The Fourth Turning and other theories about the whats and whys of hitting the fan.
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Predictions are hard to make, especially about the future. Because many people quote it, I'm reading The Fourth Turning, written in 1997. Its thesis is that history repeats itself in cycles, and that by today we would be in a fourth turning, a time of chaos.
An educated person should be familiar with the fourth turning hypothesis. Here is a summary of the turnings, as described at publication in 1997, with post-publication events taken from the Wikipedia entry.
Below is a quote from the book predicting what we would see by today. I have bolded the predictions the others cite as made by others, predictions that the authors pooh-poohed and said (second paragraph below) would not come to pass, but which seem very evident to me. In other words authors Strauss and Howe appear to have been more wrong than right. In my opinion they were right only in foreseeing stronger government, more centralization and worse conditions for the elderly. Not a very good batting average. They wrote:
And what about today? Forecasters are still making the same mistakes. Best-selling books envision a postmillennial America of unrelenting individualism, social fragmentation, and weakening government—a nation becoming ever more diverse and decentralized, its citizens inhabiting a high-tech world of tightening global ties and loosening personal ones, its Web sites multiplying and its culture splintering. We hear much talk about how elder life will improve and child life deteriorate, how the rich will get richer and the poor poorer, and how today’s kids will come of age with a huge youth crime wave.
Don’t bet on it. The rhythms of history suggest that none of those trends will last more than a few years into the new century. What will come afterward can be glimpsed by studying earlier Unraveling eras with similar generational constellations—and by inquiring into what happened next.
Models can be useful tools for prediction. Howe and Strauss impose a model of recurring cycles over linear history as a means to explain the phenomena we observe today. Others have done the same, such as Oswald Spengler a century ago with "The Decline of the West."
I recently linked to Toby Rogers' article on the ten theories to explain the crazy phenomena of this era, briefly discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each. One of the more modern theories, Mass Formation, does appear among them. None of them have much to do with the Fourth Turning. None have to do with evolution.
Edward Dutton has an attractive evolutionary explanation in his books "At Our Wits End" and The Past is a Future Country. I'm working on my own evolutionary explanation, going into Covid and rapid depopulation, two themes that Dutton does not investigate deeply.
Evolutionary theories are unpopular for three reasons. The first is that evolution is the process through which gene pools, that is, peoples become different from one another. Modern dogma, the Standard Social Science Model, maintains despite vast evidence to the contrary that all people are equal along every meaningful measure. The second is that if the problems we observe are a product of evolution there is nobody to blame and not much we can do. Politics is all about blaming people and promising action. The third and greatest flaw with the theory of evolution is that the solution is to have children and raise them to be successful adults in a healthy culture. That involves much hard work and little recognition. Bottom line – however much validity there may be to Dutton’s and my theories, they won't attract many followers.
That's the musings from Lake WeBeGone, where I have the pleasure to talking with my eleven-year-old Eddie about these thoughts. He gets it. More to the point, he gets sixth grade math, history and biology. I think he'll be prepared for what comes.
Last week, I was in France for a few days. On the train, I sat next to a "scientist," a University professor who does climate science computer modeling. He was coming to a conference of like minded colleagues to compare notes on their computer models. At one point, he asked me what I thought about the climate change predictions, the alarmist articles in newspapers and political pronouncements. I said, "It's total bullshit." I then said that it was warmer in the Medieval warm period than it is today when the Vikings lived on Greenland and grew wheat and prospered for 300 years. The Little Ice Age arrived in 1315, the year without a summer, and it was colder for the next 500 years. Climate Scientists want to restrict the Little Ice Age as a European phenomenon, but a reading of Chinese history will show that the Yuan Dynasty (the Mongols) fell in 1368 because the country had been savaged by decades of bad harvests, cold weather, and frozen canals. Bad timing for Kublai Khan's Xanadu. It should be noted that the Ming Dynasty which replaced the Mongols did a census which had not been done in a century. When the census was done, China's population was half the size as it had been in the Song Dynasty one hundred years earlier.
Lots of people want to nit-pick the details of the weather in the middle ages, but starvation ensued in Europe from 1315 onward and within 30 years the Black Death wiped out nearly half the the European population. One thing that I have never read is the impact on human health after two decades of bad harvests. Starvation does not create optimally healthy people. Is it possible that the cold weather of the Little Ice Age contributed to the mass deaths of the Black Plague? I say all this because climate scientists like my fellow passenger believe that suddenly the climate will reach a tipping point and everything will go bad in a great climate catastrophe. I don't share his vision of doom and gloom.
I remind those who fear global warming of one important reality. All those who have predicted the end of the world have one thing in common. They've all been wrong.
Finally, I would mention that the Spanish Flu in 1919 supposedly killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide. Fear of this happening again was partly responsible for the reaction by governments to lock down whole countries, restrict movement, and force masks on everyone. It also brought about mandating vaccination with drugs that are experimental, for which no long term studies have been done. This last week I was listening to two respected biologists discuss a paper in which the author explores the idea that massive doses of aspirin were the cause of so many of the deaths in 1919. It seems that aspirin was seen as a wonder drug and thus patients with the Spanish Flu were given therapeutic doses of 20 grams or more per day of aspirin. We now know that large doses of aspirin, those exceeding 1000 mg per day are considered dangerous. It could be that the health authorities in 1919 made the same mistake that was made in 2020, administering large doses of experimental pharmaceutical treatments on patients without any evidence of efficacy, but with the downside of the risk of side effects.
It seems to me that the consensus of Climate Science and the Public Health Authorities determinations about Covid-19 are the same phenomenon. Over my lifetime, I have seen and heard so many claims about the end of the world. They are all the same. As Chicken Little said, the sky is falling. The sky is falling.
Politics is all about blaming people and promising action. "
LOL