theories of generational type

To unpack the proposed mechanisms of generational cycles, the fourfold annual cycle of seasons will be analogized to the life cycle of the individual and generation in which they play a part, as “the rhythms of social change are reflected in the rhythms of biological and seasonal nature.”1

Strauss and Howe divide the life cycle into four parts, referring to various “ancients” producing similar divisions, including Pythagoras who saw “four phases, each roughly twenty years long and each associated with a season”2 and the Romans who divided life into phases of “pueritia (childhood), iuventus (young adulthood), virilitas (maturity), and senectus (old age).”3 Each phase of life comes with its own distinct opportunities and responsibilities:4

In the spring of life, from birth to one’s early twenties, children are dependent on others for protection, nurture, and avoiding harm. As they grow and learn, they are responsible for acquiring competence and absorbing the values of their community at the behest of elders.

In the summer of life, from one’s twenties to early forties, rising adults in the peak of their vitality end their apprenticeships and enter their socioeconomic roles. They are responsible for serving institutions as members of the majority, generating resources and starting families as the muscle and energy of society.

In the autumn of life, from one’s forties to mid-sixties, adults enter midlife and take on more leadership roles through parenting, teaching, and directing institutions. They are responsible for using their acquired values and experience to maintain the community and take on the mantle of power.

In the winter of life, from one’s sixties to mid-eighties, elders enter the role of stewardship for their communities, supervising, mentoring, channeling endowments, and passing on values with the wisdom of old age, taking advantage of the highest leadership posts. Passed this age, late elderhood is most often a return to dependence in which values are remembered but rarely applied.

As described above, most of humanity has experienced little differentiation between the typical experience at each life stage for successive family generations, both parent and progeny occupying the same roles in roughly the same manner. So long as communities have maintained sustainable practices in stable environments, this equilibrium has provided little incentive for radical creativity or originality. As civilization rose and spread, however, so too did kairotic Great Events, such as the founding of new states and religions. Surplus resources and the emergence of an elite strata of society allowed for generations to emerge in contrast to those who came before them. In turn, the life cycles of successive generations began to exhibit distinct characteristics, leading to the emergence of peer cohorts and social generations. In these dynamic social arrangements, ties to familial bonds and traditions are weakened by the vital bonds of those who share a common experience and destiny.

Whether participating in a Great Event themselves or inherit stories of their significance, peer cohorts are defined by these watershed moments: “the same cataclysm that a 10-year-old finds terrifying a 30-year-old may find empowering, a 50-year-old calming, a 70-year-old inspiring;”5 “children mirror each other’s dread, youth each other’s valor, midlifers each other’s competence, and seniors each other’s wisdom,”6 reinforcing collective attitudes, values, and identity. As life goes on, wave-like fluctuations in social attitudes and behaviors emerge between and through successive Great Events. These in turn further “shape the personalities of different age groups differently according to their phase of life, [who then retain] those personality differences as they grow older."7 In youth, circumstances may lead adults towards over- or underprotection; in rising adulthood, criminality and drug abuse may be more rampant, and marriage and career opportunities may come easier or harder; power is at times taken sooner in adulthood, other times later; in elderhood, counsel may be readily heeded or haughtily rejected. By analogy, some summers of life may be cooler and wetter, some winters more mild or severe. The rhythmic variations of the social life cycle, if taken as a synchronic snapshot of history, show distinct ‘constellations’ of shared generational experience and attitudes up and down each stages of life, opposed to a universal, invariant life cycle. Instead, a recurrence of peer personalities emerges, interlocking, fourfold individual and social cycles in which “everyone who lives a normal lifespan experienc[e] every constellational era once.”8

It is this “ongoing interplay of peer personalities [that gives] history a dynamic quality. How children are raised affects how they later parent. How youths come of age shapes their later exercise of leadership – which, in turn, substantially defines the coming-of-age experiences of others."9 In turn, the engine of social progress generated by peer cohort generations “never matters as much where a generation is as where it is going,”10 not by its reputation at any particular stage of life but through the retrospective and holistic lens of a generation’s life cycle and its impacts on the generations around it. The desire for a generation “to leave behind a more secure and affluent world than [a generation] inherits”11 in turn produces its “own unique brand of positive and negative endowments [with] its own special way of helping or hurting the future"12 that other generations must, in turn, correct for – a pattern made most striking across child-parent generations.

Indeed, it is the generation in their youth who are best able to perceive the shadow and shortcomings of their the generation that raises them, who are themselves reacting to the shadow of their parents in late elderhood, forming an oppositional dynamic between familial lineage and peer cohort generations. For this reason, Strauss and Howe theorize that children and late elders may bond over generational similarities, and that “the most noticeable endowment neglect or reversal is likely to occur in the endowment activity associated with the generation currently passing beyond elderhood,”13 as the terminus of their influence on culture creates a void that the young generation must rise to fill. Children are thus inclined towards a life path that mirrors that of their grandparents, as a “generation isn’t like the generation that shaped [it], but it has much in common with the generation that shaped the generation that shaped [it]. Archetypes do not create archetypes like themselves; instead, they create the shadows of archetypes like themselves.” When this principle plays out across the generations, “the oscillations within a cycle are greater than the differences across a full cycle,”14 analogous to an octave. This Heroclitean dynamic of entiodromia explain why “the story of civilization seldom moves in a straight line, but is rich with curves, oscillations, and mood shifts. The ebb and flow of history often reflect the ebb and flow of generations”15 that regulate the velocity of social change through continual minor readjustment, balancing “between risk and caution, reflection and activity, [and] passion and reason,”16 making “the cycle of generations a powerful force for rejuvenation, a balance wheel for human progress.”17

Of course, history shows that the rise of peer cohort generational dynamics is no guarantee of a social cycle’s perpetuity. The disequilibrium of dynamical social orders has often led to their dependence on founders and their peer generation; without their hard-fought wisdom or successive generations’ first-hand experience of their efforts, their creations would often not survive their passing. The cycle winds down: no rising generation takes up the call for recreating the social order of those passing, no Great Event arises to catalyze progress, or else it overwhelms the collective, leading to collapse, often four generations from their origins.18 At the same time, this is the inevitable risk and opportunity of progress, as the “dynamic of generational aging and dying enables a society to replenish its memory and evolve over time,”19 producing the correspondence of individual life cycles and that of the collective, social cycles, both embodied by Strauss and Howe’s preferred Etruscan term, the saeculum. Otherwise, “without human death, memories would never die, and unbroken habits and customs would strangle civilization.”20 In turn, society may undergo a rebirth should a novel ‘constellation’ of generations manage to cross the threshold of destiny and revolutionize what came before.

1 Fourth Turning, 20.

2 Fourth Turning, 53.

3 Fourth Turning, 53.

4 The four phases of life are paraphrased from Generations, 60, which uses the age brackets 0-21, 22-43, 44-65, 66-87; and The Fourth Turning, 55-57, which uses the age brackets 0-20, 21-41, 42-62, 63-83. Due to this inconsistency, I chose less specific periods of time.

5 Generations, 48.

6 The Fourth Turning, 58.

7 Generations, 34.

8 Generations, 351.

9 Generations, 33.

10 The Fourth Turning, 97.

11 Generations, 368.

12 Generations, 39.

13 Generations, 372.

14 The Fourth Turning, 21.

15 Generations, 39.

16 Generations, 448.

17 Generations, 373.

18 Fourth Turning, 88, paraphrases an illustrative model of Ibh Khaldun describing the collapse of dynasties: “The first generation establishes rule by conquest, after which it governs with unquestioned authority. The second generation witnesses and admire that achievement, which it weakly emulates. Lacking firsthand knowledge of how the dynasty was established, the third generation not only lacks the founder’s qualities but ignores them, so the dynasty weakens further. Coming of age under ignorant tutelage, the fourth generation reaches adulthood despising the dynasty, which then crumbles. Out of the chaos a later generation produces a new king and a new dynasty, and the cycle repeats.”

19 Fourth Turning, 14.

20 Fourth Turning, 21.