Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories take place in a Milky Way so overflowing with people that individual humans can be treated collectively as interchangeable units. A branch of statistical mathematics called psychohistory is used to predict the future evolution of human society in the galaxy, in much the same way that the mathematics of thermodynamics can be used to predict the behavior of an ideal gas. The laws of thermodynamics could not be worked out until a great deal of experience had been accumulated with steam engines and carefully designed experiments had produced sufficient useful data. It was only when a given set of prior conditions could be shown to consistently produce the same result at a later time that equations could be found that expressed this relationship, and made it possible to predict a future result from a prior set of conditions.
Therefore, implicit in Asimov’s Foundation universe is the idea that human behavior and societies must be, in some way, cyclical. If this were not the case, if human progress was always evolving and never repeating, you wouldn’t be able to develop the mathematics of psychohistory at all. This idea, that history may be cyclical, is an old one, but has largely fallen into disfavor in the West, particularly in the United States, where most of us have absorbed a linear idea of nearly continuous evolutionary “progress” from the past into the future.
Although the Foundation stories are set eons into the future, a book has already been published that could arguably be called “the first book on Psychohistory.” That book is The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe (ISBN 0-553-06682-X, 1997).
In my September Alternate View, I ended by saying that the “inspiration for this column came from a rejection letter I got from Stanley Schmidt, in which he said (among other things) of my story: ‘(T)he human relationships had a very 1950ish flavor, with little feeling of the cultural differences that would surely develop between now and then.’” My reply to that statement is this: “I am aware of the similarity of my future culture to a past one. It is my belief that so called cultural evolution is in actuality a rather robust cultural cycling through a near century long repetition of remarkably similar eras. The reason my future characters evoke a feeling of the ’50s is because they are living in the same kind of cultural ‘high’ that produced the mindset and mores that we consider ’50ish.”
Since my reply requires a bit of explanation, a brief discussion of The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy follows.
The use of the word “prophecy” should not be confused with the sort of prophecy one thinks of in connection with Nostradamus or Edgar Cayce. A more apt description is that it is a variant of the “if this goes on” science fiction story. It is “if this goes on,” but with corners, or as the book calls them, turnings.
We expect societies to change over time. We expect fads to come and go. We simplistically think of this in terms of a pendulum swing, which works fine with the width of ties or the length of skirts. But human societies are more complex than that. Strauss and Howe see the US as cycling through four similar turnings, or eras, again and again. It’s fair enough to ask why not five or six or three, but the pattern they see fits well with four.
The authors summarize these four kinds of turnings starting on page 2 in chapter one:
In fact, at the core of modern history lies this remarkable pattern: Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era—a new turning—every two decades or so. At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction:
The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.
The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.
The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.
The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with the new one.
Each turning comes with its own identifiable mood. Always, these mood shifts catch people by surprise.
This last point is an important one, the mood shifts coming as a surprise. Linear extrapolations from the recent past into even the near-term future can be far off the mark. For instance, extrapolating the nature of society ten years into the future from the world of Leave It to Beaver would not have led to a prediction of the “Summer of Love” or the Watts riots. Similarly, extrapolating from the speakeasy and flapper era of the 1920s would not have led to a proper characterization of the 1930s that actually happened. It isn’t simply a matter of failing to predict specific events, like the market collapse of 1929 or Kent State. As Strauss and Howe put it on page 16, “It’s not just that the experts missed the particular events that lay just ahead—(several events from period listed—JK). It’s that they missed the entire mood of the coming era.”
Expert predictions were wrong for this reason: “When the forecasters assumed the future would extrapolate the recent past, they expected that the next set of people in each phase of life would behave just like the current occupants.”
Long before I’d read the book, I noticed that my parents had what I called a “Depression Era mindset” about money. Having spent most of their formative years enduring shortages brought on by the Great Depression, followed by sacrifices mandated by the needs of World War II, they had a deeply ingrained sense of “pay as you go” and don’t over-extend yourself. Our world of easy credit and “no interest for two years” was to them self-evidently irresponsible, bordering on insane.
It’s no great stretch of the imagination to figure out that a generation raised in an age of plenty will differ from one raised in an age of want. But what is very interesting is that this process should be cyclical, that after four generations we should come full circle to an age of similar mood and temperament. Yet that is exactly what Strauss and Howe say happens, as one generation hands off its national role to the next. Here is an example of this role changing taken from recent history:
This dynamic has recurred throughout American history. Roughly every two decades (the span of one phase of life), there has arisen a new constellation of generations—a new layering of generational personas up and down the age ladder. As this constellation has shifted, so has the national mood. Consider what happened, from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, as one generation replaced another at each phase of life:
In elderhood, the cautionary individualists of the Lost Generation (born 1883-1900) were replaced by the hubristic G.I. Generation (born 1901-1924) of material affluence, global power, and civic planning.
In midlife, the upbeat G.I.s were replaced by the helpmate Silent Generation (born 1925-1942), who applied their expertise and sensitivity to fine-tune the institutional order while mentoring the passions of youth.
In young adulthood, the conformist Silent were replaced by the narcissistic Boom Generation (born 1943-1960), who asserted the primacy of self and challenged the alleged moral vacuity of the institutional order.
In childhood, the indulged Boomers were replaced by the neglected 13th Generation (born 1961-1981), who were left unprotected at a time of cultural convulsion and adult self-discovery. Known in pop culture as Generation X, its name here reflects that it literally is the thirteenth generation to call itself American.
The authors also name the archetypes born in each era. A Prophet generation is born during a High, Nomad generations are born during Awakenings, Heroes are born during an Unraveling, and Artists during a Crisis. So an era in which Heroes are running things and Prophets are young adults sowing their wild oats is far different from a period in which the reverse is true: think the 1930s and ’40s versus the 1960s and ’70s.
Now we come to the Analog audience participation part of this column. The book was published in 1997, during what the authors assert was a period of unraveling. The prophecy they wished for their readers to look at was whether or not in a few years we transitioned to a fourth turning. They estimated that 2005 would, given the average length of a turning, be that year.
What big event happened between then and now? 9/11. The authors even published a letter in USA Today on Oct. 29 of 2001, suggesting that Americans may have become a changed people almost overnight (“may have”—they hedged their bets).
I read the book a year before 9/11, so I was interested to see that letter from the authors, but I was skeptical that 9/11 would mark the actual entry into the fourth turning. It was too soon by five years for one thing. And when all was said and done—the wreckage was cleaned up, the bombs were dropped on Afghanistan—the US continued to just sort of muddle along, every bit as divided and self-absorbed as before.
Indeed, it is now 2008 and I still don’t see that any corner has been turned. Perhaps the divided state of the nation this year, made all the more obvious by the current campaigning for president of the US, will lead to the “precipitating event” that future generations will say marked the beginning of the fourth turning crisis. It might be fun for Analog readers to keep a look out for that arrival of the fourth turning, but I can’t offer a prize to the reader who spots it first. And come to think of it, a year or two from now maybe we’ll look back at something that has already happened and decide that it was the turning point.
The book is certainly worth a read. Most of the supporting evidence for their hypothesis is, of necessity, anecdotal, and descriptions of mood in a given era are highly subject to perception. Nevertheless, the book does offer a theory of societal evolution that I think is a worthy alternate view to the linear evolution idea. I do doubt that, even if Strauss and Howe are correct about the US and its cyclical evolution, it will be applicable to a space-faring civilization. Even in the next hundred years, space will be populated by a great many folk who were never American in the first place, nor ever had ancestors there. It may still be cyclical, but with different generational constellations and archetypes.
Still, the book provides a justification for my use of characters that seemed 1950ish to Stan. Unfortunately, nothing in the book invalidates Stan’s other criticisms, which were spot on.
