&& Evaluating Crisis Wars
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Many academic historians have rejected Generational Dynamics out of hand, claiming that the concept of a "crisis war" is too vaguely defined, and that all previous attempts by historians to identify cycles in history have failed.
The purpose of this document is to respond to these criticisms by academic historians. We will accomplish these things:
(*) Explain why Generational Dynamics is fundamentally different from other attempts at identifying historical cycles. The main reasons are: (1) GD identifies regional cycles rather than global cycles; (2) GD is based on a single, simple observation about human nature: That some wars (crisis wars) are so horrible that entire generations are traumatized, and such a horrible war is not repeated until the people who lived through the last crisis war are all gone.
(*) Provide clear, unambiguous criteria that a historian can apply to any war to evaluate whether or not it's a crisis war. The criteria are in four categories: historical significant, genocidal violence, political control, how the war was resolved.
(*) Apply these criteria to several dozen wars to show how they're used to evaluate crisis wars in a repeatable, unambiguous fashion.
It's worth pointing out here that academic historians who claim that this has been done before are wrong. Although several academic historians have rejected GD out of hand, referencing some other attempt as being "the same thing," it turns out that in fact GD does new, original work that apparently nobody has previously attempted, or at least no one has been able to point it out to me. The technique of generational analysis on a regional, local basis appears to be a unique development, leading to powerful results.
In accomplishing these objectives, I hope to put to rest the objections by academic historians, and establish the validity of Generational Dynamics as a young, relatively undeveloped but still extremely worthwhile branch of historical study.
During the 1980s, historians William Strauss and Neil Howe were doing some marketing consulting, and they noticed that people differed dramatically based on what generation they were in. The found that people who fought in World War II were quite different from people who were raised during World War II, and that those were quite different those who grew up after World War II. The similarities among people in the same generation outweighed the individual differences, and the differences between people in different generations
Strauss and Howe discovered that these generational qualities appear to repeat throughout history, and that they're all related to major national or international crisis periods that repeat roughly every 80 years -- the length of a human lifetime. In America's case, these were the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War II.
Strauss and Howe published their findings in a series of books:
When I first read The Fourth Turning, shortly after 9/11, I was struck with the power and simplicity of the generational theory, but I was also aware that it needed a great deal of additional rigor to be credible.
Strauss and Howe identify four distinct generational types in each cycle: heroes (who fight the crisis period war), prophets (the heroes' kids, who rebel during the awakening period that starts roughly 15-20 years after the end of the crisis war), artists (who grow up during the crisis period), and nomads (their kids, who grow up during the awakening). They define transitional changes among these four generations, and derive the crisis period from that.
There are many different elements to Strauss and Howe's theory, and although they're described and identified in a compelling manner, these identifications depended too much on individual judgment.
In particular, the method for identifying historical generations was not satisfactory. It was done by selecting leading political and cultural members of each generation and showing that they exhibit the archetypical characteristics of that generational type. Since the selection of the generational members and the interpretation of their behaviors is highly judgmental, Strauss and Howe's generational cycles could not be rigorously confirmed.
To develop the kind of precision and repeatability required to make the generational paradigm credible required a focus on just one particular aspect of Strauss & Howe's theory, the crisis war. Since each crisis war is a major historical event, it seemed reasonable that the crisis war could be used to validate or invalidate their generational paradigm.
On an intuitive level, the cyclic nature of the crisis war makes sense. A crisis war is the most horrible of wars; it's bloody, it's genocidal, and it traumatizes everyone who lives through it. It stands to reason that no nation would want to go through any such thing again. But when the people who actually lived through that crisis war disappear, then there's no one left to remember how horrible it was, and a new crisis war can start.
So America's Revolutionary War was such a war. When the last generation that lived through the war -- the Unionists -- disappeared in the 1850s, there was a Civil War. When those people were gone, we entered World War II.
It's very clear that these three crisis wars are the most important in America's history. Almost any American can tell you something about each of these wars, even if it's little more than the words "independence," "slavery," and "Hitler" for the three wars, respectively.
But other American wars? You can ask any average person under 30, and he probably won't be able to tell you anything meaningful about the Gulf War, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, World War I, the Spanish-American war, the Mexican-American war, or any others. These wars are fundamentally different.
What are some of the differences between crisis and non-crisis wars?
The most fundamental difference is that non-crisis wars are political, and crisis wars have a built-in visceral content that I refer to as "genocidal energy." Whether actual genocide is involved or not, there's an energy in a crisis war, a visceral hatred and desire to destroy your enemy.
A crisis war is like a ball rolling downhill. It may (or may not) need a push to start, and it may be temporarily stopped by obstacles on the way down. But it keeps gathering energy, and at some point its momentum becomes so great that it's unstoppable, until it reaches the bottom of the hill in an explosive climax that forever changes the landscape.
Crisis wars may start off slowly, and the Civil War did, as both sides continued hoping for a peaceful compromise. The war was almost genteel to start with, until the genocidal energy built up. The war became decisive with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which signaled a change in attitude. 50,000 men were killed or wounded in the Battle of Gettysburg in July. In March 1864, Sherman destroyed Atlanta and then marched to the sea, ravaging everything in his path.
We reacted sharply after America was bombed at Pearl Harbor, though it took a few months for us to come up to war strength. By the end of the war, we were firebombing and destroying Dresden and Tokyo, and dropping nuclear weapons on Japanese cities.
This is the kind of fury that typifies crisis wars. There was none of that in the Gulf War: We ejected the Iraqis from Kuwait, and didn't go for the kill in Baghdad. We could have won in Vietnam if we had wanted to, but we lost because of political considerations. In Korea we fought to a standstill, and agreed to an armistice. In these wars, there was no big explosion at the end. These wars were fought mostly on political considerations.
But what about World War I? This is the first question that people ask. "You chose World War II instead of World War I as a crisis war because you wanted to make your cycle come out right."
That's the purpose of the current document -- to dispel questions of this sort by giving specific, measurable criteria for distinguishing non-crisis wars (like World War I) from crisis wars (like World War II).
Briefly, World War I was far from a crisis war, and was much more like the Vietnam War than like World War II. Our participation was highly politicized, and many historians today still find President Woodrow Wilson's decision to even enter the war a controversial error. There are few if any serious historians who question our entering World War II. There was no great "explosion" at the end of World War I for America; it actually ended with a whimper, when Germany capitulated long before it had to.
The above is just a summary of material we'll be presenting later in this document on how to distinguish crisis from non-crisis wars, but the if you're familiar with the American wars we've discussed, you'll quickly see that the three wars we've designated as crisis wars are substantially different from the others.
&&2 A typology of cyclic theories
My purpose here is a brief presentation of the kinds of approaches that others have used to identify cycles in history or to forecast events.
&&3 Cherry-picking data and datasets: astrology and Bible codes
Astrology and Bible codes are two methods of predicting the future by cherry-picking datasets.
Astrology predicts the future by relating events on earth to motions and relationships of the planets and the stars.
The amount of data on the motions of the planets and stars is huge. There are probably thousands or tens of thousands of individual datasets on the the motions of the planets, their moons, and so forth relative to stars. By cherry-picking the correct datasets, it's possible to find one eventually that, by accident, correlates to some human activity. That relationship can be documented and used as "proof" that astrology is valid, when in fact, any relationship between celestial events and earth events is simply coincidental.
Some people are using "Bible codes" to find prophecies supposedly hidden by God in some books of the Old Testament. To reveal the code, search for "equidistant letter sequences" or ELSs, sequences of letters equal distances apart. (For details, use any search engine to search for "Bible codes.") This technique generates astronomically many groups of letters, from which you search for hidden messages. Adherents claim that messages can be found that foretold the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, as well as the assassinations of Anwar Sadat and the Kennedy Brothers. However, with so many groups of letters to select from,
was foretold in the Bible. He also claims that the assassinations of Anwar Sadat and the Kennedy brothers are encoded in biblical ELS.
If you search through several books of the Bible for letter sequences at different distances, then you
A brief summary of the codes claims is that the Hebrew text of the Bible (especially of the Torah, the first five books) contain intentional coincidences of words or phrases that appear as letters with equal spacing. More details of the claims from the Jewish point of view can be found here, and from the Christian point of view here. Both those sites present a pro-codes viewpoint.
The Bible (or Torah) Code is a code alleged embedded in the Bible by God. The code is revealed by searching for equidistant letter sequences (ELS). For example, start with any letter ("L") and read every nth letter ("N") thereafter in the book, not counting spaces. If an entire book such as Genesis is searched, the result is a long string of letters. Using different values for L and N, one can generate many strings of letters. Imagine wrapping the string of letters around a cylinder in such a way that all the letters can be displayed. Flatten the cylinder to reveal several rows with columns of equal length, except perhaps the last column, which might be shorter than all the rest. Now search for meaningful names in proximity to dates. Search horizontally, vertically, diagonally, any which way. A group of Israeli mathematicians did just this and claimed that when they searched for names in close proximity to birth or death dates (as published in the Encyclopedia of Great Men in Israel) they found many matches, for example, the date of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin was in close proximity to letters spelling out his name.. Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg (1994) published their findings under the title of "On Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis." The editor of the journal commented:
I believe the reason is that once you live through a crisis war, even as a child, you look at war very differently, and don't have the same visceral responses. World War I is a good example. It was pretty awful -- awful enough to have been a crisis war, but it clearly wasn't. Why? Because President Wilson was a Southerner who probably still remembered Sherman's earth-scorching March through Georgia.
You know, I'm still very puzzled. With your knowledge of history, you can see for yourself that these criteria work for all the American wars of the 20th century, even going back to the Civil War. You can see that the Civil War and WW II were fought with a lot of energy and determination, the Spanish-American and Gulf wars were hardly a blip, WW I and the Vietnam war caused massive internal dissent, and the Korean War was a stalemate.
I would expect some high school student who can't tell the Civil War from the Vietnam War to not understand, but I don't understand why you don't see this. The difference between a crisis war and a mid-cycle war is as plain as the nose on your face.
Try it yourself with some other era. Take a look at Middle Ages Spain -- the anti-Jewish pogroms in the 1390s, the Spanish Inquisition and Reconquest in the 1480s-90s, the Spanish Armada attack on England in the 1560s-80s. Also look at the awakenings -- the anti-Converso riots of the 1450s and the Golden Age of Spain in the early 1500s. You can easily verify this for yourself.
Or look at China's recent history, in my book starting on page 217 - the Taiping Rebellion in the 1850s-60s, and the Communist-Nationalist Civil War in the 1930s-40s.
I suggested the Spain and China examples because they're pretty clearcut and documented in the book. Or pick whatever time period you want - just keep in mind that an evaluation of a crisis period usually requires several sources.