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America is aging. Recently, considerable analysis has
been devoted to the financial impact that retiring Baby Boomers will have on
the American economy. Books such as Financial
Armageddon, The Great Bust Ahead, and The Coming Generational Storm ponder such questions as: Have Boomers saved enough to retire on? Will
there be a tremendous stock (housing) market crash as Boomers liquidate their
assets in preparation for retirement? How will the government manage to
make good on their implicit promises to pay Social Security and Medicare
benefits to a growing elderly population? Who will take care of
the aging population?
These are
serious questions, but they are only half of the story. The other,
almost completely ignored half, is the story of a new generation coming of
age and ready to reshape the world as Boomers lose their cultural
relevance. This generation, alternately known as Generation Y or the
Millennial Generation (born 1982 – 2002), is an emerging force ‘that will soon
shake your windows and rattle your walls,’ in ways that we have not seen since before the
1960’s. In many ways, this generation has already begun to
make its cultural mark, though this remains under-reported in the mainstream
media.
Boomers
understandably have their own perspectives on the problems they will face as
they age, and are naturally much more interested in examining how their own
lives will be affected. Since they occupy the powerful gatekeeper
positions as editors, producers and writers in the MSM, it is these issues we
hear the most about. But as their collective grip on the cultural
reigns slip, a new generation will step up to redefine American culture the
way Boomers did forty years ago. What will this look like? More on that
in future installments (sign up here to
be notified), but first the
stage must be set for this transition of power.
The Times They
Are A Changin’
Last
week’s article, Inflation, Dow 13K and the Second Great Depression, was by far my most popular ever, thanks to the
attention it received on social networking sites such as digg and reddit – sites overwhelmingly frequented by younger
readers. The article seemed to resonate deeply with young people, who
have a very different – but as yet under-expressed - perspective on our
world. This week I'd like to begin to establish a framework for
imagining an emerging new world, and offer an alternative way to think about
what is going on.
The next time you’re near a newsstand, take a look at the latest
issue of Rolling Stone. You
can’t miss it – it’s the Fortieth Anniversary issue, with a
sparkly red and silver holographic cover. The issue is a tribute to the times
in which the Rolling
Stone magazine was born, and is packed with interviews of
influential cultural figures waxing poetic on the significance of the
1960’s in America.
The 60’s were a unique time of growth, rebellion and exploration, and America
hasn’t seen anything like them since. The magazine and many of
the interviewees wonder: What was it that made the 60’s so special?
William
Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of the 1997 classic The Fourth Turning have an answer. It was the coming of age of America’s
largest and most privileged generation, who began questioning the world as
they saw it, rebelling against the status quo, and rebuilding their
parents’ society on their own terms. Because of their sheer numbers,
the Boom generation had the power to reshape society. They were and
have been the dominant force in society ever since, driving American culture
based on their own values and world view. While the Boomers believe
they are unique, Strauss and Howe show that there are in fact repeating
generational cycles in American history.
Linear Vs.
Cyclical Time
Even
before the 1960’s, Americans had gotten used to looking at time as a
phenomenon of linear progression. To Americans, the passage of time
means steady improvement, both economically and socially. Things in America get
better, cheaper, and faster while civil and human rights continue to improve
over time. But as I discussed last week for one of the few times in history,
America’s younger generations (X and Y) look to be growing up less
better off than their parents: Good jobs are scarce and don't pay as
well, inflation is making everything more expensive, and everyone –
including the government itself - is in more debt than ever. If things
don’t change, it is the young who will ultimately end up paying the
price for the extravagant living standards that Boomers have been charging to
the national credit card for the past forty years. If time moves only
in a linear fashion, then we face the unpleasant possibility that the new
linear trend points downward.
But the linear
view of time is not the only view, as this description of Eastern versus
Western styles of thought (from The Geography of Thought) demonstrates. A Chinese Researcher explains to his American
colleague:
[T]he difference between
you and me is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it is a
line…The Chinese believe in constant change, but with things always
moving back to some prior state. They pay attention to a wide range of
events; they search for relationships between things; and they think you
can’t understand the part without understanding the whole. Westerners
live in a simpler, more deterministic world; they focus on salient objects or
people instead of the larger picture, and they think they can control events
because they know the rules that govern the behavior of objects.
In other
words, a cyclical view of time believes that which is old will one day be new
again, and many factors beyond our control are involved in shaping the
future. The cyclical view is well known to many other cultures, and
certainly to our agrarian ancestors. While it has been mostly forgotten by
our post-modern, urban contemporaries, a simple example of cyclical time that
even city dwellers are aware of (and take for granted) is the progression of
the seasons. Winter leads to spring, which leads to summer, into
autumn, and back to winter – which is both old and new again. The cycle
continues through the centuries like clockwork. While there can be variations
within the seasons themselves – a colder winter, a wetter spring, etc.
– the seasons always recur in the same order.
And so it
is, according to Strauss and Howe, within the social realm. There are
social seasons are sure as there are climatic ones.
Generational
Turnings
Strauss
and Howe contend that the social seasons are determined by different
generations passing through the four different phases of a human life:
childhood, young adulthood, middle age and old age, each about 20 years in
length. This constitutes a constantly changing generational constellation.
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 - 100 years, a unit of time the
ancients called the saeculum.
Together, the four turnings of the saeculum compromise history's seasonal
rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction.
Turnings,
they note, also come as nearly a complete surprise in spite of their regular
recurence.
In the
current saeculum, the First Turning immediately followed the end of WWII. It
was the era of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. America was
newly triumphant, powerful and the most respected nation in the
world. A First Turning is always “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 the era currently being recalled fondly in the latest Rolling
Stone: The Sixties. Second turnings are “an Awakening - a
passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack
from a new values regime.” You can see this quite clearly in the
three years between 1964 – 1967. Anthony DeCurtis, in his interview of Paul McCartney points out that those three years were the difference between the
Beatles’ “I
Want to Hold Your Hand" and "Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band." If you are familiar with the songs,
you intuitively understand the tremendous artistic evolution that took place
between them in a span of just three years. If you aren’t
familiar with them, this is how that transformation appeared visually:
In the
above picture, you can practically see the conformist Eisenhower era
(identical haircuts, suits, ties and cheerful expressions) dissolving away
into the new values regime of radical individualism that defined the
1960’s. No wonder the 60’s were so much fun to those who
lived though it! It was the end of something old, and the start of something
completely new (they thought).
But all things
must pass. Strauss
& Howe date the start of the Third Turning to the mid 1980’s, with
Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’ and the ensuing
culture wars of Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton. (Uggh) A Third
Turning, they say, is “a downcast era of strengthening individualism
and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new
values regime implants.” If you think about it carefully, you may
find that Bill, Hillary, Newt and George W, while at opposite ends of the
political spectrum, all share certain Boomer generational traits in common,
just as Truman, Eisenhower and JFK shared a different set of common traits.
Those who
rode the wealth wave of the 80’s and 90’s may take issue with
this period being a “downcast era.” For some they were boom
times, but it was also the era of working moms, latch-key kids, increasing
poverty, debt, divorce and skyrocketing rates of emotional depression.
Nearly all
cultural remnants of the Eisenhower 50’s are now gone. Ravi Batra calls
this the Acquisitor-cum-Laborer
age, in which nearly everyone
has been forced into laboring for a minority of greedy acquisitors for whom
enough is never enough. Because of massive indebtedness and low
salaries, many find themselves rushing madly, simply to keep from falling
behind. The new Boomer values regime – characterized by Gordon
Gekko’s 1987 mantra, “Greed is good,” is
firmly implanted and looks as though it is here to stay. The legacy of
the Summer of Love has strangely calcified into an era of empty self-love:
narcissism, selfishness, and every-man-for-himself, resulting in seemingly
unsolvable social problems: Poverty, depression, falling educational
standards, global warming, excessive debt, and a lonesome society yearning
for community but without the faintest idea of how to achieve it. From
a linear perspective, these trends look like they will only get worse with
time.
The Fourth
Turning
But
wait. A turning comes every 20 years, and the Fourth Turning is due
right about now. All turnings cause society to change direction, but
the Fourth Turning is the most powerful of them all. It is, the authors
say, “history’s great discontinuity. It ends one epoch and
begins another.” It 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.” In other words, the current value system
will likely be exposed, once and for all, to be morally and spiritually
bankrupt, unable to solve the myriad problems that have been created by
it. Chaos ensues, and from this chaos, a new values regime will be born
that is able to effectively solve our seeminly insurmountable problems.
The most
recent Fourth Turning was born of a time strikingly similar to these. It
was when the Roaring Twenties gave way to the twin crises of the Great
Depression and World War II. Following that chaotic transition, the
nation emerged into the first turning High of the post-war era.
What are
we in store for in the coming Fourth Turning? In 1997, the authors
predicted:
Around the
year 2005 [give or take a few years], a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis
mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate.
Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the
land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race,
nation and empire. Yet this time of trouble will bring seeds of social
rebirth. Americans will share a regret about recent mistakes –
and a resolute new consensus about what to do. The very survival of the
nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will
pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American
Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World
War II.
The risk
of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into
insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to
authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of
maximum risk and effort – in other words, total war…
Yet
Americans will also enter the Fourth Turning with a unique opportunity to achieve
a new greatness as a people. Many despair that values that were new in
the 1960s are today so entwined with social dysfunction and cultural decay
that they can no longer lead anywhere positive. Through the current
Unraveling era, that is probably true. But in the crucible of Crisis,
that will change. As the old civic order gives way, Americans will have
to craft a new one. This will require a values consensus and, to
administer it, the empowerment of a strong new political regime…By the
2020’s, America
could become a society that is good, by today’s standards and also one that works.
Thus might
the next Fourth Turning end in apocalypse – or glory. The nation
could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or
killed. Or America
could enter a new golden age,
triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The
rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis; all they
suggest is the timing and dimension.
It must be
stressed, that a positive outcome is by no means assured. It will take a
collective effort for the country to create a successful outcome. And while
it is not entirely clear from the above passage, the authors do make it clear
elsewhere in their writings that it will be the rising generation that will
be primarily responsible for realizing the future, be it positive or
negative. In other words: Young people, your turn is
coming. We’re going to need your ideas, imagination and energy in
the very near future.
By :
Michael
Nystrom
Bull not Bull
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