Editing The Forth Turning/Winter Comes Again (section)

==Rediscovering the Seasons ==


“The farther backward you look, the farther forward you are likely to 
see,” Winston Churchill once said. The challenge is to look at the future 
not along a straight line, but around the inevitable corners. To know 
how to do that, you have to practice looking at how the past has turned 
corners. 


In American schools, where most of us first learn history, our teachers 
and books seldom if ever discuss events from a seasonal perspective. 
Recall those pictures of U.S. presidents that line so many classroom 
walls: Were you ever taught to link the mood and events of those 
presidents’ youth eras with the mood and events of their terms of 
leadership? Recall the usual litany about the rise of the modern West 
over the five centuries from Columbus to Apollo 11: Were you ever 
taught about the ebbs and flows within each of those centuries of 
supposedly monotonous progress? Recall all the lessons you heard about 
the American Revolution, Civil War, and the Great Depression and 
World War II: Were you ever taught anything more than bits and pieces 
about the decades that preceded those Crises, that is, about the 1760s, 
1850s, and 1920s? Did you ever study the public mood in those other 
Third Turnings? Or what premonition (if any) people had about the 
Crisis about to hit? Probably not. 


If you learned history in the usual linear style, you probably felt a void. Perhaps you yearned for a more personal connection with the past 
and future, a path through which you could attach a larger drama to 
your own life experience. Perhaps you yearned for a closer connection to 
the ancestral wisdom gained by real people who struggled to build the 
civilization you inherited. Perhaps you yearned for a feeling Americans 
haven't known in decades: to be active participants in a destiny that is 
both positive and plausible. 


You are about to embark on a new journey through modern history. 
There is much to learn—but before embarking, there are some things to 
unlearn. 


You should try to unlearn the linear belief that America (or the entire 
modern world) is exempt from the seasonal cycles of nature. As you 
become acquainted with the saeculum, you will meet a very different 
view, one arising with the ancients—the view that the rhythms of social 
change are reflected in the rhythms of biological and seasonal nature. In 
their search for deeper meanings, the ancients translated events into 
myths and heroes into archetypes, players in a recurring drama in which 
new civic orders (or values regimes) are perpetually created, nurtured, 
exhausted, destroyed—and, in the end, regenerated. In the ancient view, 
this cycle repeats, pursuant to the same beat, in a history without end. 
Time can bring an upward spiral of progress or a downward spiral of 
decline, much like the processes of natural evolution. 


Try to unlearn the linear need to judge change by one-dimensional 
standards of progress. Because nature was more central to their 
cosmology than to ours, the ancients understood some things better than 
we moderns do. They knew that natural change is neither steady nor 
random. They knew that nature neither guarantees progress nor 
precludes it. They knew that the oscillations within a cycle are greater 
than the differences across a full cycle. They knew that one year's (or 
one saeculum's) winter is more like the prior winter than like the 
autumn that came right before it. They knew that a Fourth Turning is a 
natural season of life. 


Try to unlearn the obsessive fear of death (and the anxious quest for 
death avoidance) that pervades linear thinking in nearly every modern 
society. The ancients knew that, without periodic decay and death, 
nature cannot complete its full round of biological and social change. 


Without plant death, weeds would strangle the forest. Without human 
death, memories would never die, and unbroken habits and customs 
would strangle civilization. Social institutions require no less. Just as 
floods replenish soils and fires rejuvenate forests, a Fourth Turning 
clears out society's exhausted elements and creates an opportunity for 
fresh growth. 


Finally, unlearn the linear view that positive change always comes 
willingly, incrementally, and by human design. Many Americans 
instinctively sense that many elements of today's Unraveling-era America 
—from Wall Street to Congress, from rock lyrics to pro sports—must 
undergo a wrenching upheaval before they can fundamentally improve. 
That instinct is correct. A Fourth Turning lends people of all ages what is 
literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to heal (or destroy) the very 
heart of the republic. 


With all that unlearned, you can relearn history from the perspective 
of seasonality. 


This is a book that turns history into prophecy. It takes you on a journey 
through the confluence of social time and human life. In Part One 
(“Seasons”), you will acquire new tools for understanding self, family, 
society, and civilization. You will learn about the cycles of life, 
generational archetypes, turnings, and history. In Part Two (“Turnings”), 
you will revisit post-World War II American history from the perspective 
of turnings and archetypes. You will gain a new insight about why the 
first three turnings of the current Millennial Saeculum have evolved as 
they have. You will read why this saecular journey must culminate in a 
Fourth Turning and what is likely to happen when it does. In Part Three 
(“Preparations”), you will explore what you and your nation can do to 
brace for the coming Crisis. Given the current Unraveling-era mood of 
personal indulgence and public despair, now may seem like a hopeless 
time to redirect the course of history. But you will learn how, by 
applying the principles of seasonality, we can steer our destiny. There is 
much that we can accomplish in a saecular autumn, many steps we can 
take to help ensure that the coming spring will herald glorious times 
ahead. 


An appreciation for history is never more important than at times when a saecular winter is forecast. In the Fourth Turning, we can expect 
to encounter personal and public choices akin to the harshest ever faced 
by ancestral generations. We would do well to learn from _ their 
experience, viewed through the prism of cyclical time. This will not 
come easily. It will require us to lend a new seasonal interpretation to 
our revered American Dream. And it will require us to admit that our 
faith in linear progress has often amounted to a Faustian bargain with 
our children. Faust always ups the ante, and every bet is double or 
nothing. Through much of the Third Turning, we have managed to 
postpone the reckoning. But history warns that we can't defer it beyond 
the next bend in time. 

As Arthur Wing Pinero has written, “The future is only the past again, 
entered through another gate.” Increasingly, Americans are sensing that 
the next great gate in history is approaching. It's time to trust our 
instincts, think seasonally, and prepare. Forewarned is forearmed.

[[Category:Book]]