(First diary... please be gentle!)
I found JuliaGrey's diary today on the rec list very interesting reading:
Old Farts, Go Home!
All the comments from Kossacks of various generations were fascinating, and very much in line with what I have been reading about how history not only shapes generations... but that generations shape history.
And our presidential candidates' generational place in time may affect their legacy in the coming Crisis... Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards... along with a few people who are not running for president at all.
In short, the Gray Champion is coming.
I'm a new poster here, but have lurked around without registering since I volunteered for the Dean campaign in 2004. Since late 2005, I have been an adherent of the late William Strauss and Neil Howe's generational theories. (To give it more cred here, I can say that Al Gore is also a huge fan of what we devotees call The Theory.) In four books, Generations, 13Gen, The Fourth Turning, and Millennials Rising, Strauss and Howe have cogently posited that generations have driven history through all of modernity.
There seems to be considerable confusion about the generational placement of the one Republican candidate who is significantly older than the Boomers (McCain) and the one candidate who was born after 1960, at the tail end of the Boom (Obama). Strauss and Howe, who are/were both Boomers, actually have more commonsense boundaries for the living American generations, and explain [i]why[/i] they use cultural markers rather than population and demographic trends as cutoff boundary dates.
LOST -- 1883-1900
GI (Greatest) -- 1901-1924
SILENT -- 1925-1942
BOOM -- 1943-1960
X (13th) -- 1961-1981
MILLENNIAL -- 1982-2001 (?)
HOMELAND (New Artist) -- 2002 - present*
Space here does not permit me to delineate the whys and wherefores for these dates. I can say that on the forums associated with Strauss and Howe's work, we've pretty much kicked the tires and found that they fit. For instance, I was born in 1977. I always knew that Generation Y was a silly label for us, and we really are not Millennial. Strauss and Howe were the first to actually recognize that we were very late Xers on the Millennial cusp. Similarly, everyone on the generations forums recognized Obama as a Boom/X cusper -- he has traits of both generations.Each generation seems to fit one of four cyclical archetype that is best explained in the book The Fourth Turning. A short description can be found here: Generations and Archetypes
So what does this have to do with politics?
The Fourth Turning is subtitled "An American Prophecy". Instead of history being linear, Strauss & Howe propose that it is cyclical -- and in the case of Anglo-American history in the modern period, consists of four seasons or turnings. The first turning is a High, the second is an Awakening, the third is an Unraveling, and the fourth is a Crisis. All four turnings together are a saeculum (really, read the book).
Here are the dates they propose for 20th and 21st century turnings:
UNRAVELING 1908-1929
CRISIS 1929-1946
HIGH 1946-1964
AWAKENING 1964-1984
UNRAVELING 1984-2005? (The Fourth Turning was published in 1997)
CRISIS 2005?-2026?
Feeling as if we are on the verge of Crisis is pretty commonplace among Americans. Knowing that a Turning is inevitable whenever a new generation enters a certain phase of life is explained by the Theory. So those of us at the The Fourth Turning forums have been watching this election with excitement. Many of us have been waiting for this moment ever since we read TFT more than 10 years ago.
The theory is that a Crisis occurs when a Prophet generation reaches elderhood, a Nomadic generation reaches midlife, and a Hero generation reaches young adulthood. But Crises are necessary, just as winter is. After winter comes spring, and a new High... in short, a new world.
Everyone whines about the Boomers, but as the child of two core Boomer parents, I know that their generation has many, many good men and women. As a Gen-Xer who is allergic to cynicism and got ridiculed for my idealism by my peers, I appreciate the fact that so many dreamed big dreams in the 1960s, but that so many of them turned to nightmares during my own lifetime.
So I was quite electrified when I read the most compelling part of The Fourth Turning of all. It comes from a Nathaniel Hawthorne story.
One afternoon in April 1689, as the American colonies boiled with rumors that King James II was about to strip them of their liberties, the King’s hand-picked governor of New England, Sir Edmund Andros, marched his troops menacingly through Boston. His purpose was to crush any thought of colonial self-rule. To everyone present, the future looked grim.
Just at that moment, seemingly from nowhere, there appeared on the streets “the figure of an ancient man” with “the eye, the face, the attitude of command.” His manner “combining the leader and the saint,” the old man planted himself directly in the path of the approaching British soldiers and demanded that they stop. “The solemn, yet warlike peal of that voice, fit either to rule a host in the battlefield or be raised to God in prayer, were irresistible. At the old man’s word and outstretched arm, the roll of the drum was hushed at once, and the advancing line stood still.” Inspired by this single act of defiance, the people of Boston roused their courage and acted. Within the day, Andros was deposed and jailed, the liberty of Boston saved, and the corner turned on the colonial Glorious Revolution.
“Who was this Gray Champion?” Nathaniel Hawthorne asked near the end of this story in his Twice-Told Tales. No one knew, except that he had once been among the fire-hearted young Puritans who had first settled New England more than a half century earlier. Later that evening, just before the old priest-warrior disappeared, the townspeople saw him embracing the 85-year-old Simon Bradstreet, a kindred spirit and one of the few original Puritans still alive. Would the Gray Champion ever return? “I have heard,” added Hawthorne, “that whenever the descendants of the Puritans are to show the spirit of their sires, the old man appears again.”
Strauss and Howe go on...
Posterity had to wait a while before seeing him again—the length of another long human life, in fact. “When eighty years had passed,” wrote Hawthorne, the Gray Champion reappeared. The occasion was the revolutionary summer of 1775—when America’s elders once again appealed to God, summoned the young to battle, and dared the hated enemy to fire. “When our fathers were toiling at the breastwork on Bunker’s Hill,” Hawthorne continued, “all through that night the old warrior walked his rounds.” This “old warrior”—this graying peer of Sam Adams or Ben Franklin or Samuel Langdon (the Harvard president who preached to the Bunker Hill troops)—belonged to the Awakening Generation, whose youth had provided the spiritual taproot of the republic secured in their old age.
Hawthorne wrote this stirring legend in 1837, as a young man of 33. The Bunker Hill “fathers” belonged to his parents’ generation, by then well into old age. The nation had new arguments (over slavery) and new enemies (Mexico), but no one expected the old people of that era—the worldly likes of John Marshall and John Jacob Astor—to be play the role of Gray Champion.
“Long, long may it be ere he comes again!” Hawthorne prophesied. “His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril. But should domestic tyranny oppress us, or the invaders’ step pollute our soil, still may the Gray Champion come....”
The rest of the story is here... Gray Champions: Abe Lincoln, FDR & a Boomer Coming to a Worldstage Near You
Part of the theory justifies the fire of the Boomer generation. Those of us in elder and younger generations have our places in time, and our own scripts. (It may surprise many Kossacks to know that Strauss and Howe, and many of us believe that the Boomers have actually raised a generation that is the echo of their own parents... a new GI generation.)
But the Gray Champions of history have, for centuries, come from generations just like the Boomers. They seem to share as a collective broad characteristics. Childhood during a "high". "Awakening" the world during their young adulthood. Retreating into their inner worlds of family and career during a midlife "unraveling".
But in elderhood, they remake the world. Theirs is the vision that lasts for the next 80-90 years, until thatorder of things is worn out, and a new Crisis occurs... and...
Wash, rinse, repeat.
The best of the Boomers will be the ones who will steer us through this Crisis. They will have the talent, idealism, and the life experience to inspire Xer generals and managers, and Millennial workers and foot soldiers to "buy into" the vision. We will see what our society is capable of then. So over at The Fourth Turning, we're having fun watching not only the elections, but the rest of current events, and trying to figure out who will be the next Gray Champions (or "GC").
Many of us think (still think) it'll be Al Gore. Some think it'll be one of the current presidential candidates -- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, or someone yet to emerge. A few wisely point out that it'll depend on the key issues of the coming Crisis... peak oil? Global warming? Terrorism? A devalued dollar? Our crumbling infrastructure?
I don't have any ready answers. I just thought that it was time to insert some hope and some meaning into the generation gap here, and to provide some useful links.
Thanks for reading!