http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fourth-Turning-American-Prophecy/dp/0767900464/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221908491&sr=8-1
Paperback: 400 pages
Trade Pbk. Ed edition (5 Oct 1998)
America feels like it's unraveling.
Though we live in an era of relative peace and comfort,
we have settled into a mood of pessimism about the long-term future,
fearful that our superpower nation is somehow rotting from within.
Neither an epic victory over Communism nor an extended upswing of
the business cycle can buoy our public spirit. The Cold War and New
Deal struggles are plainly over, but we are of no mind to bask in their successes.
The America of today feels worse, in its fundamentals, than the one
many of us remember from youth, a society presided over by those
of supposedly lesser consciousness. Wherever we look, from L.A. to D.C.,
from Oklahoma City to Sun City, we see paths to a foreboding future.
We yearn for civic character but satisfy ourselves with symbolic gestures
and celebrity circuses. We perceive no greatness in our leaders, a new
meanness in ourselves. Small wonder that each new election brings a
new jolt, its aftermath a new disappointment.
Not long ago, America was more than the sum of its parts. Now, it is less. Around World War II, we
were proud as a people but modest as individuals. Fewer than two people in ten said yes when asked
"Are you a very important person?" Today, more than six in ten say yes. Where we once thought
ourselves collectively strong, we now regard ourselves as individually entitled.
Yet even while we exalt our own personal growth, we realize that millions of self-actualized persons
don't add up to an actualized society. Popular trust in virtually every American institution-from
businesses and governments to churches and newspapers-keeps falling to new lows. Public debts soar,
the middle class shrinks, welfare dependencies deepen, and cultural wars worsen by the year. We now
have the highest incarceration rate, and the lowest eligible-voter participation rate, of any major
democracy. Statistics inform us that many adverse trends (crime, divorce, abortion, scholastic
aptitudes) may have bottomed out, but we're not reassured.
Optimism still attaches to self, but no longer to family or community. Most Americans express more
hope for their own prospects than for their children's-or the nation's. Parents widely fear that
the American Dream, which was there (solidly) for their parents and still there (barely) for them,
will not be there for their kids. Young householders are reaching their mid-thirties never having
known a time when America seemed to be on the right track. Middle-aged people look at their thin
savings accounts and slim-to-none pensions, scoff at an illusory Social Security trust fund, and try
not to dwell on what a burden their old age could become. Seniors separate into their own Leisure
World, recoiling at the lost virtue of youth while trying not to think about the future.
We perceive our civic challenge as some vast, insoluble Rubik's Cube. Behind each problem lies
another problem that must be solved first, and behind that lies yet another, and another, ad
infinitum. To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that we have to fix welfare,
and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can't do that
without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing
the inner cities, and that's impossible unless we fix crime. There's no fulcrum on which to rest a
policy lever. People of all ages sense that something huge will have to sweep across America before
the gloom can be lifted-but that's an awareness we suppress. As a nation, we're in deep denial.
While we grope for answers, we wonder if analysis may be crowding out our intuition. Like the
anxious patient who takes 17 kinds of medicine while poring over his own CAT scan, we find it hard
to stop and ask: What is the underlying malady really about? How can we best bring the primal
forces of nature to our assistance? Isn't there a choice lying somewhere between total control and
total despair? Deep down, beneath the tangle of trend lines, we suspect that our history or biology
or very humanity must have something simple and important to say to us. But we don't know what it
is. If we once did know, we have since forgotten.
Wherever we're headed, America is evolving in ways most of us don't like or understand.
Individually focused yet collectively adrift, we wonder if we're heading toward a waterfall.
Are we?
The reward of the historian is to locate patterns that recur over time and to discover the natural
rhythms of social experience.
In fact, at the core of modern history lies this remarkable pattern: Over the past five centuries,
Anglo-American society has entered a new era-a new turning-every two decades or so. At the start of
each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future.
Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly 80 to
100 years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the
saeculum comprise history's seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction:
The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening
individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.
The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order
comes under attack from a new values regime.
The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening
institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.
The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels
the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.
Each turning comes with its own identifiable mood. Always, these mood shifts catch people by
surprise.
In the current saeculum, the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and
Kennedy presidencies. As World War II wound down, no one predicted that America would soon become
so confident and institutionally muscular, yet so conformist and spiritually complacent. But that's
what happened.
The Second Turning was the Consciousness Revolution, stretching from the campus revolts of the
mid-1960s to the tax revolts of the early 1980s. Before John Kennedy was assassinated, no one
predicted that America was about to enter an era of personal liberation and cross a cultural divide
that would separate anything thought or said after from anything thought or said before. But that's
what happened.
The Third Turning has been the Culture Wars, an era that began with Reagan's mid-'80s "Morning in
America" and is due to expire around the middle of the Oh-Oh decade, eight or ten years from now.
Amidst the glitz of the early Reagan years, no one predicted that the nation was entering an era of
national drift and institutional decay. But that's where we are.
Have major national mood shifts like this ever before happened? Yes-many times. Have Americans
ever before experienced anything like the current attitude of Unraveling? Yes-many times, over the
centuries.
Elders in their eighties can remember an earlier mood that was much like today's. They can recall
the years between Armistice Day (1918) and the Great Crash of 1929. Euphoria over a global military
triumph was painfully short-lived. Earlier optimism about a progressive future gave way to a jazz
age nihilism and a pervasive cynicism about high ideals. Bosses swaggered in immigrant ghettos, the
KKK in the South, the mafia in the industrial heartland, and defenders of Americanism in a myriad
Middletowns. Unions atrophied, government weakened, third-parties were the rage, and a dynamic
marketplace ushered in new consumer technologies (autos, radios, phones, juke boxes, vending
machines) that made life feel newly complicated and frenetic. The risky pleasures of a "lost" young
generation shocked middle-aged decency crusaders-many of them "tired radicals" who were then
moralizing against the detritus of the "mauve" decade of their youth (the 1890s). Opinions
polarized around no-compromise cultural issues like drugs, family, and "decency." Meanwhile,
parents strove to protect a scoutlike new generation of children (who, in time, aged into today's
senior citizens).
Back then, the details were different, but the underlying mood resembled what Americans feel today.
Listen to Walter Lippmann, writing during World War I:
"We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn't a human relation, whether of parent
or child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn't move in a strange situation. We are
not used to a complicated civilization, we don't know how to behave when personal contact and
eternal authority have disappeared. There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that was not
meant for a simpler age."
Jan Rasmussen