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The Fourth Turning Rating: 10 on a scale of 10 Review I have given this book a rare 10/10 rating. Everyone should read and work at understanding what these authors are saying. I believe this to be a profoundly important work by two historians. The book is about a simple but profound concept. They maintain there is a cycle in the history of organized human civilization for at least the past 500 years in our culture and in prior cultures, also. They call this cycle a saeculum, an Etruscan word for cycle apparently. The cycle is made up of four generations which follow each other in a rigid order. Each generation has an archetypal character to it. Each generation follows in an order because each generation is responding to the qualities of the previous generation, both its overt character and the unconscious shadow character of each generation. Each generation is about 20-25 years in length, it seems to have shortened to generally 20 years in the past few hundred years. Each generation can be thought of as a "turning" in the mood of society in general, although we are all a part of our own generational character and cohort throughout our lives. Our generational character is a sort of collective societal personality style common to a group born in a certain span of time. They seem to be aware of Jungian concepts and are also aware of the many other typological formulations that have come out in the study of history and people. They assign names generally to each generation. They seem to correlate rather nicely with personality temperament types as described in the Jungian based Myers-Briggs personality typology as described by Keirsey and Bates in their work on temperament (see Please Understand Me and Please Understand Me II). If you are familiar with these ideas then the correlation looks like this: Hero generation=Sensing Judging type, Artist generation=Intuitive Feeling type, Prophet generation=Intuitive Thinking types, and Nomad generation=Sensing Perceiving type. Each type is a general collective generational character taken on by those born in a particular cohort. The current saeculum consists of the four generations we have all heard of before generally, they are respectively referred to as the GI generation (Hero), Silent generation (Artist), Boomers (Prophet) and Generation X (Nomads). A new generation called the Millenials is currently coming of age as the GI generation is about 85% passed on as of this writing. When the book was written the Millenials were all children, now they are becoming young adults or are in young adulthood, they are a new Hero generation coming of age. The saeculum, or cycle, starts following a crisis. The crisis is part of the "fourth turning". The Hero generation must rise up to resolve the crisis. These crises over history have often involved economic disasters and wars. The generation coming of age after the crisis, the first turning, lives in the shadow of this great prior Hero generation. It is a sort of golden age when all is going well and the new Hero generation sets about creating a world to their liking. The Hero generation is active spiritually and physically in an outward sense in the world, they extravert their collective character. This is in keeping with the character of a Sensing-Judging character collectively. They are about creating social and physical structures. They are not a very intuitive group, they are prone to act and do what needs to get done for the common good. They are the consummate team players, and they create a culture based on this. I remember well this atmosphere from my childhood in the 50's and 60's. It becomes a sort of stifling culture. You begin to wonder who makes up all those rules and why? The spirituality of the era seems sort of shallow and not well considered. As this process unfolds, the next generation coming of age begins to react to the previous generation's shortcomings, strengths and shadow characteristics. This so-called Silent generation comes of age in the lea of the Hero generation. Gradually, there will be a mood shift over time in an ongoing fashion. By the time we reach the second turning there is a very "opposed" shift in the generational character. The second turning will be the rising of a prophet generation who will rise up to create an "awakening". The Prophet generation will dive inwardly spiritually and will bring forth a spiritual awakening which will directly oppose the eccentricities and deficiencies of the prior Hero generation and the world they have been creating. This will end up being good for everyone, but as we noted in the last awakening era in the 1960's, it can be very painful and traumatic feeling, too. It is in effect a spiritual "crisis" inwardly which must be dealt with by a new generation coming of age. This inward crisis is reflected in dramatic changes in the world related to the care of and condition of people as evidenced by happenings of the 1960's and 1970's. Eventually, the eccentricities of the awakening begin to fade and a new Nomad generation arises to challenge the "navel gazing" of the awakening driven Prophet generation. This generation ends up being in the spiritual shadow of the Prophet generation, it becomes as pragmatic as the awakened ones were theoretical and spiritual, and the "third turning" comes into being and of age. Each generation does not fade out from its peak after coming of age. The generations progress along their individual tracks as they come of age, grow, raise families, move into positions of power and authority as they age into mid-life, and then begin to finish their generational work as they move into elderhood at around age 60 or so and then let go of the reigns of power as they begin to fade in their 70's and beyond. As the Prophet generation moves into elderhood, the conditions begin to arise that will trigger another crisis and a new Hero generation has been being reared for "just such a time as this". There is an amazing beauty and symmetry to this whole discussion. The book was written in 1997, and the authors do a remarkable job predicting what the 00's would look like. In fact, they do such a good job it is a bit frightening. We have been witnessing most of what they predicted based on the cycling of the saeculum. The big question to me is whether or not we have been through our "crisis" again or whether it might still be coming. Obviously, we have suffered 911, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Katrina, global warming, the Gulf oil spill and the global economic recession. Is this "the crisis" or a prelude to the crisis? Frankly, I'm not sure. My sense is that the big crisis is still coming. Now, there is another part of me that wants to call this all "hocus pocus". It takes some intellectual gymnastics to convert our various wars and conflicts into less than major events such as the crises they describe. It takes some stretching to see each generation as having a collective character, also. But, anecdotally and empirically, I have been asking patients about which generation they are part of, and it seems clear that people can rather easily identify which generation they are from without any prompting even. We seem to have a clear collective sense of who we are and where we are from based on our life experience and era of birth. This is of course effected by our individual personality styles I believe. We may be psychologically concordant or discordant with our generational temperament and this would effect greatly, I suspect, our sense of our own connection to our "age" or generation. The saeculum seems to move around in history and geography from England and Europe to the United States which seems a little strange to me. It seems to require an organized society to function. But, just because we move over to the United States with it and power begins to reside here more and more over time, doesn't the saeculum continue in Europe and England, too. Maybe it does, but in this book you initially hear about Europe and and England then they seem to fade and it is all about the United States. It seems to me like it should always be about the whole world, especially now during this time in history when everything seems quite globalized. I think they would agree with this, but it seems presented in a bit of an odd fashion in this regard. Would the rest of the world have perceived the American Civil War as a crisis of such magnitude that it changed the world or was this a conflict following what had already happened in a lot of other places? I'm certain there would be people who have conflicts with their presentation of history. However, their melding of cycles in history, psychological concepts with generational collectivity is brilliant and important. I think it is "right on". Perhaps the most useful aspect of this book is its suggestions for how to deal with the coming "fourth turning". I now understand that one of my generational goals is to bring a spiritual perspective to a generation bound to "build and do" in the outward world, the new Hero generation coming of age now. As we have been raising our own children, who are part of this new Hero generation, I can see exactly what they are saying and why it is crucial and important. We boomers have a big task in elderhood, to teach a new Hero generation what they need to value, find precious, and important. We have one generation left to do it. The crisis is either upon us or building up. Clearly, the world is not like it used to be 10 years ago. We have a lot of work to do. Move over Artist generation, the Boomers have arrived! God help us! We're gonna need it. Read this book and consume what it has to tell us. Their predictions have already been quite accurate. The future may be be even more daunting that we had expected. Hail to the rising Heroes! May we, like Obi Wan Kanobi, train you well. "May the force be with you!" All opinions are those of Curtis Climer, MD
Copyright 2010
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