Episode 308 - Generations, Awakenings, and Gen X Comedy
Max just finished reading the 450-page book "The Fourth Turning is Here" by Neil Howe, so he has a new discussion with Aaron about Generational Theory and its relationship to cultural trends.
Links
YouTube - Trio Fadolín - Millennium Stage (March 22, 2023)
Goodreads - The Fourth Turning Is Here
KnowYourMeme - Hard Times Create Strong Men
YouTube - Civil War - Official Trailer (2024)
New York Times - Big Histories for the Big Future
Related Episodes
Episode 172 - The Fourth Turning Part I - Cycles of History
Episode 173 - The Fourth Turning Part II - Emerging from the Crisis
Episode 214 - War in Ukraine, New York Times Bias
Episode 300 - War in the Middle East, Part I
Episode 272 - Data Science History with Chris Wiggins and Matthew Jones
Episode 295 - Rewriting the Constitution: Did the Founders Screw up the Senate
Transcript
Max: You're listening to the Local Maximum episode 308.
Narration: Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to the Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max:
Welcome everyone. Welcome. You have reached another Local Maximum. Today finally joined once again by Aaron. Aaron, how you doing?
Aaron: I'm doing well. It's been a little while.
Max: It has been a little while. I've been having a good time, I actually just got back from an incredible concert of a trio up in New Canaan, they were called Trio Fadolin. And it felt very fancy very, like very kind of very uplifting music. It was like one violin, one viola, one cello. And they were doing music from Ukraine, from Armenia, from all over the world. And it was, it was quite good.
Aaron: I was just going to toss out that we may be discussing some popular music a little bit later on. Oh, nice. But not what, what typically gets played on that kind of trio.
Max: What type of music is that? That's not classical.
Aaron: You could use the term chamber music probably to encompass it. But I guess classical was really more of a period. Chamber is more of a kind of a style or a format.
Max: I felt like they were almost recording for a, like a movie score or something like that, which is different types of music. But today we're going to talk about the fourth turning. Once again, this is and I just finished reading the book. This is a new book that came out by Neil Howe, “The Fourth Turning is Here”. Now, we discussed his earlier book called “The Fourth Turning”. That came out in 1997 with William Strauss.
So they were talking about the future there. And they were saying, well, the 2020s are going to be a real turbulent decade there. They were saying this in 1997. Well, here we are in the 2020s. Some of his predictions came true. Not all of them but enough to be interesting.
So he decided to write a new book called “The Fourth Turning”, which seems like a combination. It is 450 pages seems like a culmination of all his work as a demographer, political prognosticator. I bit the bullet, and I read all 450 pages
So here you go, you can ask me questions about it. But first of all, let's talk a little bit about what the fourth turning here is. Because this is Strauss-Howe generational theory.
I'm trying to think of how to introduce this, we have talked about this before, particularly in Episode 172 and 173, when we reviewed the older fourth turning book, but it's really a cyclical idea of history. And I first came across this because originally you and I and we were talking about, and we probably should dive into this stuff a little more in the future.
We would always try to make predictions on a technological basis. And so we would use frameworks like the Gartner-Hype cycle, and we would use frameworks like the Law of Accelerating Returns, right — Ray Kurzweil — but I couldn't quite, I didn't have the tools to talk about social change. And I was like, well, that's the way it is, we should just keep it separate.
We were the tech guys, leave social change to other people or just being like, hey, can't predict it at all. So don't even bother. But this, but eventually, I came to the conclusion that, no, social change is a big part of the- it interacts with technology in a very fundamental way. And you can't ignore it if you want to talk about it.
Aaron: And vice versa.
Max: Yeah, exactly. So if you want to talk about social change, you can't ignore technology, which actually — I think Howe should go into more technological change in his book, but that's a little, perhaps criticism that we could talk about later. And if you want to talk about technological change, you should not ignore social change.
And so this fourth turning, Strauss-Howe generational theory gives a really good framework for talking about social change. And really, he's talking about generations and how different generations of people view the world differently. And it's funny because you think, well, why should I view the world exactly the same as someone who was just born the same time as me?
It's not that you view the world the same way you might have different religions, you might have different outlooks on life. You might have different personalities, but you lived through the same events. You heard the same messages. Growing up, you heard the same commercials growing up.
You might not like the messages that society was giving, growing up, you might reject them, but you still had to contend with them no matter what. So there's kind of like, there's kind of like a shared language.
Aaron: Common exposure. I mean, a microcosm of that would be folks who, whether we're talking about World War Two, or Vietnam, or more recently, the global war on terror people who actually were in the armed services and fought overseas and these events, there's a certain camaraderie that they have with other folks who were there, because they have a very distinct shared experience.
Which in that case, is not necessarily shared with their contemporaries who were not in that subset segment of the population. And it creates a certain divide, but also a much stronger bond between those people because of what they share there.
Max: Yes. And not just political and war, but also cultural, particularly pop culture and artistic trends, as well. So for example, if you were in the Silent Generation, as like, I'm thinking perhaps my grandmother was, you would have been a young adult, in the 1950s. When the big names would have been Frank Sinatra or Elvis, right. And you remember that as a young adult.
Now, that's very different. Yeah, we could go online, we could go online and hear those things we still hear, those are such big names, still hear them in movies and stuff. But we weren't around when those people came out, we had a whole different set of cultural phenomena as young adults.
So it does really provide a shared language. And also, just like this is a big, big part of the equation, how, how children are raised. Now, you might look across the world and across the country and say, well, children are raised very differently.
But it turns out, like the experts that tell you how to raise your children, and the the kind of orientation of the schools at the time. And even if you are homeschooled, it doesn't matter, because you're still, you've got your cohort that you still have to contend with.
If you're eight years old, you have to care how all the — well, I don't know if you necessarily care how all the other eight year olds are raised — but how they're being raised is affecting you directly, that your parents can't really do much about.
So why does this create cycles, and I think the reason is that, and this has been noticed, for a long time, it's not that Strauss and Howe made this up, they kind of refined the theory a little bit, which in a way that's helpful to put it all together. But it might not be the only way to refine it.
But it's been mentioned by the ancient Greeks, the Etruscans, the Romans. And more concretely, I think it was a 14th century Arab writer called Ibn Khaldoun, who said “The future is the same as the past.” And they basically said that these cycles are about the length of a lifetime.
So it'll be about 80 to 100 years, and that's called the saeculum. And what happens is, a generation will raise the next generation, depending upon the generations above them. Usually, when you're in your childhood, there are three generations above you.
And then there's elders who can be very old. And they're actually very interesting as well. Because those, what are they called late elders? I think he called them. Elderly elders, you've lived it. You've already lived beyond the full saeculum, you've come back full circle.
Aaron: They’re starting to see repeats.
Max: Yeah, and they actually have very interesting things to say. And so he got into some of that as well. I found that part of the book interesting. But, usually, they're not as many of them around these days.
Now these days, Howe says the cycle might be getting longer, because people are living longer, and they're hanging on to cultural and political significance a lot longer as well. So and we see this in Congress, and I don't have to, I probably don't have to make that argument.
But yes, so generations raise the next generation, the next generation kind of reacts to the events and the attitudes of the previous generation, and that causes this, what ends up being a cycle of about 80 to 100 years.
So one prime example of a good way to think about it is, let's say one generation is shaped by fighting and winning a great war, tired of fighting that war, they know what they fought for, they don’t want to get into another war.
So the attitudes of that generation, they're gonna have one attitude raising their kids, next generation, they have no memory of this. And so they're going to interpret events. And it's not that they're not going to listen to the lessons from their elders at all. But they're going to interpret them very differently than people who lived through.
And so to make that more concrete, we have lost the World War Two generation over the last few years. And so that might affect the way people are interpreting events today. And not only have we lost the World War Two generation, but anyone our age, millennials, younger, we were not raised by people who remember World War Two either.
So it's getting deeper and deeper into the past. So you posted this overly simplified version. Tell me about that. Because I think that's important.
Aaron: I think a lot of people may have seen this in one form or another, but it's kind of meme-ified as “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times. Good times create weak men and weak men create hard times.” And then you loop back over again. Yes.
Max: I keep thinking like okay, we grew up in good times. It's made us weak. And I'm like, okay, times are getting hard. Let's get strong. And then I realized, oh, no, no, we don't get strong. We have to wait until the next generation.
Aaron: Would we be in the hard times? Or would we be the weak men creating the hard times?
Max: Yeah, it's unclear. Now. So I should point out that in Strauss-Howe generational theory they don't. They never talk about strong men or weak men. They don't even talk about hard times or easy times. They're just different. Obviously, a fourth turning, which we're in now, which is the crisis time, could be very hard.
Aaron: Crisis doesn't sound easy. Not smooth sailing.
Max: But you could have hard times in other times as well. And you could have parts of the fourth turning that are not so bad. So they don't create much of a moral judgment on the times and the generations, as some people would like to do. Let's put it that way.
Aaron: Yeah, I mean, and the, I think you're about to touch on the generational types, the names that he granted to them sure, “Hero” and “Prophet”, have strong positive connotations to them. But “Nomad” and “artist” don't really carry negative connotations, either. So they're generally neutral, neutral or positive. It doesn't come with a baked in value judgment.
Max: What's interesting is that, for every turning, all of these things, like everyone kind of participates to create a turning.
Aaron: There are four generations around at any given time. It's just that they're in different stages of the upswing downswing in their dominance, or their role in society, when their particular turning occurs.
Max: Right, right. So here are the four generation types, we'll go through them in order, although I don't really know if there's an order, but you know, let's see. So the first one, well, in cyclical order.
So we'll start with the Prophet, which is what he starts with. That is the first generation type, they're called Prophets, because during the Awakening, they're young adults. These are people who- this is the boomers. They're born after the Great War, and after the great crisis.
So then, after them comes the Nomads, which I think comes from, like the biblical story, where it's like, okay, after the great crisis of the Exodus, now we have the wandering in the desert, and, and the golden calf or whatever. That's the Nomad. So that is, that's Gen X. And we're going to talk a lot about Gen X today, because they're really interesting.
These are people who are today in their 40s and 50s. And who were born probably in the 60s, in the 1960s in the 1970s. And they tend to be a lot more cynical than the generation above them. They tend to be a lot more individualistic. And interestingly enough that the previous Nomad generation is called the Lost Generation. They are the generation that fought in World War One. In Europe, they were literally lost because a lot of them died.
But in America they were people who were born in the late 1800s. So that would include my great grandfather who I met when I was very young, who was born in 1899. These uh, he might have been too young to fight in World War One, or just barely, but he didn't. But you know, a lot of the people who were World War One veterans were not treated the same way as World War Two veterans
Aaron: Was he already in the States at that point?
Max: Oh, yeah.
Aaron: And our, the scale of our involvement in World War One was significantly less than we would see in the next world war.
Max: Well, if I remember correctly — and I hope I'm getting my history right — after World War One, which is later on, towards the fourth turning, they had like the Bonus Army, which was a bunch of World War One veterans who were not happy with the deal that they had gotten.
Aaron: I thought I thought the Bonus Army was Civil War veterans, but I could be mixing things up.
Max: Now I have to look it up to make sure I'm getting it correct. But let me. The Bonus Army was a group of 43,000 demonstrators, 17,000 veterans of US involvement in World War ones who gathered in Washington in 1932.
Okay, so yes, these would have been a lot of Lost Generation folks. And they were also the folks who were in the 1920s involved in possibly the illegal liquor trade, in the speakeasies.
Aaron: Flappers perhaps?
Max: Yeah. Gen X is cool, or Nomads are cool. I like them. They're kind of a Han Solo of the group. And, and so, so we're going to talk about that a bit.
The next is the Hero generation. Now, that's us. That's also the generation that fought in World War Two, they usually don't feel up to the task of doing what the last one did. But that's actually quite common.
Aaron: So does he use the term the greatest generation to refer to that?
Max: No, he uses the term, “the GI generation”.
Aaron: That's a little bit more neutral sounding.
Max: Right, right. And then after — which I think, is the idea. And then after that, you have the artist generation, which is the generation who remembers the crisis times, but they grew up in them.
So their memory of the crisis times is okay, adults are really, really concerned, and you better listen to them. Because some crazy stuff is going down. So the current Artist's generation, he's actually calling “Homelanders”. Gen Z, he actually thinks, is just like the media wants to jump the narrative of the new generation, but Gen Z today is simply just the younger millennials, whereas we’re the older millennial.
So, essentially, these are people who grew up in the wake of 9-11 and COVID. And, and everything in between, and just basically are like kind of this generation is often, they're the most controlled as kids, maybe that's kind of a negative way to put it, but they're the most they have a childhood where it's like, you really have to behave and so they're kind of like the very well behaved.
Aaron: Polar opposite of the kind of Gen Z. latchkey child stereotype.
Max: You mean Gen X?
Aaron: Sorry, yes, I said Z. I was looking at Gen X. Yes.
Max: Right. Exactly. Exactly. And so, that kind of makes sense. Because we grew up in a world where it was that hole between the latchkey and the masks kid, we grew up kind of in between that where the rules on kids were tightening. And I definitely saw that growing up. And I just thought that was always the way it was, it was just that we're just-
Aaron: Childhoods are becoming increasingly scheduled and coordinated.
Max: Yeah. And I just thought that's the way society moves. But no, it's because we were actually in the really hard part of the pendulum back then. Which is really interesting way of putting it. So yeah, so those are the four generations. Artist's generation. Artist’s is a really strangely named one. They are often they are economically collectivist. But that doesn't necessarily mean-
Aaron: So would the previous Artist's generation, would that be the Silent Generation?
Max: Yes. People who grew up, so like my grandparents, or some of my grandparents. I don't know how old your grandparents were. They remember World War Two, but were too young to fight.
Aaron: I think my grandmother was in her early teens during the war.
Max: Right. So your grandmother, same as mine, probably grew up. You might often think, well if Gen X was latchkey, then back then they must have been really latchkey.
But actually, no, it turns out that the pendulum was kind of the other way. Now, obviously, technologically, back then the kids were going to be out, and you're not going to necessarily know where they are. So in one sense, they had more freedom than today.
But it was definitely more of a, at least according to this book, it was more of a society where no, you had to make sure you know, the kids were a little more controlled than- they were more controlled in the 40s than they were in the 70s. And then less control and then more controlled again, in the 2020s.
So that and oftentimes it's the Nomads raising the Artists. So it's not like one generation always raises the other, usually one generation is raised by the two generations above them. So that's kind of, but like, the Gen X will often remember being kind of having too much freedom. And they're like, oh, we don't, we don't want our kids to have that.
So they raise Artists and Artists often don't want to be raised that way, either. And so they overcorrect to the other side. So that's one pendulum. And so this theory has many different pendulums. That's one pendulum that I think is probably the most interesting and probably something that everyone can grasp.
Okay, so these four generation types are always around, but it depends on who's the oldest, who's the youngest, you always have a Prophet generation followed by a Nomad followed by a Hero followed by an artist, you can't go backwards, okay, you only go forwards. You have to wait for the pendulum to go full swing. So the first turning is a high, that's right after the war, that's in the latest one, you can think of 1950s America.
It wasn't only the 1950s. But it's so who's the oldest then? The oldest would be the Nomads. So at that point, it was the Lost Generation was in charge. Harry Truman was a good example of that. Whereas the previous Prophets were fighting World War Two is like a great, the way he put it was like, it's, oh, it's a great battle, but moral battle between good and evil.
Whereas Truman just gets in, he's like, Alright, we're gonna drop a couple nukes and call it a day kind of kind of a thing.
Aaron: But so you made it you made a comment earlier about you can't you can't skip a generation. But you can go back to artist?
Max: Sometimes you could skip or accelerate, but you can't go backwards.
Aaron: You can't go backwards. But you could move, you could move forward a little bit faster.
Max: Exactly. Yeah.
Aaron: And we've talked about cyclic and, and roughly 80 to 100 years, but there's not. And I think we talked about this the first time through, but there's not a hard and fast like, it's got to be 20 years of this and then 20 years of this, there's a little bit of kind of a stretch accordion nature to where those divisions fall.
Max: Exactly. And he talks about this lag, where there's like a period of three or four years, when the new generational arrangement is in place, where you're still kind of falling on old habits until you realize, wait a minute, those other people are not there anymore.
And then a lot starts to change all at once. So it starts with the high where the oldest are the Nomads, followed by the Heroes that just won the war and midlife Artists as young adults, and then the Prophets are little kids. So they're they're not in the equation
Then you move into, and so usually, society has a very positive outlook at that point. Then you move into the Awakening, which is kind of a spiritual and cultural upheaval, which usually include political upheavals as well, but they're not overturning the whole political system. They're more like that they might go along with like, the cultural.
Aaron: So this would be kind of the 60s and 70s cultural movement in the US.
Max: Yeah, and I think it's actually the places it from like, 1963 all the way to kind of like the mid to late 80s. So it's longer than you think. Some good 80s music, I suppose. Although interestingly enough, he puts the Reagan Revolution as part of the Awakening.
It's not just the hippies it's also you know, there's also the evangelical movements as well. So for all these things, it's not just it's not just that this right wing dominant or left wing dominant or traditionalist, dominant or radical dominant, there's, there's kind of a two sides.
Aaron: The whole society is swinging together in exactly a particular direction. It just manifests differently in different parties or segments or sectors.
Max: So that's why he can say, hey, this fourth turning, we can't tell you which, whether red America wins or blue America wins, we could just tell you how they're going to fight each other or how they're gonna relate to each other as this goes on.
So Awakening occurs. Cultural upheavals, then you finally get tired of that. And so that's the Prophets are young adults, they're taking part in this Awakening as young adults, the Artists are also taking part in this Awakening as mid lifers.
One interesting fact that I remember from the book is that after World War Two, the Heroes, the GI generation, they come home, right, and they start having lots of kids, they're tired, is more time stuff, they start having kids and you get the baby boom.
The Artist's generation, the Silent Generation who were too young during World War Two. Now they turn 20, right after the war, right? They start marrying and having kids as well. So you have two generations having kids a lot at the same time to produce the boomer generation, just kind of borrow from both generations, which is actually something similar that might be happening in our future. So I guess, the GI is a lot like us, the millennials waited longer to get married to have kids.
But at the time, and this might not repeat, but at the time, the Silent Generation got married and had kids very young. And as a result, if you look 20 years down the line, the divorce rate went up quite a bit. And then the divorce laws were changed.
He paints us millennials — this has been true for me, not necessarily others — but like as being a lot more being all for marriage and as an institution, but being much more cautious than the previous generation. Whereas maybe the Nomad generation might have been a lot more skeptical.
Aaron: That's certainly the impression that I've gotten however, I wouldn't necessarily have attributed that to a millennial thing as much as I'm in a four year college grad bubble, which, which is a socio-economic indicator, tends to skew much more towards marry later, have children later compared to the population at large.
But also that's a growing portion of the population. As you know, I don't. I don't know if you could say that that is because of or strongly correlated with the turnings but it certainly happens to be at least this time around, happening in tandem with it.
Max: Right. So if we go through the Awakenings, right, high, everyone's raising kids and the Awakening, everyone is involved in cultural upheavals, what happens to raising the kids? Just let the kids do whatever they want. That produces the lost the Nomad generation. So they become young adults. The Awakening kind of sputters out, and you have this Unraveling, which I don't really like that name, because the 1990s were pretty good, as were the 20s.
But it's really a time where, okay, we've had political unity, we've had the Awakening that kind of is table stakes for the new culture. Now the Unraveling is I guess, it's the Unraveling of the institutional consensus from the high, I suppose. So like people are kind of off doing their own thing. And they often say like Unraveling are a great time to have like a frenzy of innovation with like, new startups, new technology.
Aaron: A way that you could couch that is that our latest Unraveling kind of coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union. And so all of a sudden, a force that has for basically two generations focused a lot of our national international efforts. You know, there's this conflict of ideals, you having a concrete enemy, it's gone now. And now that we don't have that unifying focus, that makes sense that things would start to kind of unravel and fall apart, and we'd find other things to fight among ourselves over.
Max: Yeah, it's really interesting. And so one thing that people like to do with this is they'd like to quibble over the dates that the different things start, but you make a good point, because Neil Howe puts, I don't know exactly when he puts the ends of the second turning sometime in the mid 80s. Certainly, the fall of communism has to be a very important event. And I'm sure he would agree at the beginning of the latest Unraveling.
So basically, the latest Unraveling, we Heroes are kind of too young, to remember it, nothing is really settled. You know, there, there's wars and stuff, there's political debates and stuff, but nothing really gets settled during the Unraveling. And then finally, the Prophets, the boomer generation, become the new elders.
And then you move into a crisis mode, where they're like, alright, it's the fourth quarter of our lives, at least, let's bring it on, let's bring on the great good and evil fight. And so that puts us this young adulthood, kind of in the crosshairs of that. I'm sort of interpreting it in a certain way, I'm sure it can be interpreted in many different ways.
And then the new Artist's generation is born and they're kind of they're, they're living amidst this crisis. The Nomads, the kind of Gen X people are raising the new kids. And they're also kind of the ones making the kind of decisions during this time. They're the generals, they're the they're the, they're the doers. They're the practical ones that are putting everything into effect.
Aaron: So they may not be the levers of power, but they're the ones executing.
Max: Yeah, they don't have as much power, because they're kind of not a dominant generation, usually. But they are. I mean, there is power in being the one executing everything. I mean, I wouldn't say that Eisenhower had no power during World War Two, but he wasn't the one who was — and he had a lot of moral influence as well, I'm sure — but he wasn't the one defining the great moral battle at the time.
So I don't know, you could probably you could probably, like, I remember all the examples that are given here, it's you could probably quibble about whether they're good examples or not, but I'll use it.
Aaron: So one thing that you mentioned in passing, was that we could see some departure from this in the sense of things being sped up or condensed in how quickly we move through a phase or how long a generation may actually be on the map there.
One of the things you mentioned in your notes was that departures from this are complex, when societies who are at different swings of their pendulums interact with each other. And I don't know, did he address in his latest book, whether we are at an end of that, that in a society that has become almost completely globalized, kind of a case where all Europe and the US are on different timelines.
They're in different turnings right now. And so you can't you can't map directly between them. Given where we are now in terms of the global economy, global society, is that over until we see a significant fracturing, or could that still be happening today?
Max: Yes, he did talk about the French Revolution and how at the time, like Europe was a little bit behind the Anglosphere, Britain and the US. However, yeah, my impression, and I read the whole book, I internalized it. I'm not sure I get every quote exactly, but my impression of what he's saying is that this may have reset everyone on the same timeline, thanks to World War Two, but we only have one data point. So we don't really have enough. We can't really say right now.
Aaron: Yeah, I mean — tell me to hold this thought if it's inappropriate. But I'm curious, was there anything that he called out specifically that, oh, we got this wrong in the first book? And I'm not just elaborating on the theory, I need to correct something or reverse something we laid out there.
Max: Oh, interesting. No, I don't I don't think I remember that.
Aaron: So, it holds up. He's just got another 20 years of insight to add on to it.
Max: I guess so. And so, right, you talk about like, expanding and contracting timelines. What's interesting is that the Civil War saeculum is kind of messed up in his theory, because, okay what he calls the the era of good feelings, is a really long first turning, that stretches from George Washington, all the way through James Monroe. But historically, when we talk about the era of good feelings, that's usually only talking about that last president, James Monroe, which is really interesting, because no one ran against James Monroe.
But he considers that one long first turning, then you have the War of 1812, during the first turning, the confirmation war, and then after that, you get another high or the continuation of the high, because you had just won or I guess, completed that war. I mean, there’s some arguments over who won.
But an interesting quote on that where he was like, well, oftentimes at the end of a turning the prognosticators make really bad predictions about what's coming next. Because if you're going around in a circle, usually you are looking at like the last 50 years. And that often goes in the complete opposite direction, of what you're thinking. And I think you said, at the end of the first turning, last time, Thomas Jefferson predicted that, pretty soon everyone would be a Unitarian.
I’m not exactly sure what the meaning of what that means, or maybe like a deist, or a rationalist or something. I think he said Unitarian, but, but my interpretation was like, okay, people are kind of people like, very kind of rational, sort of people have sort of turned against religion, maybe. And people want a more kind of metric worldview at the time. And so this is what Thomas Jefferson was predicting, a few years later, right into the, to an actual Awakening that was like,
Aaron: Putting on my engineer hat. I'm trying to visualize this graphically. And I'm thinking, we're talking about a circle. And if we want to stretch that circle over an x axis of time, really that that starts looking like a sine wave, right, and, and whatever we're graphing on that, whatever the amplitude of that is, if you're at a point on that sine wave, you are going to be very tempted to make predictions by trying to linearize you know where you are, and where you've been.
And that works great if you're on the upslope, or the downslope. But as you start to peak, or, or, or hit the bottom of the trough, those linear predictions are going to be very poorly fit to what's about to happen.
Max: Yeah. And usually, when you're at the peak or the trough, that's usually when you are when you finally become confident to make those predictions. Because when you're in the middle, you're like, Oh, well, it's not really a pattern just yet. So that causes a lot of the poor predictions. So does that thing about Jefferson makes sense? I'm trying to understand what he means. But it's essentially like this Awakening will never happen.
So. Okay, so let's see some interesting points of the book that he makes. And you can agree with these or disagree with these. I feel like they're qualitative statements. So it's hard to get data on them, although it's well documented, the book, so maybe, maybe there's some data but he says young adults in the 60s and 70s, that kind of turned against their parents music, all new music.
Now, there are seeds of the Awakening, starts in the high so maybe you can include some music from the 50s in there, as well. But that hasn't happened as strongly there was kind of like a there's kind of a quote like, hey, millennials, you might have your own music new might not love your parents music, but we know you still listen to it and keep it around.
Whereas, the Prophet generation didn't do that as much. And so they say we’ll be wondering why the next few generations will be so different from us culturally, whereas we kept our, our parents music.
Aaron: Interesting. Yeah. And I was, I was curious whether that's a one sided or a a two way street there. How much is it that the next generation is not rejecting their parents music? Or is it that the, the, the parents are not as harshly judging their children's music?
Because I'll put on my angry man yells at clouds hat and say that I think there's, there's a lot a lot of garbage music coming out today, that's just empty pop. And that seems like that's what gets the most play time on. Now, granted, I could say that about a lot of things from the 90s and 2000s too. So there's probably some survivor bias feeding into that.
Max: So if you have a say about it, you're not right. So you're right, on all counts. You could say that at any time. I mean, like, even the 60s and 70s, most of the crap that was produced, we just don't hear anymore.
So, and I think adults are always gonna say kids these days and their music, but you're actually right, because we are at the complete opposite end of the circle, we're at the complete opposite end of the saeculum, from the cultural Awakening. So we are here, the stuff that's coming out now is not really, it's not really that great, we kind of have to wait a few years for the high, and then we'll start to see some seeds of the next Awakening.
So according to this theory, the music should get better in a few years, or it should start to go in the opposite direction. But throughout our lives, they seem to have gotten worse and worse. Actually, that's one of those sine waves that we could be misinterpreting, because we're at the bottom of that, in terms of, I guess, music quality.
Aaron: I remember, actually, let’s switch back to like Occupy Wall Street. And that seemed like this is the moment where the protest songs of our generation should be formed and, and be taken up. And I can't really think of one piece of music or pop culture that came out of that particular movement, that particular time that has any staying power.
So there's something to be said there. As much as we think we might be going through these world defining or generation defining struggles, we're not producing the art, so to speak, that goes with that, that we've seen in some previous generations from I believe that that was the Nomads and the Artists.
Max: I believe it was Howard Stern, who was a boomer who lived through 9-11. And who went from “Turn the entire Middle East to glass and, and kill everyone in the region” to being anti war in about five years or something. And then I remember him saying, “Okay, now all of the protest music and stuff is coming back, probably remembering the 60s and 70s.”
It's like, no, I mean, yes, there's music about that. But are any of them remembered? Like, if you want to think okay, give me some music protesting war that's popular. It's not going to be from the last 20 years. Yeah,
Aaron: It's going to be like 50 years old. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, that makes me think a little bit of the and I don't know how well this extrapolates into current day into the future. But you know, what was the show, M*A*S*H? Which, which was ostensibly set in the Korean War, but was really a commentary on the Vietnam War, and how a generation will use not not their current conflict or their current war, but they'll comment on that by making art about the previous one.
And kind of the cycle of, when did Westerns, when the cowboy movies kind of phase out and all of a sudden the time was right. It had been long enough that they could start making World War Two movies. And surprisingly, we actually seem to be in a resurgence of that. I think what is it? Is it Spielberg? Is doing Masters of the Air and there's some other stuff coming out.
I just saw, I want to say it's on Netflix that they've taken a lot of footage from World War Two and remastered and colorized it. And so I wonder what that signifies that we're seeing? You know, because World War Two movies kind of disappeared, but it feels like there may be coming back a little bit.
Max: But I feel like they've been done in every turning.
Aaron: But why is it that we go back to that particular? Well, we really haven't seen a resurgence in movies about Vietnam. Right. And almost there was a brief period where you got movies about Korea, that really hasn't resonated through the ages in the way that the other conflicts have.
Max: Yeah. So I mean, that was the fourth turning crisis. So that's the important one that they're going to make a lot of more content about. It doesn't mean you can't make content about anything else. But it's just not going to be the same.
Okay, so another interesting thing, a point about Awakening in the book, and maybe this is kind of a scattered, kind of scattered, but just these are just quotes, I remember from the book that were interesting is that the Awakening of the 60s, 70s, and 80s occurred more strongly, Howe claims, in Germany and Italy, the losers of World War Two, and he speculates, the reason of that is that after being on the losing side of World War Two, there's more urgency for cultural change.
And also in the winning side, in the US, there, there is some respect for the World War Two generation, even if it's turning against them culturally, whereas in these other countries, those generations are not going to hold any.
Aaron: We're willing to buy into your kind of wipe the slate clean and fill it with something new.
Max: Exactly. So now, I don't know anything about this time period in Germany and Italy, so I can't really comment on it. But it was an interesting, it was an interesting point. Okay. So another cultural point that I found interesting was we talked about Boomer and Gen X comedians, having a hard time going onto college campuses.
Because back during the Awakening and the Unraveling, you really want to push into peoples, you really want to push people's buttons, you really want to accentuate the differences, you really want to push the boundary.
We've come to the end of that in terms of our kind of cultural preferences, and now the younger generations don't like that as much. So you know, homelanders are and just like the Artists before them, our grandparents might not like that type of comedy. Now also, it's it's all the woke stuff, but I think that-
Aaron: I think I've heard some inklings of perhaps a backlash or the pendulum swinging back in the other direction, but it's not in that generation as a whole. It's very much in certain segments of it.
Max: And there's always going to be there's always gonna be some people who are into that. Interestingly enough, he mentioned some you know, some Gen X comedy and some movies which was, somebody put on Hot Tub Time Machine on a trip I was on recently. And then I was reading the book, Fourth Turning, which is like a very sophisticated book, it mentions Hot Tub Time Machine.
Now, I don't know. Do you remember the movie Hot Tub Time Machine that was with John Cusack and and Rob Corddry? So Rob Corddry, dude kind of carried that movie that is very funny. So the premise is, these are guys in their 40s. So at the time who came out 2010. It would be Gen X folks, and they're not really happy with where their life has gone.
They kind of feel like their youth was misspent, which is a very common theme for the Nomad archetype, and they kind of wish they'd go back in time. So, they go back to the old ski place, the old ski mountain in Colorado, or wherever it is somewhere out west, where they used to party it up, because you know, Nomads in their youth, they're partying it up.
So, they go back there, and the place is a complete dump. You know, a lot of the places they used to go to are closed and boarded up, there's graffiti everywhere. They go to the hotel that they were at, it kind of smells funny, you know. So, right now they are at the end. They're at the end of the third. So the movie takes place at the cusp between a third and fourth turning. We've unraveled.
Aaron: So Unraveling and about to hit the crisis.
Max: Right. So they go to their hot tub. There's like a dead raccoon in the hot tub and they're like, yuck. But then it mysteriously gets fixed and cleaned up. So they decide to hop in. And they get taken back in time to 1986 which is the second turning, turning into the third turning, they went back one turning. Okay.
Aaron: I don't know if that would be the peak or the end of the Awakening, but the very, very much riding the high of The Awakening,
Max: Right. So at the end of the Awakening, there at kind of the peak. Gen X is having a fun time. The mood is very, is very upbeat, jubilant, whereas the movie mood at the end of the Unraveling is, is very negative and so they can see if they can do their life over again.
And so that was an interesting example of a Nomad tale, which I thought was pretty funny. My particular favorite is a movie called Grandma's Boy. I think it came out in either 2006 or 2008. I should know this.
Aaron: This is Adam Sandler.
Max: Right so Adam Sandler is not in it. It’s Allen Covert. And so you could say yeah, he was born in 64. ‘Nick Swardson. He was born in ‘76. So these are all Gen Xers right? Peter Dante born in, doesn't even say where he's born. Man. That guy is completely unknown.
All right. So of course, Doris Roberts is the grandmother, of the Silent Generation, born in 1925. So you can already tell because the movie is called Grandma's Boy — it’s 2006 — it’s about generations, right?
Aaron: Yeah And I'm just looking at the I don't know if it was the poster or the cover from the DVD, but it's the vibe it gives me is very, like channeling Animal House.
Max: Oh, that Yeah. The poster does.
Aaron: Yeah. The artwork on it.
Max: I don't think the movie is anything like Animal House. It's basically, they're stoners, and their whole job is to test video games. You know, and his reasoning is like, hey, this, this works for us. We're not here to, we're not like the boomers that either want to go work for a big firm or want to be very idealistic. This is just, it's fun. We make a living. Great. So they're Gen X video game testers.
And there's a scene where they like, when they take breaks, they go into the video game room, and they play against each other. There's a Dance Dance Revolution game where they're like, they're playing against the millennials and winning. He’s like, oh, it says, I broke the game. Is that bad? Is that you know?
So they had their boss who's a boomer who's always trying to get them to, like he's always trying to get them to do meditation in meetings, to try to, like, find the answer and stuff has always tried to try to find like, spiritual meaning and everything. And they're just like, pfft, this guy and they're just, they're just trying to test the video game or make the video game.
So, and then, of course they have the grandmother, who's the Silent Generation. So it's a very interesting look at the generations as kind of a pretty funny movie, as well. Sometimes one generation makes a movie about their generation too late, and sometimes it works. And sometimes, sometimes it doesn't.
I feel, for example, what's another movie like this another stoner film I'm thinking is, you remember Harold and Kumar? Go to White Castle? Yeah, that was written by Gen Xers about their own college experience, but I think they did a good job of updating it to 2006 so that it was more, it was more millennial focused, they were more like trying to find meaning and everything, not just mess around. Kind of a vibe to it, if that makes sense. Yeah.
Aaron: And I, if I remember correctly, that that kind of became an instant cult classic.
Max: Yeah, it did. And there's examples of movies that didn't work. So I don't have any good examples. I guess one is The Exorcist or well remember during the early 60s and 70s? Well, okay, Gen X wasn't born in the 80s. Because that's already millennial at that point. But, it was still, it was still the second turning point in the early 80s. But basically, this whole genre of the kids are evil, evil children movies,
Aaron: And that's when the whole I'm blanking on the term for it. But the Dungeons and Dragons moral panic happened.
Max: Oh, tell me about that.
Aaron: I don't know. Oh, yeah. So Dungeons and Dragons a classic game, I think it was. I feel bad not having the exact dates in front of you. But I think it was launched in the 70s, but became very popular among school aged kids in like the 80s. And there were quite a few people across the country who viewed this as kind of in the same way that some people reacted to Harry Potter that like, this isn't just a harmless game. This isn't just a story. This is the people are burning witchcraft and actually summoning demons.
And there, there were some concerns about people who like kids who disappeared. And that well, he actually he went down in the steam tunnels to summon a demon and it absolutely went overboard. But people were very concerned about this and very much in line with that, like, the kids are evil kind of thing or maybe not that the kids are inherently evil, but the kids are dabbling with evil.
Max: Right. But we should mention Harry Potter, too. But just to add to this, like the kids are evil, you could probably find movies made about that every year. But they became popular around that time. And so they were popular making money. So studios kept making them, but at some point, people stopped going in large numbers. So they stopped making them and then at some point, it was good kids where we need to instill values.
And so yeah, it's always the Nomads are the bad kids, but the millennials are the good kids kind of a kind of a vibe. And then the Artists are like the sweet quiet kids. So there's kind of that, that progression a little bit. Harry Potter is interesting, because that's like, that's a millennial tale, which is it's almost like Oh, Gryffindor is clearly the Hero generation of the Harry Potter houses.
Aaron: You could certainly try and map the different generational archetypes onto the different houses. And that oh, yeah, that hints at the danger of well, if you just start dividing things up into four groups, and you can arbitrarily kind of squeeze and map it onto anything to fit a pattern. This seems to hold up more. It maps over a more consistent historical pattern than the snapshot approach.
Max: I think many, like important, like cultural and like, and literary and religious works that break into four types often map to each other very well. I don't think that's a coincidence.
Aaron: We don't have to dissect it now, because I think we talked about it in 172, 73. But Star Wars, and how that has very distinct, different generational roles and how they play into the story format there. Yeah.
Max: No, he totally uses these generational patterns for Star Wars. And notice, like The Force Awakens, well, that's an Awakening after the crisis of the original movie. But yeah, so coming back to well, yeah, okay. You know what, I've mapped the four Harry Potter houses onto the four generational archetypes, why don't we have the audience do it and see if it agrees with.
Aaron: Let’s leave this as an exercise to the audience. You tweet us, email us, and let us know what you think. And we'll tell you if you're right or not.
Max: Right, right. Okay. Another interesting point is that the superhero genre was invented during the last crisis, the 30s and 40s during World War Two, a little bit before World War Two that now has unprecedented popularity today, that is the kind of thing that sees a resurgence during a fourth turning.
Aaron: Yeah, so that raises the thought for me. Are we seeing kind of a one to one mapping of that between the World War Two kind of development and rise of the superhero and the popularity of superheroes now, or is there a distinct difference? Are we seeing maybe the rise of more of anti-Heroes rather than Heroes in our superhero media?
Or is my maybe more simplified view of how superhero stories were told back then, being being ineffectively filtered, that nuance or that complexity was always there and I'm not looking back to the right material?
Max: Well, Batman is often a darker kind of a figure. And so my question is, and I don't know this. Batman, it's really campy in the 60s, but then gets darker and darker as time goes on.
Aaron: Is that a one way valve? Or are we going to see a pendulum swing?
Max: Yeah, yeah. Did Batman start in the comics? Because you really have to look at the comics, which is the way, it wasn't like movies and TV, it was that that was the way people were consuming it in the 30s. And the 40s. Was that like a darker grittier Batman for the times? That would be an interesting.
Aaron: I would guess not, but I am certainly not equipped to answer that. But hopefully, some of our listeners have deep knowledge in this field.
Max: Do you think Batman was as campy in the 40s as it was in the 60s? I can't imagine it.
Aaron: No, I don't think it was as campy but I don't think it was nearly as gritty and dark as it has become.
Max: Well it's the look at the genre, though. It's it's, it's yeah, you're trying to do it in a comic book. I think here's a, here's someone who wouldn't have benefited from learning Strauss-Howe generational theory and that's Joel Schumacher, I think was his name. He was the director of the absolute flop, Batman and Robin, that came out in the late 90s.
That was the only one with George Clooney. And it was basically, he really upped the camp. It was the campiest of camp. And people didn't want that people wanted the Christopher Nolan version. So he tried to go in the wrong direction.
Aaron: He was leaning into the way things were pointing and Yeah, didn't anticipate the curve.
Max: So he was trying to go back to the Awakening, when he was in Unraveling, big mistake, big mistake. So I suppose that's the case now. And of course the entire universe of movies, about the whole entire Marvel universe, all came out in this fourth turning, which is, is pretty incredible.
Aaron: Although, I've definitely heard it argued that we've hit superhero fatigue. And now is that because they've squeezed the Marvel Cinematic Universe dry? Or is it because that we happen to be at that point in the turning where no matter how many movies they've made by now, we will be seeing people, people looking for something a little bit different getting tired of that approach?
Max: Well, if it's the former, then we should see movies that feel the same, and by the former, I mean, it's just the Marvel Universe. Then we should see similar themed movies that kind of fill that same need, written about different, different things. So that would be what to look for.
Another thing that gets popular, particularly at the end of the fourth turning is a lot of discussion, and maybe he's I don't know, hopefully, he's not just taking this as like one data point, the 1940s. But like, a lot of movies and or a lot of media about returning home. So that's something to look for, as well.
All right, folks, hope you enjoyed our discussion on the cultural side of Strauss-Howe generational theory, this conversation was done at one in the morning last night, and it goes on another hour. So we're going to play that next week. And that is on the question of how will this present crisis, this fourth turning resolve?
So a lot of the book talks about that, and so if you liked this discussion, not gonna want to miss next week on our predictions on how the fourth turning heads out. I hope you enjoyed as we approach the end of 2023. Have a great week, everyone.
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