Cycles in U.S. History

Remembering the Future

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The lessons of the past are the only tools we have for understanding what our future might have in store for us. Anticipation of the future might be the only way we can improve our chances for survival.

Strauss & Howe offer a great analogy for viewing cycles of history. They suggest that the cycles should be viewed as a spiral rather than a never ending, repetitive wave. As social behavior travels along the spiral, patterns repeating each time around, the thrust of History moves ever onward. In other words, history does not actually repeat, only the human reactions to events repeat as generational alignments recur.

In this space I am going to use Strauss and Howe's ideas about cycles to ponder the possibilities for the near future. A lot of what is here can be gotten from their new book The Fourth Turning. There is no magic here. It is just an exercise in projecting a particular view of the past onto the future. That's why I say I am not predicting the future I am remembering it.

It is difficult to know if particular turns are occurring while they are happening, but we are now approximately at the end of an inner-driven or the beginning of a crisis era. Personally, I believe the turn into the Crisis era began with the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Therefore we now find ourselves a few years into the Crisis period of the present historical cycle. For comparison, this would put us roughly in the year 1677 in the Colonial Cycle, nearing the beginning of the Glorious Revolution. The time would be approximately 1770 in the Revolutionary Cycle, an era following war (post-French and Indian) approaching the start of the American Revolution. We would be living around 1846 in the Civil War Cycle (this is hard to judge due to the difficulty with generational alignment during the Civil War), an era of struggle with the expansion of slavery and loss of national unity at the beginning of the Civil War. And finally we find ourselves at 1928 in the World War Cycle, nearing the beginning of the Great Depression and WWII. Clearly a time of concern is upon us. I have come to imagine that the approaching Crisis period will be related to energy depletion and a power-down of the industrialized world so I am going to tentatively describe the coming era as the Power Down Era and I am even starting to think of the Present Cycle as the Industrial Power Cycle.

In the following paragraphs we will investigate several social themes with reference to these points in time to try and understand the similarity in each cycle. Then we will see what the Present Cycle might have in store for us.

There are many pages out there dealing with the future. I list a few of them here as a general reference to the kind of thinking that is going on in this field not as a corroborative data source for the ideas put forward on this page.

• How advances in technology may reshape humanity an illustrated speculative timeline of future technology and social change
• Futurist.com
• A Primer on Climate Change

Back to the Present Cycle