Strauss-Howe Generational Theory is the closest thing we have to a crystal ball — Part 2
I started out simply wanting to share my renewed appreciation for the groundbreaking generational study of William Strauss and Neil Howe. I quickly realized that would require me plunging into the deep end and grappling face to face with a monster of a theory.
A couple weeks back I ambitiously attempted to encapsulate the profundity of Strauss-Howe Generational Theory in a 5 minute blog post and then realized that:
a) so layered and nuanced is the theory that it probably would require being explored over several weeks, and also that
b) I should probably go back and read some more.
Predicting the future! A crystal ball! The stuff of myth and legend, never thought possible before, step right up folks. See the amazing soothsaying wizardry of the wiley William Strauss and the nefarious Neil Howe!
I’m going to say it right now before I continue: studying Strauss-Howe Generational Theory will make you start to think proactively as opposed to reactively, make you feel smarter, decrease your existential angst, and elevate your sense of personal purpose. You will feel better prepared for the uncertainty of the future, as if someone let you in on some great secret for surviving a mission to Mars.
You will feel almost as if you have a crystal ball into the future.
Well, alright fine at least that’s what it did for me, and I feel compelled to share and provoke thought. Forgive me for how obtuse this topic may seem at times, and yes one day I would love to be as great a writer as a rockstar like Ryan Holiday (wow, that boy can write). That day is not yet today.
Allow me to caveat. I am not a doctor. I am not a mental health specialist. I’m just some dude, talking. But it would seem to me there is little question that anxiety is becoming more widespread and a mental health mania of epidemic proportions is sweeping the planet right now, especially in North America. I like to call it existential angst. We are all feeling it.
A lot of us are running blind and scared, perhaps going through the motions, completing our duties at work in zombie like fashion while paralyzed with a growing sense of alarm as to what the future may hold. Yes, we know more robots are coming. Self-driving cars. Amazon delivery drones. Internet-enabled everything. But so what if technology advances? What does the next 50 years really look like? Did Trump just fuck us all by petulantly withdrawing from the Paris Accords? Are these the end of days oft foretold in Judeo-Christian lore? They can certainly sometimes feel that way. We all could use better coping mechanisms and mental frameworks to assist our mental decision making and critical thinking faculties during these strange days.
The elixir for me when things get confusing has always been to go back to history. I have long been an advocate for passionate, deliberate, life-long commitment to the study of history. The sentiment of you dont know where you’re going unless you know where you’re coming from always rang very true to me.
Somewhere in the din of war on the social media battlefields of the last decade, we started to lose touch with even basic consensus on recent history. Things are bad right now. We now consume almost all of our news from Facebook Newsfeed, various Twitter streams or Google Alerts. We are all in separate social media echo chambers, splintered off from each other, yelling at each other anonymously and in person, saying vile things and accusing and pointing fingers while failing to see the forest for the trees. There is a lot at stake here, and the very way in which we even conceive of and mentally process history — in an ongoing linear pattern, where the past just gets fuzzier and fuzzier as you move farther away from it, lessons simply forgotten — is clearly at this point dangerous. For some, we are hurtling forward towards inevitable cataclysmic apocalypse, while for others, towards a final euphoric Nirvana. Linear historical thinking has become our biggest psychological flaw as a species.
Our very future may depend on beginning to see history as circular, not linear.
History repeats itself. Lessons should be retained and internalized, to be effectively marshaled when facing social issues and events in the future, because we will recognize obstacles as being similar. Strauss-Howe Theory teaches us that if you take into account the recurrent patterns of history, in addition to obstacles being similar to ones in the past they should become familiar to you.
I was exposed to Strauss-Howe Generational Theory, purely by chance, in what I initially thought was an innocent throwaway elective social science course called simply Generational Studies that I took on a whim in university. Probably 20 or 21 at the time, in what now seems like aeons ago (the mid 2000s, or the decade William Strauss lovingly refers to as the “Oh-Ohs”), I did not yet grasp the importance, enormity or potential impact of the material I was studying. In the haze of my youth and overactive hormones, there was one big takeaway, however. The very concept itself of belonging to a generational cohort, that I shared large swaths of my attitudes, beliefs and worldview with people born into my generation — it resonated deeply for me, as it did for many people.
William Strauss and Neil Howe were inquisitive authors and meticulous historians who collaborated on a series of groundbreaking books that would come to lay the groundwork for the fundamental way in which we in the Western world grapple with generational thought and definition. Strauss’s books with Neil Howe include Generations (1991), 13th Gen (1993), The Fourth Turning (1997) and Millennials Rising (2000), examining historical generations and describing a theorized ever-churning cycle of recurring moods and impulses animating people through consecutive eras of American History.
Generations: A History of America’s Future from 1584–2069
A breathtaking tome that is the intellectual foundation and underpinning of Strauss-Howe Generational Theory. Strauss and Howe posit that history has repeated itself, in 80 to 100 year increments, over and over again, and most measurably since the 1500s. According to them, history and the passage of time has always been cyclical and not linear, a never ending pattern of rebirth, evolution and destruction. The cycle begins with a period of renewed hope for growth and prosperity called a High, immediately proceeding a period of crisis and war. The prosperity and wealth of the High eventually turns to a time of social unrest and uncertainty as fundamental questions concerning morality and ethics begin to be asked, this period being known as an Awakening. As an Awakening rolls forward, society begins to withdraw inward from wider social issues and causes, focus on amassing individual and familial wealth, and becoming distrustful of once trusted institutions and symbols of authority. This period of social value decay is called by Strauss and Howe an Unravelling. After an Unravelling, an accelerated countdown to a period of Crisis begins, climaxed by a major civilizational level crisis such as war or deep political upheaval surrounded by a number of smaller seminal events featuring further breakdowns in the economic and social fabric.
Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation
The title says it all. Yes, that’s right — Strauss and Howe are the guys who came up with the oft-used euphemism for the kids born in the 80s and 90s. I spoke in the first post of how I spent years walking around armed with what I now recognize to be an almost irrationally optimistic outlook, imbued with a heavy helping of Hero complex. In exploring Strauss-Howe theory, I have come to learn the extraordinary amounts of external cultural programming that is really at play in my mindset, and by extension the members of my cohort. In Millennials Rising, Strauss and Howee envision 4 main archetypes for each generation, coincidentally — and eerily to me upon my discovery — labelling the Millennial generation as the Hero archetype.
Going further, the outlined archetypes are the Artist (eg. the tech-infused Gen Z kids of the 2000s and today, the 2010s), the Prophet (the all powerful post-WW2 Baby Boomer generation that still holds much of the wealth on the planet), and the Nomad (the much decried “lost” generation of kids born in the 60s and 70s now entering into middle age).
Strauss and Howe argue that each cohort exhibits the attributes of their corresponding archetype. Born in the 80s and 90s during a period of cultural decay and increased emphasis on individualism and the greed is good paradigm (Unravelling), and just after the civil rights marches and clashes of the 60s and 70s (Awakening), Hero archetypes are mentally fortified for hard times in a way that the other cohorts are not. The Millennial generation has unwittingly been infused with traits that will allow them to steer humanity forward through the period of time called the Crisis and into the subsequent High.
If it isn’t obvious by now, we are today in 2017 smack dab in the middle of the period that Strauss and Howe identified as the Crisis.
The Fourth Turning
As it happened, this is the one Strauss/Howe book that I had not read, and now that I have I am even more astounded by the breadth of clarity and vision of the future pulled off by the two historians. It has been a long time since I had shivers reading anything. The chutzpah! The audacity! Strauss and Howe, long lambasted for attempting to predict the future in their seminal work Generations, double down on their exploration of the crisis period, or The Fourth Turning.
What brings you out of your seat only paragraphs in is how much they gets right. Strauss and Howe predicted the future. We are simply living it right now.
Strauss and Howe are so talented at connecting the dots and showing the events and occurrences that weave throughout different eras but nonetheless have connective tissue. In Part 3, I will delve deeper into my jaw dropping experience reading The Fourth Turning, a book I am now convinced should be required reading for everyone perhaps even as young as middle school as we move forward into the 2020s and 2030s.
At a time of great civic discord, political upheaval, and increasingly brazen acts of public terrorism — we must all not despair. We simply need to breath, be strong, and realize that we are in a period of crisis. That history repeats itself has been shown to be one of the greatest truisms there ever was.
We have been here before.
