You must all be wondering what suddenly changed from 2020. One day we were all fine and cruising through life, and then COVID happened.
Well, we overcame that, and then started cruising through life, and now Trump happened.
Doesn’t seem logical, does it? Well…
Around a couple of years back, I read this intriguing book called ‘The Fourth Turning’ by Neil Howe and William Strauss. This was written in 1996, yet is very relevant not just today, but I guess throughout time.
The book’s authors argue that Anglo-American history tends to move in recurring cycles of roughly 80–100 years, which the authors call a saeculum. Each cycle has four “turnings,” and the last one, the Fourth Turning, is a period of crisis marked by institutional breakdown, social upheaval, and often major war or conflict.
The authors point to examples like the American Revolution era, the Civil War era and the Great Depression / World War II era, among others.
Their suggestion is not that there is a literal clock causing a war every 80 years. It is more that each full generational cycle creates conditions where a major systemic crisis becomes more likely, and those crises have often involved violent conflict.
Now comes the fun (or not so fun) part.
By the book’s logic, the next major crisis/upheaval was expected to fall in the mid-2000s to late 2020s.
Strauss and Howe wrote that the U.S. had entered a new Fourth Turning around the mid-2000s, and that it could last roughly 20–25 years. So under their framework, the crisis era would peak or resolve sometime in the 2020s, not start far in the future.
What date is it again??
Another interesting concept in the book, is something that I had written about a couple of years back. And here it is…
On time, the authors write about three concepts of time.
“Over the millennia, man has developed three ways of thinking about time: chaotic, cyclical, and linear. The first was the dominant view of primitive man, the second of ancient and traditional civilizations, and the third of the modern West, especially America.”
In chaotic time, history does not have any path, but events follow seemingly randomly, without any connection or meaning. This is how life and time appear to a small child.
Cyclical time emerged when our ancestors first linked naturally-occurring cycles of planetary events (revolution around the sun, rotation of the earth, lunar cycles etc.) to related cycles of human activity (sleeping, walking, birthing, agriculture etc.). This brought about a sense of moral accountability in the form of karma, and Indian philosophy still follows this principle.
Then came linear time – a progressing story with an absolute beginning and an absolute end.
“The Persian, Judaic, Christian, and Islamic cosmologies all embraced the radically new concept of personal and historical time as a unidirectional drama. Time begins with a fall from grace; struggles forward in an intermediate sequence of trials, failures, revelations, and divine interventions; and ends with redemption and reentry into the Kingdom of God.”
The authors go on to define generations – A generation, in turn, is the aggregate of all people born over roughly the span of a phase of life who share a common location in history and, hence, a common collective persona. And four ‘turnings’ of around 20 years each, forming a cycle of 100 years each, or a century. Basically, patterns repeating and hence a chance to look back and learn from history.
This kind of also answers the question that most schooling children (and many adults) have – why do I need to learn history, which is traditionally seen as a dead subject…Well, if one analyses history and the socio-economic context that lies within these timelines, a definite pattern emerges, one that helps predict where mankind will lead in the years and decades to come.
Doesn’t this remind you of the yugas (cycles of time) and ashramas (cycle of human life) in Indian philosophy? Ironical that the very Western philosophy that many of us want to mimic, is itself discovering the subtle (and not so subtle) concepts of the East?
I recommend a reading.