The Fourth Turning
nothing is older than our habit of calling everything new.
William Strauss • The Fourth Turning
Time begins with a fall from grace; struggles forward in an intermediate sequence of trials, failures, revelations, and divine interventions; and ends with redemption and reentry into the Kingdom of God.
William Strauss • The Fourth Turning
Every cycle had four turnings, and (except for the anomalous U.S. Civil War) every cycle produced four generational
William Strauss • The Fourth Turning
pathless time has also become a supreme spiritual goal, the “knowing beyond knowing” of many Eastern religions.
William Strauss • The Fourth Turning
With artificial light, we believe we defeat the sleep-wake cycle; with climate control, the seasonal cycle; with refrigeration, the agricultural cycle; and with high-tech medicine, the rest-recovery cycle. Triumphal linearism has shaped the very style of Western and (especially) American civilization. Before, when cyclical time reigned, people... See more
William Strauss • The Fourth Turning
Over the millennia, man has developed three ways of thinking about time: chaotic, cyclical, and linear. The first was the dominant view of primitive man, the second of ancient and traditional civilizations, and the third of the modern West, especially America.
William Strauss • The Fourth Turning
Americans' chronic failure to grasp the seasonality of history explains why the consensus forecasts about the national direction usually turn out so wrong.
William Strauss • The Fourth Turning
“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.”
William Strauss • The Fourth Turning
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 a new one.