Dave Pollard's Blog, "How To Save The World" has been running on a Salon hosted website since 2003. This posting was so interesting that I'm going to print most of it.
The
Fourth Turning, The Thirteen Cascading Crises and Generation
Millennium
For those of you
who have not read The
Fourth Turning, its thesis is that history tends to repeat
itself in four roughly twenty-year-long consecutive cycles, and that
we are now on the verge of entering the fourth of those cycles, like
the one we entered in the late 1920s which led to the Great
Depression and World War II. Its authors argue that these long,
somewhat predictable cycles of economic and political behaviours and
results are the reaction of generations of cohorts to the damage done
by previous generations of cohorts, and that each of these cyclic
cohort generations has a unique personality that stands in stark
contrast to the one(s) immediately preceding it. The baby boomer
generation (those born in the 1940s and 1950s) is now two cycles old,
and Gen X (those born in the 1960s and 1970s) are soon to pass the
torch to Generation Millennium (those born 1982-2002), which is just
coming into its own.
What I want to explore in this post is
not the validity of the theory (which did accurately predict
9/11) but rather the characterization of Generation Millennium and
the implications for our future, if the authors are right, and if my
(and a growing number of people's) foreboding about the crises to
come in the next few decades is prescient.
Believers in the
Fourth Turning theory would have us believe that the behaviours and
actions of the boomers (initial idealism followed by a kind of jaded
materialism and general disengagement from the political process),
followed by the behaviours and actions of Gen X, the 13th generation
since the cycles began (characterized by cautious dating and
marriage, an embracing of risk, a preference for free agency over
loyal corporatism, and political pragmatism and non-affiliation) has
left the world stressed out and messed up. The combined psychology of
the baby boomers and the baby bust of Gen X, in other words, is the
lower right quadrant of Adams' cultural profile shown below –
neither liberal nor conservative, but deeply cynical, victimized by
learned helplessness, and living for the moment in a spirit of
anomie:
disengaged, dissociated and afflicted with attention deficit.
Liberals and conservatives have been alarmed and confused by this
trend, and, surprise, Generation Millennium is too. Here's how the
Fourth Turning authors characterize Generation Millennium:
team players
value unity over diversity
carry out the agenda of others
rather than creating their own
not creative or entrepreneurial
accepting of authority
upbeat
hard-working
obedient and conforming
self-censoring
dogmatic
Now consider the fact that there are today more people in
Generation Millennium than there are baby boomers, both in the
affluent nations and worldwide. Thought the population was declining?
Think again. This 20-year cohort is substantially larger than
the boomers 20-year cohort, because not only are boomers more than
replacing themselves, their offspring are living longer. That's why,
for example, high schools are filled to overflowing and university
professors are now considered the profession that will grow the most
percentage-wise in the next decade (though, alas, only slightly more
than a score of underpaid, menial job categories with a lot more
people in them already).
So we are going to have a record crop
of graduates whose personality is either obedient and diligent (glass
half full view) or unimaginative and militaristic (glass half empty
view). Whatever, they're going to put a huge stamp, the largest in
history, on the world they will inherit over the next two decades.
And what will those decades bring, largely thanks to the negligence,
indifference and greed of the two generations that preceded it? I
call them the thirteen cascading crises, because they are
inextricably interrelated, so that as any one occurs it's likely to
precipitate others. And thanks to our reckless, overextended,
live-for-today attitudes (e.g. stealing from Gen X and Generation
Millennium by grabbing the last of the world's natural wealth for
ourselves, polluting the air, water, soil and land thoughtlessly, and
incurring massive debts that Generation Millennium will have to repay
when we're retired or gone) many of these thirteen cascading crises
are long overdue:
the end of oil
the collapse of industrial
agriculture
the collapse of major currencies
economic depression
regional nuclear wars and
genocidal civil wars
bioterror by stateless idealists
famine
pandemic and epidemic disease
large-scale infrastructure
failures: utilities, production and distribution systems
consequences of global warming
housing collapse, foreclosures and
ubiquitous squatter communities
desertification, sandstorms, the
death of the oceans and forests and other unregulated environmental
crises
the end of water
All of these crises are caused by our irresponsible, unsustainable
behaviours: excessive population, excessive consumption, excessive
waste and pollution, excessive indebtedness. Living beyond our, and
the Earth's, means.
By 2025, Generation Millennium will be
between 23 and 43 years of age, and they will outnumber all other
generations by a large margin. They will be facing the first waves of
these thirteen crises, none of which they caused, and will have
certainly learned enough by then to know that the worst is yet
to come (the deniers and believers in religious or technological
miracles, like those who argued the Earth was flat and the centre of
the universe, will finally be silent). What will they do with
this terrible knowledge, trying to cope with this world of constant
and compound crises?
My fear is that, like so many of those
who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, they'll do what they're
told. The Great Depression and World War II was a time when many
people flocked to charismatic, extremist leaders who scapegoated
minorities and promised a way out of crisis, and clung to their
ideologies almost fanatically. There was an appetite for
hero-worship, repression and fierce authoritarianism, which usually
only made matters worse (even the New Deal was widely denounced as
Communism, and only received acceptance because of the popularity of
its sponsor and the failure of all less-generous solutions).
A
more hopeful view is that they (Generation Millennium) will do
what they must. They'll ration, they'll sacrifice, they'll jail
those who exploit or exacerbate crises. They'll figure out how to
live with less instead of burning coal when the oil runs out, and
instead of running nuclear-powered water desalination and filtration
plants. They'll mandate vegetarianism for all because it's the best
way to provide for the greatest number. They'll stop competing and
help each other out. They'll embrace a Generosity Economy because the
market economy will have simply stopped working. They'll radically
curtail travel and learn to live and work local because it's good for
the environment, good for the economy, and stingy on scarce energy.
They'll actually enforce social and environmental regulations.
Which
of these two paths they'll take (or more likely which combination of
the two) will depend on who they are and what they've learned, and
what their emotions and instincts lead them to do. Of most concern
perhaps is that, in this 'age of information', ignorance of history,
of science, and of how the world really works, is rampant, and I have
little faith that we're about to fix that – too many rich and
powerful interests have too much invested in our collective ignorance
and inaction.
If you're a Generation Millennium member
(i.e. under 25) I'd love to hear from you. Your cohorts from the
previous Fourth Turning, the so-called GI generation born in the
early years of the 20th century, are almost all gone, so we have no
idea or memory of how Fourth Turning, 'Hero'
cohorts think or feel. All we know is you're almost unimaginably
unlike us, members of the silent 'Artist'
generation that came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, the boomer
'Prophet'
generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Gen-X
'Nomad'
generation that came of age in the last twenty years of the last
century. That, I think, is a good thing, maybe our future's greatest
hope. The future, for better and for worse, belongs to you.
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Greetings from Excelsior, Minnesota, where the sky is cloudy, but the wood roast is delicious.
