The Fourth Turning

more about cash, sexual disease, and going it alone in an unforgiving world. Why? The young-adult Nomad is replacing the young-adult Prophet.

philia (love and harmony) and neikos (strife and separation).

immigrants likewise saw themselves as builders of a millennial New Jerusalem,

“a sudden acceleration of the historical process in a terrifying manner,” sufficient to “release economic, social, and moral forces of unforeseen power and dimensions, which often make return to the status quo impossible.”

practical shortcoming of chaotic time is that it dissolves society's connective tissue.

In the current saeculum, the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies. As World War II wound down, no one predicted that America would soon become so confident and institutionally muscular, yet so conformist and spiritually complacent. But that's what happened. The Second Turning was the Consciousness

Etymologically, the word time comes from tide—an ancient reference to the lunar cycle still retained in such expressions as “yuletide” and “good tidings.” Similarly, the word period originally meant “orbit,” as in “planetary period.” The word annual comes from annus, whose ancient root meant “circle.” The words year and hour come from the same root

Cyclical time is endless, yet also endlessly completed and renewed,

“We are bound to assume as a scientific hypothesis on which history is to be written, a progress in human affairs. This progress must inevitably be towards some end.” “Progress was Providence,” was how Lord Acton later described the prevailing Victorian view. “Unless there was progress there could be no God in history.”