Bias

If I really wanted to, I could continue down the previous path and talk about how “Zombieland” has a good example of a Reactive mentoring a Civic, gaining opportunities for redemption and belonging while showing what needs to be done to survive. Interestingly enough, Woody Harrelson repeats that role in “The Hunger Games.” 

Instead, I’m going to take Harry Potter seriously and start eliminating positive bias from my generational thinking. 

Theories of history aren’t falsifiable, which means they aren’t scientific. One problem would seem to be that there isn’t a way to check proposed tests, there being neither multiple histories to compare nor the ability to run experiments. When alien races are discovered, we may be able to do some cross checks. Or, if there was some way to identify Crisis and Awakening events in bison, elephants, wolves, maybe pilot whales - some animal intelligent and social enough to have culture that could be parsed in this way.  Lacking these options, the natural tendency is to indulge positive bias, always seeing where the theory works but not paying attention when it doesn’t. So when doesn’t it work as we might like?

One of the more damning situations is the set of predictions that were made in Generations that definitely did not come true, concerning future presidents of the United States. The particular prediction I’m considering was that the Boomer generation would start in the presidency in the late 1990s or early 21st century, with GenX starting 10-20 years later.  Instead, the first Boomer was Clinton, elected 1992, and the first GenXer is Obama. One could point out that Clinton read “Generations” and was impressed with it, perhaps enough to positively influence his own success. Still, one of the main absolutely confirmable predictions was unsuccessful, and what value is a theory that can’t predict? 

Another example to consider is the American Civil War anomaly. While Strauss & Howe were able to trace back their proposed generational cycle to the 15th century, they did find that it faltered around the 1870s. Instead of the Hero generation expected from the Crisis, there was a Reactive generation followed by an Artist generation. The Awakening  happens as expected, and the wheel continues to turn after that point. While decent reasons exist for why this anomaly occurred, it’s an acknowledged and definite difference between what is predicted and what occurred. Plus, the lack of another, similar anomaly suggests a hole in the theory around their existence and cause.

Another problem to consider is that two people won’t definitely identify the same Turnings given the same historical events.(A related issue - perhaps less significant - is the inability to recognize a move between Turnings while you’re in the middle of it. “Generations” was published a few years into the Third Turning, though, so there has been exactly one transition to check. )  On “The Fourth Turning” forum, a discussion of Ancient Rome gets several different results, at least one of which is different from mine. (Seems obvious that 44 BC is the start of a Crisis, Christ’s ministry is in an Awakening, the pacification of Judea and Year of Four Emperors as a new crisis, but that’s not what the first proposal on the thread thought.) There is similar disagreement on Russia’s cycle (particularly the period after the Revolution and WWII - when does the Crisis start and end?) If this was approaching a science, we should be able to get similar results.