The Fourth Turning: Is It Real?

Gary North - February 28, 2017

Trump's advisor Steve Bannon is a big fan of a book co-authored by Neil Howe.

I am not. I discussed the book eight years ago. You can read my comments here.

I am a trained historian. I have the trained historian's antipathy to theories of history that are based on the concept of some inevitable pattern. Certainly, I am convinced that there is no way to put dates on these patterns, especially future dates.

The most famous theorist of inevitable history in Western history is Karl Marx. You would be hard-pressed to find anybody whose predictions were as erroneous as his predictions. This was obvious by 1925, after the Proletarian revolution took place in rural Russia, not the industrial capitalist West. Yet his predictions remained popular within a narrow circle of academics who were verbally committed to social revolution, but who spent their lives in tenured security in Western universities. But when the Soviet Union committed suicide in December 1991, the whole preposterous theoretical framework lost academic support overnight. These politically impotent academics dreamed of power, and when it was clear that the Soviet Union no longer had power, they dropped Marxism down the memory hole, or, if you prefer Leon Trotsky's phrase, into the ashcan of history.

If you want to get committed to some kind of theory of historical cycles, go to the works of Pitirim Sorokin. He was the founder of the sociology department of Harvard University in 1930. He grew up in czarist Russia. He was a remarkable scholar. He began writing on the transformation of Western civilization back in the 1930's. His four-volume work, Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937), is like nothing else ever written. He had a team of scholars working with him, and they looked at just about everything in Western history and a lot of other regional histories. If you want to read a one-volume summary, read this: The Crisis of Our Age (1941). He believed that Western society, which is almost exclusively rationalistic and materialistic, is headed for a breakdown. He believed that there would be a move back to either idealism or a supernatural religion-based civilization.

Sorokin believed that the Renaissance's rationalist culture which began around 1500 is today decadent. This theory was brought up to date in the year 2000 by Jacques Barzun: From Dawn to Decadence, a masterpiece. Barzun was of the opinion that there would be a shattering of empires, and that political legitimacy would move back towards local political entities. He thought that the welfare state is going to go bankrupt. Its promises will be abandoned by politicians. The nation-state will lose legitimacy. I think he is correct, but I'm not certain about the timetable. For that matter, neither was Barzun.

I do not see a great break in the pattern of economic growth in the range of 2% per annum. This is down from what it was for a long time: 2% per annum per capita. I don't think we are going to get 2% per annum growth per capita in the United States, but I think economic growth and innovation will continue. I think Moore's law will be superseded after 2020 by other kinds of digital developments which will continue to reduce the cost of information by 50% every two or three years. This is the crucial economic development of the modern world, and I do not think it is going to be reversed.

I ask this. Do all of the other nations of Western Europe have a pattern like this? Then the next question becomes obvious: does this series of 20-year developments apply chronologically to all the societies simultaneously, or are they individualistic? If they are individualistic, why are they different? Why isn't the general pattern of Western culture applicable across national borders?

PREMATURE OPTIMISM

Howe discusses his book and Bannon here.

Beyond ideology, I think there's another reason for the rising interest in our book. We reject the deep premise of modern Western historians that social time is either linear (continuous progress or decline) or chaotic (too complex to reveal any direction). Instead we adopt the insight of nearly all traditional societies: that social time is a recurring cycle in which events become meaningful only to the extent that they are what philosopher Mircea Eliade calls "reenactments." In cyclical space, once you strip away the extraneous accidents and technology, you are left with only a limited number of social moods, which tend to recur in a fixed order.

Along this cycle, we can identify four "turnings" that each last about 20 years -- the length of a generation. Think of these as recurring seasons, starting with spring and ending with winter. In every turning, a new generation is born and each older generation ages into its next phase of life. . . .

I have read at least six volumes written by Mircea Eliade, and I can state categorically that they have nothing to do with modern history. His specialty was the relationship between ancient religions and ancient cultures. He also equates this with what we would call primitive cultures. His theory of reenactments is a resurrection of the pagan myth of the eternal return. This is what ancient Hebrew religion and Christianity opposed and ultimately replaced.

Howe loves specific dates, such as 2008.

America entered a new Fourth Turning in 2008. It is likely to last until around 2030. Our paradigm suggests that current trends will deepen as we move toward the halfway point.

Further adverse events, possibly another financial crisis or a major armed conflict, will galvanize public opinion and mobilize leaders to take more decisive action. Rising regionalism and nationalism around the world could lead to the fragmentation of major political entities (perhaps the European Union) and the outbreak of hostilities (perhaps in the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula, the Baltic states or the Persian Gulf).

Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows? He doesn't.

Despite a new tilt toward isolationism, the United States could find itself at war. I certainly do not hope for war. I simply make a sobering observation: Every total war in U.S. history has occurred during a Fourth Turning, and no Fourth Turning has yet unfolded without one. America's objectives in such a war are likely to be defined very broadly.

At the end of the 2020s, the Fourth Turning crisis era will climax and draw to a close. Settlements will be negotiated, treaties will be signed, new borders will be drawn, and perhaps (as in the late 1940s) a new durable world order will be created. Perhaps as well, by the early 2030s, we will enter a new First Turning: Young families will rejoice, fertility will rebound, economic equality will rise, a new middle class will emerge, public investment will grow into a new 21st-century infrastructure, and ordered prosperity will recommence.

Any connection between this speculative prediction and what is going to happen will be purely coincidental.

All the hype about The Fourth Turning is good for book royalties, but nothing else.

As with any book that discusses details of recent history, there are bits and pieces of it that are plausible. But if you are looking to this book as some sort of guidebook to what is going to happen over the next 20 years, I think you're making a mistake.

CONCLUSIONS

I don't think there is going to be a New World Order set up. If there is an attempt to do this, it will not be durable. The idea of the New World Order is in decline. It's about time.

I think that by the end of the 2020's, we can count on almost exactly the opposite of the optimistic pipe dream that Howe predicts. We will be into the great default. So will other nations in the West.

It will not be a time of optimism. It will be a time of enormous pessimism. It will be a time in which the promises of the 20th century with respect to old age security will go belly-up. This is going to create a rethinking of the nation-state. This is not going to be sorted out in a few years of economic disruption. This is going to cause complete rethinking of Keynesian economics in the modern welfare state. Such times of rethinking are not times of optimism and a durable world order.