THE FOURTH TURNING
A Book Review
THE FOURTH TURNING: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny by William Strauss and Neil Howe began interesting and became fascinating. There is a powerful and compelling intelligence in every sentence, every observation.
For the last thousand years or so, human generations seem to be of four basic kinds, and they seem to follow each other, over and over, in a cycle, in their particular order. Turnings or phases of history also seem to repeat due to the constellation (positions) of the generations at those times.
THE FOURTH TURNING evokes parents, grandparents, and other ancestors, and children and grandchildren, which conjured that luxury almost too precious to imagine for fear of preventing its arrival: a future, which can seem a miracle if it comes, given our current challenges.
Published in 1997, THE FOURTH TURNING puts us on the carousel and shows the seasons of time that we have gone through like the seasons of the year. It shows the qualities of our generations: the GI-Heroes, the Silent who followed, then the Boomers, the 13ers, and the Millennials.
It well imagined the Crisis phase of the Oh-Ohs through the mid-2020s that we are probably moving out of.
Near the end it says, “A belief in foreseeable seasons and perceptible rhythms can inspire a society or an individual to do great things that might otherwise seem pointless. There is nothing ethically inhibiting in the notion that our behavior is, in some fundamental sense, a reenactment of the past. To the contrary: The ancients understood that to participate in cyclical time is to bear the responsibility for participating well or badly.”
I highly recommend this captivating book.