early Boomer. Before Trump, Boomer George W. Bush led us into Iraq for an eight-year invasion that resulted in an estimated 150,000 to over a million deaths, including over 100,000 civilians.
But some of the other predictions Lind shares from the book don’t land:
The boomers are to get their comeuppance when they are impoverished during a financial panic early in the next century. ”Following the Great Devaluation, boomers will find new ethical purpose in low consumption because, with America in Crisis, they will have no other choice,” the authors write. Many boomers ”who spent a lifetime paying steep Social Security and Medicare taxes will be substantially excluded from benefits by an affluence test.” Making a virtue of necessity, the aged Aquarians ”will eschew high-tech hospital care for homeopathy, minimalist self-care and the mind-body techniques Deepak Chopra calls ‘quantum healing’ ” — thus perhaps accelerating generational succession.
That’s pretty much the opposite of the Boomer vibe right now. We see them sitting atop gigantic investment portfolios in their much-appreciated houses, refusing to sell them because they might have to pay capital gains taxes. Over 30% of the federal budget goes to retired people in the form of Social Security and Medicare. So the elders are hardly being excluded from benefits.
Describing the new American vibe, Strauss and Howe get it right again (as reported in Lind’s review):
Sometimes Mr. Strauss and Mr. Howe try to have it both ways: ”America will become more isolationist than today in its unwillingness to coordinate its affairs with other countries but less isolationist in its insistence that vital national interests not be compromised.”
This is an apt description of what the current presidential administration would like to achieve: maintain isolation and American privilege at the same time.
This morning, Trump shared on social media a message, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” While his followers may say, “he’s just exaggerating,” we have no way of knowing that in advance. He has promised to bomb civilian infrastructure and said that the Iranian population welcomes this, which is hard to believe. He told a reporter that in seeking to achieve his aims, “very little” is off the table, suggesting that he may consider a nuclear strike.
One thing that makes the Strauss and Howe theory more pseudoscientific and unfalsifiable than not is that it can be stretched to fit almost anything that happens. However, the United States is facing a crisis right now that is like almost nothing I’ve seen in my almost fifty-eight years. I find that Strauss and Howe’s theory of generational cycles helps me better understand and prepare for what we may be facing. It may be pseudoscience and yet, as a way of seeing cycles in history rather than just events strung together, I believe it’s giving me some insight into what we are facing.