I was listening to a podcast that talked about Steve Bannon’s worldview, and how it was informing the current constitutional crisis in our country by amping up people’s emotions to a fever pitch. According to his perspective, the human timeline is not a progression, improving, building on the mistakes and learnings of past generations, but a cycle, turning back on itself, leading to wars and conflagrations, and then starting over. This viewpoint is explained in a book called “The Fourth Turning: What Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny.”
In the book, authors William Strauss and Neil Howe theorize that the history of a people moves in 80-to-100 year cycles called “saecula.” The idea goes back to the ancient Greeks, who believed that at a given saeculum’s end, there would come “ekpyrosis,” a cataclysmic event that destroys the old order and brings in a new one in a trial of fire.
This era of change is known as the Fourth Turning, and Bannon, like Strauss and Howe, believes we are in the midst of one right now.
According to the book, the last two Fourth Turnings that America experienced were the Civil War and the Reconstruction, and then the Great Depression and World War II. Before that, it was the Revolutionary War.
All these were marked by periods of dread and decay in which the American people were forced to unite to rebuild a new future, but only after a massive conflict in which many lives were lost. It all starts with a catalyst event, then there’s a period of regeneracy, after that there is a defining climax in which a war for the old order is fought, and then finally there is a resolution in which a new world order is stabilized.
https://www.businessinsider.com/book-steve-bannon-is-obsessed-with-the-fourth-turning-2017-2
While most journalists who have reported on this connection have done so with a sneering derision, perhaps righty so, calling these ideas “crackpot theories” and “superficial,” my Mormon spidey senses immediately started tingling when I heard that Bannon sees “time as a cycle” whereas most others (particularly non-conservatives) see “time as a progression.” The Book of Mormon famously talks about time as a cycle, a “pride cycle.” There are plenty of similarities here, even though the Book of Mormon doesn’t specify an 80 year cycle like Bannon’s favorite read does. The Book of Mormon pride cycle is deliberately vague, but posits that society goes through the following cycle over and over throughout time:
- Righteousness
- Prosperity
- Pride
- Wickedness
- Destruction
- Suffering
- Humility
- Repentance
- Back to Righteousness
The problem with the pride cycle is that it is essentially preaching a “prosperity” gospel in which prosperity and wealth are God’s reward for righteous behavior, which is contradicted by scriptures and teachings of modern prophets alike, although it keeps turning up like the proverbial bad penny. Humans love nothing more than to claim they have earned their wealth & prosperity. A different interpretation states that the pride cycle is really a caution against turning our backs on the poor, that when society forgets the poor, we are ripe for a fall. That feels particularly salient, and pretty mainstream.
But a different criticism of Bannon’s favorite book also feels important to consider: that the issue with these types of theories is that they rely on determinism.
The dream of formulating a scientific theory of history, with predictive capacities, was once a common project. In the 19th century, as the field of history, like other intellectual pursuits, professionalized, many practitioners sought to put the discipline on a scientific footing by elucidating laws or grand patterns in the past—laws and patterns that might also foretell the future. From Auguste Comte and Karl Marx up through Arnold Toynbee, historians proposed assorted theories about the development of civilization. . .
To be sure, there’s nothing controversial about the basic idea that wars and other conflicts may be followed by bouts of calm, or that eras of far-reaching reform may produce backlashes or cooling-off periods. But few historians today take seriously the idea that an inner logic guides the course of history like a gyroscope. . .
One giveaway are the charts, tables, diagrams and bulleted lists that litter the book, which find a way to fit every consequential figure and event into neat patterns. If history unfolds as inevitably as this, then the study of human decision-making in the past—or even in the present—becomes all but irrelevant. . . . The Fourth Turning also, like an astrologer or fortune teller, plays fast and loose in shuttling between its big claims and specific evidence. Its contentions are vague enough that it’s easy to justify them with a handful of illustrative examples, with contrary cases simply omitted. It also mistakes symptoms for causes.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/20/stephen-bannon-fourth-turning-generation-theory-215053/
Seeing the authors’ tables and charts and diagrams that shoehorn historical events of various relevance into their neat little timeline boxes reminded me of the Cleon Skousen books that were so popular in Mormon culture a few decades ago, outlining the history of the earth according to a 7000 year time model, considering each one a thousand year dispensation, and forcing all historical events into a neat box to support the books’ theories. The critique of Bannon’s favorite book seems to apply here as well:
The penchant for grand explanatory theories frequently reflects an inflexibility of thought, a resistance to contrary evidence, an eagerness to fit everything into an all-encompassing system. But successful policy making depends on intellectual nimbleness and pragmatism, on being able to revise your ideas based on new events and information, on understanding history as a set of contingent choices. The type of person enchanted by The Fourth Turning’s overly neat diagrams and mechanistic arguments, who isn’t compelled to pick apart its glib generalizations, is not someone whose intellectual instincts encourage confidence.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/20/stephen-bannon-fourth-turning-generation-theory-215053/
On another level, this difference in worldview between time as a cycle and time as a progression seems to be at the core of some of our current political disconnects, and it comes up with some frequency at Church. How often have you been in a lesson in which the teacher or someone in a class brought up their assumption that the world is getting “worse and worse” and “more and more wicked,” even claiming that “things that used to be good are now bad, and things that used to be bad are now good.” Well, that, my friends, is a person who sees time as a cycle, getting worse and worse until an inevitable destruction and re-setting that will put us back on an upswing. That’s, at least on some level, a low-key determinist view in which what we individually do doesn’t really matter; time just works this way. We are caught up in a swirling eddy of forces beyond our ken.
But I don’t see time that way. How could I? I’m a woman! I don’t yearn for the 1950s when marital rape was legal. I don’t yearn for the 1970s when sexual harrassment in the workplace was more common than not, or when women couldn’t have a credit card in our own name or needed a husband’s permission to get birth control pills. It has always seemed to me that the idea of time as a cycle is the same narrative for the dying patriarchy, the idea that things are getting worse is the same as the idea that the privilege of white cishetero men is being eroded, which is basically good for everyone but white cishetero men. The world isn’t getting worse for me, for minority races, or for LGBTQ people. It’s getting better, not without backlash, but progressing little by little.
Of course, another interpretation of the pride cycle is that it’s describing a struggle for dominance, and whether it’s progress or backlash, depends on your own position in that struggle. If you are the currently powerful group, others gaining power is a threat, is a crisis, is “the world getting worse,” and if you are a marginalized group, gaining rights and a voice are evidence of improvement and progress, things getting better or less bad. Conservatives see their tenuous positions in the culture war as an attack; progressives see it a long overdue amelioration.
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”.
Isaac Newton (1675)
The progressive view is that you can’t really go back to the past, even if you backslide a little. We still learn from mistakes, we improve our understanding, the human condition improves, burdens are lifted through technological advancement. We stumble, but we fall forward.
The problem I have with the conservative view is a mischaracterization of progress as wickedness. Extending freedom and access to women and minorities, and allowing LGBTQ people to enjoy the same rights others take for granted can only be positives in my view. Those who consider those advancements to be evidence of evil are the ones who are creating dystopia. Seeing it as an inevitable cycle, something predicted in scripture, creates a fatalistic mindset of self-fulfilling prophecy, aggrandizement, catastrophizing, and inaction, all of which make negative societal outcomes more likely.
- Do you see time as a progression or a cycle? Why?
- Is this a left / right divide?
- Is time as a cycle a dangerous perspective or a valid caution?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
The rhetoric about the latter days espoused by the COJCOLDS hasn’t changed much since I was a teenager in the awesome 80s. Like the youth of today, the youth of the 80s had been preserved for the last days when good was seen as bad and bad was seen as good by the world. Back in the 80s, like today, we were living in the most evil of times. It makes me wonder how evil (by the Church’s definition) things will be by 2050. It also makes me wonder if the Church in 2050 will treat the LGBTQ community as “normal”. Isn’t that how it works? ….today’s evil is tomorrow’s mainstream and the Church changes with the times but then says the world is more evil than ever. Shout out to J Holland.
Four-quadrant civilizational or cosmic cycles (rise, zenith, fall, nadir) are very ancient, and found e.g. in ancient India. Besides the “Fourth Turning” guys, Peter Turchin would be another prominent contemporary exponent. But all kinds of cycles have been proposed for economics, US politics, and what have you. It is possible that some things (like economics) are cyclical to a degree, while others (like technology) are progressive. Noting that “the myth of progress” is one of our cultural blind spots.
Actually, I’m wrong: the ancient Indic system resembled the Greek Golden / Silver / Bronze / Iron Ages, so that each successive age has been worse. Except in the Indian version, the Kaliyuga (the worst age, the present age) will eventually give way to the Satyayuga (another Golden Age).
I have been developing my thoughts on self-fulfilling prophecies and have not felt quite ready to articulate them. But this post hits on much of what I am thinking, so maybe I can use the comment thread – hopefully not as a thread-jacker but as an appropriate contributor – as a place to start refining what I am pondering: that because of expectations or “prophecies” of war, devastation, and destruction, when terrible things start happening, those who believe in the prophecies do nothing to stop them, and may even (often do) make them worse – especially if they also think that passing through those terrible events is a prerequisite for a glorious and desired end-result. It’s my biggest gripe right now with the mentality in church. “Things are getting worse and worse, but it’s it wonderful that we are seeing prophecies fulfilled for the Second Coming!” When there is an expectation of judgment and needing to be on the “right” side, people who believe in these prophecies build trenches and go to war, instead of finding middle ground and healing. They think the healing only comes AFTER destruction, not as a preventative to destruction. I am feeling lately that so much of what people believe about end-of-days prophecies actually creates the end of days. I am scared that there is no way to arrest these prophecies once enough people are convinced that destruction is a good thing. This idea of the “Fourth Turning” makes my skin crawl. The Politico quote is right that such a mindset results in lack of flexibility and openness. Scary.
Great post. Agree with josh h that the Mormon Church hasn’t changed much. I was a 15 year old investigator in 1980 and I heard exactly the same kind of stuff about how we were the “choice generation,” etc. It’s interesting, because josh h’s comment highlights a tension in LDS thought and rhetoric about cycles and change. On the one hand, we get the same, boring lessons every year, hear the same tired rhetoric about lots of topics (LGBTQ, Law of Chastity, Word of Wisdom, tithing, etc.) and generally are a stagnant and unimaginative church, despite our claims about “continuing revelation”. On the other hand, we also hear all of this rhetoric about cycles, change, the world getting more evil, etc. It’s rather bizarre.
To the larger point of your post, I do think this is at least in part a left/right issue. The overarching narrative of progress, change, etc. being evil or scary has been a conservative talking point for a long time. Same with the church. Again, we’ve got that odd tension about continuing revelation and the idea of a “living church”, but in the main, I think LDS rhetoric and thinking is both stagnant and conservative. And of course, that mirrors a lot of the Book of Mormon narrative. How many times do we read about periods of relative prosperity (we only get about one verse when things are going well) and then something new or different happens and that’s what throws everything into chaos. Conservative thought and conservative institutions hang their ability to fear monger and keep their followers in line upon making the future as scary as possible so that their followers will want to embrace the status quo (and yes, the Left fear mongers, too, just in different ways). This is a tried and true practice of both the church and American conservatism. And of course, the idea of a cycle plays into this. If you can make time into a cycle, you can really stymie any attempts by your followers to be swayed by progressivism because if they buy into the cycle model, they will always fear the recurrence of the “bad times” and want to cling to the “good times”.
To be fair, one can see a few patterns in history, though I would say not that history repeats itself, but rather that patterns of human thought reoccur. And of course, another bonus of viewing time as a cycle is that one can both blame others for promulgating “evil” (progressive) doctrine and blame the cycle itself for the rise of “evil”, which means that introspection and self-reflection don’t have to be part of the equation, which means that there is a powerful incentive for keeping people ignorant in order to curtail their ability to self-reflect. See both Trump and the LDS Church for examples.
Preaching pending apocalypses is good business. Just ask Glenn Beck and the Q15. Resigning our free will in the face of predetermined outcomes works wonders for the TBM lazy learners.
Just look at the benefits of gloom and doom: No need to understand/confront issues of the day (e.g., climate change LGBTQ rights , etc); suspension of critical thinking and the freedom to endlessly engage in wacko conspiracy theories. After all, those pesky Gadiantons lurk behind every corner.
It is difficult for me to understand belief in a God that purposefully inflicts cycles of tragedy on humankind. Perhaps our ‘evolved’ human instincts are to blame and God elects not to interfere (see Deism). I still maintain a modicum of hope that our society can progress beyond the lust for power and filthy lucre. I know – my naïveté runs deep.
Great post Hawkgrrrl! Here are some of my rambling thoughts. I think everything on earth is just a cycle. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. I do good, I start to do less good, I feel bad, I repent, I do good, and on and on and on. One hundred years ago we had a pandemic and a world war. I was a teenager of the 80’s and I see us again cycling through the “Chosen Generation” theme and “this generation was saved to prepare the world for Christ”. The same things do keep happening over and over again which can be interpreted as a cycle. On the other hand, I do not believe things are continuing to get worse and worse. Some things are better, some things are worse. And as mentioned above, whether it is worse or better depends on which group of people you belong to. Is it good or evil that women have more autonomy? With less autonomy they stayed home and gave constant support to their families. Whether that is better or worse may depend on if you are the woman staying home or the man gaining the benefits of a full-time wife. But technology is linear not cyclical. So to sum up my ramble, I don’t think time or history fits neatly into any particular box or theory, but I do believe many many things are indeed cyclical and we can use past mistakes to hopefully make our present better.
Even Hawk Girl cannot dispute the irrefutable fact that the morals of society have degenerated to lows not seen in any living person’s lifetime.
Instead of seeking knowledge and wisdom, the masses of today seek after immediate gratification, regardless of the consequences. They follow the examples of Cardi B and Machine Gun Kelly in a contest to see who can engage in the most depravity. Even the most demented, sweatpants wearing stoat couldn’t compete.
In addition, the level of laziness amongst the great masses has reached unmatched levels. The hordes sit around in basements playing violent video games instead of engaging in honest labor. There sense of entitlement is unmatched.
So let us not be so proud of how society had “advanced.” In many respects, the masses have regressed to historic lows.
In what cycle do stoats wear sweatpants?
I’m going for spiral, if I must. Hopefully on an upward trajectory but maybe not. More likely a horizontal trajectory…
As for time, I have long thought it to be an artefact arising from the imposition of three dimensional constraint…
JCS: We could have a very interesting discussion about the premise that we are now living in the most “immoral” of times. Mormons tend to view the world through the simple lense of Alma 39:5…that sexual sin is second only to murder in the eyes of the Lord. Is the world that simple? It’s all about sex? Even if it is, consider these points:
1. throughout much (most?) of history women were seen as the property of men and men were free to do whatever they wanted with women. That’s more moral than 2022?
2. throughout most of history homosexuals have been consigned to the closet and their sexual freedom was 100% restricted. That’s more moral than 2022?
I could make many other arguments supporting the idea that 2022 is MORE moral than the past, not LESS. But I’m focusing on sex and sexuality in this post because I know that’s how most Mormons define morality / immorality.
Grinding the faces of the poor… that’s immoral… one could say that’s exactly what big corporations and shareholders are doing when CEOs are paid obscene amounts and the people at the bottom don’t even get a living wage..
Slavery is immoral. I recently saw an art exhibition on the topic of modern day slavery…
So whilst some things have improved, widening inequalities over the past decades are destabilising our societies..
The LDS “pride cycle” is as unfounded as any other template that imposes a grand historical cycle on the past. Yes, with some effort and selective deployment of facts, you can shoehorn the past into this or that cycle model, but it is imposed on the narrative, not inherent in it. There are some natural cycles — seasonal weather patterns, the business cycle, sunspot cycles, and so forth — but that’s not how history works. It doesn’t follow a script. It’s an open process. That’s why the predictive power of historical cycle theories is basically zero.
Funny how the “pride cycle” is trotted out to explain Nephite history — that is, narrative patterns in the Book of Mormon; it’s not like we have actual historical sources like with the sort of histories that historians work with — but never applied to, say, the LDS Church and the Mormon people. You won’t get any LDS prophet that stands up and says, “Today, in 20xx, you people are proud, adversity is coming upon us, and the Church is in apostasy.” Which is a good way to illustrate how the “pride cycle” is simply a way to talk about various parts of the Book of Mormon narrative, not a natural cycle (one that actually exists in nature or the way the world works) that explains anything about our time or our world.
I’m afraid I also have to reject the linear model that projects our technological advance into the stratosphere. Have we made advances in medical science and computing which have improved the human condition? Obviously.
But we have shown a lack of wisdom in utilizing technologies for practices which benefit humankind. And some technologies have proven detrimental to humanity and the environment. Wisdom and self-control are still at a premium. Advance the upward movement of those and one will receive well-deserved accolades for generations.
Now, where did I leave my cellphone?
Dave B has an excellent name and makes an excellent point. The Book of Mormon Pride Cycle is always interpreted at a societal level. All the people get proud, all the people are punished, all the people get humble, all the people get rich. It’s oversimplifying to claim that the book is literally saying that every single person is in the same spot on that cycle, but clearly Mormon is making an argument that the entire society is largely moving together through the cycle. In the present day, we never make that claim. The pride cycle is always applied to today as a very individual thing. On the one hand, I fully support looking for individual applications of the gospel – I can’t really do much about society as a whole, but I can try to do something about myself. But if the pride cycle is some sort of fact of our existence, then where are we today? Most TBMs don’t talk of cycles in the present, everything is only a one way arrow: the world was better in the past, it terrible now and will only get worse; the church was true yesterday and is getting truer with each passing day; every generation of teenagers is somehow more special than the last and was held in reserve(r) for the last(er) days. If the BoM can document so many cycles, where are all the cycles in the church in the last 192 years? Maybe we should be looking at a more granular level and individual wards are stakes are continually cycling, but out of phase with each other?
I would recommend reading up on Spiral Dynamics theory. It’s a theory if how cultures grow and evolve over time. Moralfoundations.org is another framework to understand the values of different cultures as more of how they prioritize 6 common foundations.
“Even Hawk Girl cannot dispute the irrefutable fact that the morals of society have degenerated to lows not seen in any living person’s lifetime.”
Morality encompasses more than sex, John Charity. For instance, lynching is deeply immoral. Lynching makes casual sex and even adultery small potatoes. Once upon a time lynching was both common & tolerated. No longer. That’s called progress. Moral progress to be exact.
“Even Hawk Girl cannot dispute the irrefutable fact that the morals of society have degenerated to lows not seen in any living person’s lifetime.”
Morality encompasses more than sex, John Charity. For instance, lynching is deeply immoral. Lynching makes casual sex and even adultery small potatoes. Once upon a time lynching was both common & tolerated. No longer. That’s called progress. Moral progress to be exact.
I talked about this a bit in my GC wrap-up post; I completely agree that it’s dysfunctional and inaccurate to characterize the world as constantly getting “worse.” And using that as a filter has meant the Church has been behind on every single civil rights issue in at least 100 years because its leadership defaults to a view that change is bad.
I don’t think we should necessarily default to change is good, either, but I think either filter distorts our perceptions and hurts our ability to be objective.
Lots of good comments too.
My two cents is that history… just moves. Luckily, things have been better lately. But I fear that the idea that history has a progressive trajectory leads to an unwarranted triumphalism and complacency. There are any number of threats to moral progress, as the Trump era has demonstrated on numerous fronts. The current war in Ukraine also demonstrates that our technological progress could be very quickly upset if events spiral out of control. And the need for Black Lives Matter shows that a sense of moral progress can often conceal real underlying injustices. A whiggish history of progress sometimes bears ugly fruit.
As a historian, I’m often offput by cyclical theories that are often imposed on history by folks in the social sciences, whose theories gloss over the finer details of history in order to fit historical events into their models. Histories I’ve studied in great detail include Turkish and Armenian history, Arab history, European history and US history, and what I’ve found is that history mostly doesn’t repeat itself and is full of unprecedented events.
There is some degree of linearity and cyclicality to collective human behavior, which of course maps onto history. There are patterns in history for sure, but I’m heavily reluctant to translate these patterns into larger cycles. The fact of the matter is that humanity is composed of lots and lots of different cultures and the behaviors, norms, values, and rituals in different cultures are staggeringly diverse.
Linearity is often an illusion. There is no guarantee of continued progress and flourishing of any culture or large political entity. Many empires have risen and fallen in the past and the reasons for their rises and falls are diverse. Yes, it always involves some sort of resource accumulation to create a rise, but how these resources are accumulated and what these resources varies significantly. Certainly events are caused by a variety of factors that precede them, but again, what these factors are, again, are incredibly diverse. So much so, that social science theories more often than not do an injustice to understanding them by imposing broad models on them.
On the pride cycle, it is a really stupid theory that has zero grounding in reality. I have bad news for Joseph Smith and believers in the pride cycle, which is that the largest most prosperous empires and political entities of the past have often achieved their “greatness” through mass murder, exploitation, enslavement, and a long list of other atrocities that we in the US do not acknowledge as moral or godly. It has nothing to do with “righteousness” and godliness. Joseph Smith didn’t read the Old Testament very well, for had he subjected it to a closer reading he would have seen that the rise of the Israelites involved the slaughtering of Amorites, Midianites, among many other peoples.
That said, I’m not sure if interpreting history as cyclical is inherently dangerous. Some cyclical models might provide some insight for policy-makers in how to move forward. But beware, policy-makers, political scientists of the past have been gravely wrong and lead policy-makers in a terrible direction.
On left/right divide, I have grown very weary of interpreting US politics and European politics along this divide. To demonstrate the absurdity of the left/right dichotomy and its falseness, I ask: was Genghis Khan a leftist or a conservative? Now, of course, the categories of conservative and liberal are valid, but only in a specific time and place. They make sense in the context of US politics in a certain time, but what it means to be conservative or to be liberal has changed drastically over time. The meanings of these labels will change again, too. We should be careful of category errors and false dichotomies. Recognizing nuance and complexity in collective reality. At the same time, categories do help us make sense of things. But we should try to understand society along the lines of more complex categories, but overly simplistic ones such as left/right or conservative/liberal.
May I add that for a person who has some sort of disability, from poor vision to needing eqintubation to breathe, the world (unfortunately, not worldwide) is getting better. Thanks in part to corroboration between the late Senators Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy, people living with disabilities have achieved degrees of independence, access to public transportation, educational and employment opportunities, etc. to a level probably never seen before in the history of the world.
Advancing technology plays a part in that, as well.
1977 senior Social Studies class. Mr. Miller read a report of contact tracing for someone diagnosed with syphilis. After going through a mind-blowing chain of sexual encounters, he asked, “What year do you think this took place.” Of course, it had to have been in the last couple of years during these wicked, wicked post-sexual revolution times. We were shocked to learn that this rampant evil took place in 1953.
So fevered stoats aside, sex isn’t cyclical and, perhaps, only seems more prevalent because technology simply makes it easier to know about and arrange for it, and perhaps there is less communal shame so it isn’t as cloaked in secrecy as it once was.
I remember weeping as a young teen over the imminent end of time. How much I would never experience and maybe the 2nd coming would dawn before I could have a family. In a real way, I was robbed by that fear instilled by the institution that also claimed to possess the cure – for a price. And I was determined to pay that price no matter what.
We’re simultaneously more screwed up and better off than ever. And I am glad to be alive in this place and time.
I agree with many commenters that there are cycles all around, but no overarching, definitive cycle. Stuff just happens. Those professing special knowledge to the contrary are exploitative or naïve.