S2 Book Club: The Fourth Turning

Once more into the breach we dive, and take on a book that probably deserves much more contemplation than we can contain within a month. Nevertheless, this month’s Book Club selection The Fourth Turning is quite an interesting choice. And though I certainly have doubts as to the overall thesis, this book probably would have turned quite a few heads upon it’s publishing many years ago. So let’s as usually take a look at a few random notes and thoughts that occurred when trying to get through this one:
Overall, the book itself is not an especially easy read from a research perspective. Perhaps this is just me personally, but I found the authors’ writing styles to be quite challenging, overly poetic, and sometimes challenging to get through as they often made up their own terms and references. I’m not sure about anyone elses copy, but mine did not have any subscript designating references. Instead, a statistic was quoted often without any indication of where it came from, and if you wanted to learn more, you had to flip to the appendix and somehow find the study the authors mentioned. Many times I saw a particularly dubious statistic and literally could not find it in the appendix, which is inexcusable if this work is to be written by academics, for academics.
Questionable data aside, the other major complaint of this book is its length; it absolutely could have been much shorter without losing any meaningful input. In fact, I highly suspect that this entire book was at one point a doctoral thesis, or a term paper.
The good news is that the overall ideas are quite simple: The authors make the case that generational groupings matter more in society than any other factor, such as religion, geography, culture, etc. Moreover, the authors claim that four generations specifically tend to come in cycles, as evidenced by history. This is almost identical to the Three Generation Theory, the “weak men create hard times” idea that we’re all very familiar with these days. The authors make the point that it's really four cycles (or Turnings), which are grouped as follows:

The High: Occurring shortly after Crisis, a period of social and political dominance on the world stage.
The Awakening: A societal shift toward the individual desires, gravitating away from a shared cultural and social identity in favor of individualism.
The Unraveling: A period of weakness brought on by decaying institutions and public order.
The Crisis: A time of chaos and (usually global) war, which realigns the conditions for the cycle to begin again.

Almost all of my thoughts on this this book can be summed up in two words: “weak correlation”. It’s not that the authors are wrong, on the contrary, their ability to forecast the early 2000’s with their theory speaks volumes.
And personally I am slightly inclined to think that the authors may be mostly right, but right for the wrong reasons. Therefore, while I think these general ideas are correct, there are far too many other variables for me to grab this book and say “See! They predicted everything! The end is nigh!”. It must be mentioned that this book was published in 1997…which makes most of the contents of these ideas quite impressive, if not entirely correct to the finest detail.
However, barely being correct has the same weight as barely being wrong. And in some cases, I would rather listen to the theory that is barely wrong, because its foundational bedrock is more representative of the overall situation, and inclusive of more accurately described world events. And I think that by ignoring some very important details of world history, the authors conclusions are mostly correct, but still slightly off for reasons they themselves probably can’t explain.
One of the downsides with any book that attempts to explain the world around us is the inevitable cherry-picking of world events to suit a narrative. I do not specifically fault these authors for doing this, but it is important to remember that whenever the authors say “look at this world event, this means we’re in this cycle” or “this world event transitioned us out of X and into Y”. From an empirical standpoint, it’s going to be hard for anyone to make these claims without equal and opposite evidence to the contrary being readily available. I do not hold the authors to a higher standard than usual with regards to this idea, but considering that a large portion of their book lies with predicting the future, I kind of have to, to some degree.
This is most compounded by my own biggest gripe with this book…the complete ignorance (or intentional cherry-picking around) the impact of powerful institutions, groups, and people in society. In nearly every single chapter, the attitude is akin to “well, it just happens”, and completely ignores the invisible hand of powerful people. This is most exemplified by the negativity surrounding conspiracy theories. In nearly every single chapter, the authors put down the idea of conspiracy theories, and speak childishly about those who engage in these beliefs, in was that only academics are known to do constantly.
The rather humorous problem with this, is that the authors try to make it seem like there are no outside influences guiding our society, and all the people that believe such are conspiracy theorists…but it turns out that since 1997, we know that nearly all of the specific conspiracy theories listed in this book turned out to be 100% true.
This causes complicated thoughts, at least for me, so I’ll try to give an example. If you flip through to Chapter 10, the authors give quite an in depth series of “prophesies”. Hint: the use of the word “prophesy” instead of “prediction” highlights the writer’s ego like nothing else, but I digress.
Reading through the predictions from 1997, quite a few of them are spot on…but for the wrong reasons. The authors predicted a biological pandemic would occur, which is did. However, the authors state that it would have happened naturally, when we now know it was a bioweapon. Again, the authors sort-of hit the mark with the prediction of a major terror attack like 9/11…but again, we now know how that worked out.
Almost everything in the Crisis Turning that the authors highlight has come to fruition…but only because powerful people or the American government did it. Absolutely NONE of these events came naturally or organically as heavily testified and assured by the authors, which takes away from the gravity of these so-called “prophesies”. And the authors not only neglect these very obvious facts, but chastise or belittle anyone who suggests a theory contrary to their own. If we add in just the American financial elites alone, the wealthy bankers of higher financial institutions, and their power to influence society (such as the entire Federal Reserve concept) I personally think much of Strauss and Howe’s arguments collapse immediately.
The authors wrote this book assuming that the middle-to-lower classes drive society forward, and shape the social norms and mores of the time. Today, that is quite obviously not true. We now know that the civil rights movement, while Strauss and Howe correctly predict was inevitable…was also not organic at all, and was a top-down, well-funded effort to achieve the goals of a handful of elites. Same with everything else the authors would shamefully attribute to conspiracies. The Occupy Wallstreet movement was largely fake and well funded. BLM and ANTIFA are well-funded organizations with a completely unnatural rise to fame...the list is endless. Same with conservative movements too; pretty much all non-grassroots efforts end up being one fed trying to entrap another fed. As such, the book definitely has a 1990’s ‘Ally McBeal’ or ‘West Wing’ view of society, especially when it comes to religion (which is barely mentioned in the book at all, yet today we see a massive rise in Christian nationalism that is completely unexplained by our author’s “prophesies”).
My entire long-winded frustration is essentially to say that if an academic can spend their entire life writing books, have a decades-long career in the same field, but is only marginally more effective than the average dude standing on a street corner looking at the world around him…maybe we need to more carefully weigh the things we have been taught over the years. Without a doubt, this book highlights by own biases, which is helpful for remaining objective, but also quite annoying just due to human nature. However, I am personally most annoyed by academics who get so close to the truth…before veering violently away from it in the opposite direction. I personally felt that way throughout most of this book. I agree…good point…nice idea…interesting observation….NOOOO! was a common thought process I frequent when reading virtually any book written after 1950, but was especially reliable for this reading.
But perhaps more importantly, what did all of you think? Were there any ideas that started out fine and correct, before violently taking a turn for the nonsensical? How do these predictions play our in our modern time? Were the authors on to something, or is this just an academization of the obvious? Are we in the Fourth Turning right now, or are we finishing up the Third Turning, looking to tough times ahead?