The Fourth Turning

How a prophetic book from 1997 shook my Crisis-Millennial core in the best and most optimistic way

Ever hold onto a book for a painfully long time before you muster up the gusto to actually read it?

The Fourth Turning was one of those books I bought well in advance of when I felt ready to read. Frankly, I’m not sure I would have read it recently, had I not been talking with a friend and fellow millennial who mentioned she had read it, and it’d be worth my while.

Challenge accepted. Book pulled from shelf, binding cracked.

I started reading May 11 and finished on May 22. While eleven days may not seem fast to you, May is gardening season, and I have a six-year-old in homestudy. I barely remembered to breathe half the month, if I’m being honest with myself, but the seeds and starts are in the soil, my daughter has moved from her reading module into her science module, and I managed to read in the margins of busy days.

In all honesty, my local library should be thankful that I own this book, because lemme tell ya, my orange highlighter and I had a day!

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Strauss and Howe painstakingly detail the cycles to which we are all beholden, and push back on the linearity with which many see history. I’m not one for many spoilers; I assume if you really want to read this book, you’ll get yourself a copy—borrowed or otherwise—and dive in.

But at several points in the reading, one quote or another hit me so hard I sighed audibly because Strauss and Howe had put into words what I’d been feeling and intuiting from the world around me.

In 1997, the authors wrote:

“History is seasonal, and winter is coming.”

You know that collective anxiety millennials seem to carry? Turns out, it’s cyclical and borne of saecular winter, something we feel deep in our bones even if we don’t have the words to describe the evolutionary season we’re in.

Y’all, winter is fuggin here, and we’ve been in it for nearly two decades.

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“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.”

Given that the MAHA movement is essentially what got 45 elected as 47, I believe the “great gate” Strauss and Howe wrote about was the refusal of the industrial state, the same industrial state created and ushered in by the GI generation that came into adulthood at the turn of the 20th century, the same industrial state that brought us Rockefeller medicine, the current sick-care system, cronyism, and regulatory capture because “progress” was propagandized as a net public good.

“[T]he enlightenment transmuted Christian linearism into a complementary secular faith, what historian Carl Becker called “the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers”—the belief in indefinite scientific, economic, and political improvement.

Because of the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution came rip-roaring into being in America and became a sort of dogma for those in power.

“Unless there was progress there could be no God in history.”

And this is the real crux here. America is currently suffering at the hands of progressivist industrialists, hell-bent on achieving new, more, better—without any thought as to whether progress itself is a net good.

In my view, it is not. And I’ve said this before: “Every person is religious, but some religious people are more honest than others about their relationships with their chosen stories.”

For progressive thinkers, progress itself is the god, the highest good, the path which we follow to a Nietzschian Übermensch we can never achieve. But progress also requires linearity and can’t function well within cycles.

Strauss and Howe wrote:

“More recently, the West began using technology to flatten the very physical evidence of natural cycles. With artificial light, we believe we defeat the sleep-wake cycle; with climate control, the seasonal cycle; with refrigeration, the agricultural cycle; and with high-tech medicine, the rest-recovery cycle . . . . Before, people prized the ability to divine nature’s energy and use it. Today, we prize the ability to defy nature’s energy and overcome it.”

Isn’t that some of the most chaotic and hubrustic shit you’ve read?

Humans believing they can overcome nature.

“[O]ur faith in linear progress has often amounted to a Faustian bargain with our children.”

Reminds me a bit of the Hamburglar: I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. Except there’s nothing but hamburgers today, and that Tuesday payday never seems to arrive.

The debt, economic and social, mounts.

“A saecular winter is indeed an era of trial and suffering, though not necessarily of tragedy. Though it can produce destruction, it can also produce uncommon vision, heroism, and a sudden elevation of the human condition.”

Millennials, like the GIs before us, are a Hero generation. We carry the weight of possibility while looking back with disdain on what has come to pass. We vow not to make the mistakes of our forebears, while assuming we know what’s best for everyone.

We are also hubrists, and it will behoove us all to remember that, as we round out the rest of the 2020s and head into the 2030s.

Remember: Freedom and diversity are synonyms. They are also part of the natural cycles of life to which we are beholden.

Let us not forget this as we tear down the old structures and replace them with nothing with Mother Nature, evolution, and the acknowledgement that people, not systems, are more adaptable to change.

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After reading this book, seeing how the prophecies made have come to pass now nearly 30 years after this book’s release, I am ever more grateful that I’ve already recommitted myself to natural cycles, that I’ve divorced myself from the bridge-troll that is “progressivism.” Instead, I’ve come to accept the role of circles in history. As the seasons change each year, there are seasons within each century.

Yes, we’re here, stuck in the endless snowstorm of socio-political winter. But spring is coming, and I can feel it in my bones.

And I’m so glad to have come of age during the Crisis so that my daughter doesn’t have to weather this saecular winter on her own.

While I haven’t yet picked up Howe’s next book, The Fourth Turning Is Here, I plan to read it. However, I think I’ll wait a decade so I can read it in hindsight.

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I’ll likely write about this book a few more times as I come to process and re-process exactly how I feel now that I have language to explain my inner state of being, but I’d love to hear from you, too.

Have you read The Fourth Turning? Is your heart positively swollen with optimism too?