To all:

I recently received a lengthy critique of my book from a person who
had read it after seeing my presentation last month.

The message was quite skeptical and criticized many different levels,
everything from the number of typos to the entire theory, and why
more people don't accept it.

Since his list was fairly comprehensive, containing most of the
criticisms I've been hearing on an individual basis since my book
came out, and since he questions the entire generational paradigm as
well as my book specifically, I thought it would be useful to post
his message, along with my responses.

I know that other people in this forum have expressed frustration
that the ideas in the Strauss and Howe books Generations and
The Fourth Turning have not received wider acceptance, so
the criticisms that aren't entirely specific to me are part of the
greater picture of why more of the public doesn't accept this subject
matter in general.

Thus, this thread can be used as an opportunity to discuss how better
to present and gain more public acceptance of the entire generational
paradigm.

Since I have a pretty thick skin anyway (a woman that I once dated
told me that the problem with me was that I was "too well-defended,"
an interesting if puzzling characterization), this thread can serve
as a place for any other criticisms of or objections to Generational
Dynamics and generational theory that might come up in the future.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Following is the e-mail message that I received (with personal
references removed):

John,

I have now had time to read and consider your book and will share my
comments with you. Please understand that I do this to give you some
understanding of the reception your book and ideas have received so
that you can take whatever corrective measures you deem appropriate.

Problems fall into two basic categories, technical/mechanical, and
conceptual. Let me begin with the technical/mechanical because I
think you may be more receptive to those.

My first suggestion is to get yourself an editor to help rewrite the
book, someone less committed to the idea and therefore better able to
whip your ideas into a presentable form. As you requested, I started
making a list of errors and soon found that there were too many to
keep track of. Errors came in several distinct varieties:

1. There are missing words, excess words, and parts of phrases that
suggest that your editing was incomplete. An example of this is on
page 45, where you refer to "German subroutines" where I think you
mean "submarines". On page 55, there is an overprint, two words on
top of one another. I estimate there are upwards of 100 such errors.
These errors reflect poorly on your ideas, even though they don't
arise from them, simply because they suggest a sloppiness and lack of
attention to detail that raises warning flags about the points you
are trying to make.

2. In addition, there are several clear typos that also suggest
sloppiness, such as putting the Magna Carta in 1815 and having Marie
Antoinette married to Louis XIV. I estimate there are a few dozen of
these.

3. There are a couple of places where you assert that support for the
war in Iraq is overwhelming and that antiwar sentiment is limited. I
don't think the latest opinion polls support this.

4. More importantly, there are also assertions of fact that simply
aren't so. For example, on page 24, you assert that there have been
"15,000 or so years of recorded history." That's wrong by about
10,000 years. On page 29, you put Salem at the heart of the
battlefields for the King Philip War, but that war was concentrated in
the southern and western parts of Massachusetts, and the witch trials
were in what is now Danvers, not Salem. China was actually
technologically ahead of Europe until the late Middle Ages. There are
dozens of these as well, some of which are serious for your
objectives.

Perhaps the most serious such problems are the invention of "crisis
wars" when there is no evidence for any war at all. Inferring the
existence of a war, not just any war, but a crisis war, solely because
your theory requires that there be one at some point in history, is
bad history. You can't do that and expect to be taken seriously, yet
I detected several cases of this.

For example, the Pilgrim fathers report seeing dead bodies in the
villages of the Wampanoags, suggesting a plague of some sort just
before 1620; it would be a forerunner of the impact diseases imported
from Europe would have on the native population, but you turned this
into a hypothetical war between the Wampanoags and the Narragansetts.

Likewise with the Exodus from Egypt. There is no evidence, either
archaeological or Biblical, for a crisis war (or any other kind of
war) accompanying the departure from Egypt reported in the Bible. Yet
you infer one, based on what your theory requires. (Jewish tradition
holds that the collection of gold and silver by the departing
Israelites was designed specifically so that there would be no hatred
for the Egyptians, which should mean this could not have been a crisis
war even if there had been a war.)

Every once in a while, you got lucky. For example, the crisis war you
infer leading to the rise of Islam is known to history; it is the
collapse of a state known as Himyar, the culmination of South Arabian
civilization, which was based at least in part on trade between the
Mediterranean basin and South Asia and East Africa through the port at
Aden. The caravans that provided employment for Muhammad transported
goods from Aden along the west coast of Arabia into the Byzantine
Empire, providing wealth to Mecca and Medina, which were stops along
the way. This civilization was destroyed around 606 by an invading
Persian army, sent to avenge earlier affronts arising out of civil
unrest between Jewish, Christian and pagan elements in Himyar. That
unrest had already brought an army from what is now Ethiopia across
the Straits to defend the Christians; it is said that this army
included 10,000 elephants, which caused havoc on the local ecology.
In the process, a dam, on which the region's agriculture depended, was
destroyed, putting Himyar out of business in short order, and when it
went, it took the caravan trade with it, leaving the Arabs to fend
for themselves.

While you were right about the existence of this war, your theory
doesn't appear able to reconcile with the timing of it, or with the
probable actual objective of Muhammad's army: to restore order along
the trade route in the belief that the caravans would then resume,
restoring prosperity. If I understand you correctly, the last thing a
society will do within four years of a cataclysm such as the collapse
of South Arabian civilization, is resort to war, yet that is what
Muhammad did.

I think you should also know that Arabs and Jews have not lived in
friendship and peace as you state in several places. The ability of
Jews (and Christians) to live in Muslim societies at all depended on
their willingness to accept status as dhimmis, second-class,
"protected" citizens whose freedoms depended on the whims of the
rulers. Conflict between Jews and Muslims in Palestine started almost
immediately after the British conquered the territory in World War I;
there was a massacre of Jews in Hebron in 1920 and other attacks in
Jerusalem shortly thereafter because the local Muslims believed
"their" Jews would be liberated from dhimmitude by the British.

This category of error appears to be related to depending on a single
source for a narrative that supports your theory in a given region.
Reliance on a single source, particularly on subjects that are outside
your area of expertise, is a very risky proposition; you never know
when you have chosen to rely on someone who is basically a nut.

Let me now turn to the conceptual components of your theory.

I believe there are three identifiable elements in the theory. The
first two, trend analysis (or cyclicality), and the role of youthful
experience in forming values that influence behavior for the remainder
of one's life, are not new, and while not accepted as received wisdom,
are certainly intellectually respectable.

The third element, the notion of a crisis war, is new, and as a
result, you have an obligation to demonstrate its validity.
Ordinarily, this would be done by setting forth a set of standards and
then systematically going through a data base of known wars,
classifying each according to pre-established criteria, and then
looking for a pattern. It would be best to include every war in the
data base, but that would indeed be a lot of work, so you might think
about picking a few regions you know relatively little about and then
classifying every war in those regions before stringing them together
into a narrative. (It would be best to work on regions where the
details of each war could be separated from its date so your
classifications could be truly independent of their place in the
region's chronology. Knowing the chronology can bias your
classifications.)

You will also have to be less selective about the periods you cover:
if the concept works, it should be identifiable across many cycles,
not just the two or three you usually present. It would be very
valuable if you could present data showing that the cycle holds across
a thousand years for sampled regions, especially where you allow for
substantial variation in the length of the cycle.

To some minor extent, you have done this, but your notion of a crisis
war has far too much wiggle room, its character changes depending on
what you have been able to find in history. An example of this is
that you present the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock as a
kind of crisis war. While this event was certainly historic, it
hardly matches the notion of a high-energy war involving genocide,
etc. Unless "crisis war" means something specific, it ceases to mean
anything at all.

Nor is it up to some grad student to do this research: It is your
theory, if you want it to be taken seriously, YOU must do the research
(or see that it IS done) and make the case.

But there are some very real problems with the theory as a whole and
with the crisis war component in particular. For example, finding the
correlation that these wars happen every eighty years or so, doesn't
prove your theory. Women have menstrual cycles about every thirty
days, the same period as the moon to a much higher degree of
correlation than your theory posits, but there is no known causal
connection between the two. (Confusing correlation with causation is
one of the more common sources of intellectual errors.)

You have also failed to present any evidence that the mechanism for
the cycles is a pattern arising out of remembered fears; the same data
could support a claim that rising expectations produce these cycles.
Such an interpretation would work better with the varying lengths of
the cycles since they depend on reasons for expectations to rise
rather than waiting for a generation to die out. There are other
possible explanations for the 80-year cycle as well, such as economic
recovery followed by technological innovation. (If this were the
explanation, the cycles should be getting shorter to reflect
accelerating technological change.)

There is also a paradigmatic problem you should understand: Your
theory is basically what academics call reductionist, assigning to one
cause, or some small number of causes, the ability to explain a great
deal. Reductionism is academically taboo these days. While it might
be possible to change this attitude, you'll need a very compelling
case to do so, one that is far more convincing than what is presented
in the book.

Lastly, if you haven't read it already, you would benefit from reading
Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which suggests
an explanation for changes in scientific paradigms that might throw
some light on your ideas.

I hope you will take these comments as an effort to help you advance
you work. I am a believer in trend analysis and accept the role of
youthful experiences in forming one's lifelong values. I admit to
being unconvinced about the role of crisis wars and why they should
have the effect you attribute to them. Keep people like me in mind as
you work on your ideas; try to convince us, and then see where you go
from there.

Good luck,

The following is my first response to the above message:

Dear [snip],

Thank you very much for the detailed review of my book.

I'm going to write a detailed item by item response, but for now I
just want to acknowledge receipt of your message and express gratitude
for the time you took to write it.

You know, I've now analyzed hundreds of time periods throughout
history. There's absolutely no question at all about the 70-90 year
crisis war cycle. If there were, I would have dropped this whole
project ages ago.

I'm not familiar with the Himyar battle you reference, but if it fits
the time frame then it would be very exciting. One of the really
exciting things about generational dynamics is its ability to
forecast crisis wars and awakenings both forwards and backwards in
history, subject to a number of restrictions. So if I can verify that
the war you're describing is a crisis war in the right time frame,
then it would be an illustration of this forecasting capability. (By
the way, do you know of any crisis war near the end of the Buddha's
life?)

In developing generational dynamics, I saw this repeated many, many
times.

For example, in the last few weeks I decided to put something
together on African history. Now I don't know squat about African
history, and the first thing I stumbled across was the Zulu victories
and the Mfecane in the early 1800s. From this I inferred that there
must be another crisis war around 1900. The Zulu wars around 1880
appear to be mid-cycle wars (applying the criteria in chapter 4), but
the Boer War does indeed appear to be a crisis war for the Boers,
though a mid-cycle war for the English. From this I inferred a new
crisis period in the 1960s and 1970s, and I need to do more analysis
on this period, but the South African intervention in the 1960s wars
in Angola and Southern Zaire (I'm writing this all from memory now -
I hope I'm remembering it right) appears to be a crisis war for the
southern region. The collapse of apartheid in 1990 would appear to
be an awakening. I need to do more analysis here, but my first
glance at it appears to provide a good timeline for the southern part
of the continent. And there would be different timelines for
Ethiopia, Rwanda and Nigeria.

Incidentally, I went out of my way to be honest about this. The
criteria I use for a crisis war are listed in chapter 4. I'm
sufficiently analytical that I would not allow myself to be swayed by
wishful thinking, at least not for long. Furthermore, I've debated
many of the timelines with historians on the Fourth Turning forum
site ( http://www.fourthturning.com/forums ), so the timelines
weren't my own untested opinion. I can assure you that if I made any
mistake on a timeline, someone on that forum would have taken great
delight in shooting me down.

I apologize for the errors and lack of editing, but that simply
wasn't an option for me, for reasons having to do with time and
expense. If I do a updated version of the book, then I'll include a
bunch of new stuff from my web site, and hopefully I can have it
fully edited.

If perchance your copy of the book has errors marked in it, and you
wouldn't mind parting with it, please send me your address and I'll
send you a new copy in exchange for your copy, so I can make sure I
get all the errors you found corrected.

Ohhhhh, I want to mention just one more of the items in your list:
"3. There are a couple of places where you assert that support for
the war in Iraq is overwhelming and that antiwar sentiment is limited.
I don't think the latest opinion polls support this."

You really have to be careful not to let political views sway your
evaluation. There is absolutely no antiwar movement today -- and if
you were old enough to have lived through the 1960s awakening, you
would know what a stark difference there was. (How do you like that
clever generational put-down?) Today there's an anti-Bush movement,
but no anti-war movement. Kerry has already committed to finishing
the war, and on Sunday I saw Hilary Clinton say that we had to send a
lot more troops to Iraq. If Kerry wins in November, he will pursue
EXACTLY the same policies that Bush will pursue if he wins. Whatever
happens in Iraq is already baked into the cake, irrespective of who
wins. (I actually consider this to be an extremely amusing
certainty, given the moronic passions that both Republicans and
Democrats are exhibiting. What a circus.)

But I mentioned all this now because I'd like to ask you to read the
page, "Iraq Today vs 1960s America (Revised)" on my web site, with a
link from the home page, http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com . This
will show you clear what the antiwar movement was really like in the
60s, why Iraq today is very much like America in the 60s, and why
America today is NOTHING like America in the 60s.

The whole thing about generational dynamics is that each person lives
through only one crisis period and one awakening period. I lived
through the 60s awakening period, we're both living through the
current crisis period and, if you survive the war, you'll see what an
awakening period is really like, around 2030. At that time you'll be
in the older generation that the kids will be rebelling against.
They'll make a complete fool of you. You'll love it.

I'll be writing to you again soon.

Sincerely,

John

The following is my second response to the above message:

Dear [snip],

I'm now following up my last message with an item by item response.

Along the way, I have some questions for you.

> There are missing words, excess words, and parts of phrases that
> suggest that your editing was incomplete. ... I estimate there
> are upwards of 100 such errors. ... I estimate there are a few
> dozen of these.

You know, I proofread the entire book probably 10-20 times, and a
couple of friends did some proofreading. I would be very surprised
to find that there are anywhere close to 120 errors remaining. If
you're really found anything like this many errors, I'd really
appreciate a marked copy of your book so I can make the corrections.

> On page 29, you put Salem at the heart of the battlefields for the
> King Philip War, but that war was concentrated in the southern and
> western parts of Massachusetts, and the witch trials were in what
> is now Danvers, not Salem.

It would have been more correct to write "near the heart" rather than
"at the heart." The final conclusions don't change.

> China was actually technologically ahead of Europe until the late
> Middle Ages.

This is something I've been meaning to do more research on. It has
nothing to do with the generational paradigm, but it does bear on
some of my technological analyses. Specifically, on speculating what
will might happen after the 2030 Singularity: With the
super-exponential growth of technology after that time, there will be
a vastly increased possibility of detecting other life in the
universe, if that exists. The question is whether an alien
civilization would have to have followed the same technology path
that earth did, inventing new things in roughly the same order as on
earth, in the same relative time frame as earth. I believe that the
answer is "yes."

If China was really technologically ahead of Europe until the Middle
Ages, and then fell behind, it would be a significant challenge to
this view.

What I would want to research is the following question: Was China
really ahead of Europe on the main technology curve, or did they
merely have several side inventions "ahead of their time," but were
still several centuries behind Europe on the main technology path.
The answer to this question would provide insight into technology
development in other parts of the universe, where life might exist.

> There are dozens of these as well, some of which are serious for
> your objectives.

No, that isn't true. You haven't presented a single issue that has
any bearing whatsoever on challenging my objectives. You've
referenced numerous typos, date errors and place errors, but not a
single one challenges the underlying theory involving crisis wars and
generational changes.

You've made the point that typographical errors and other minor
errors make me look sloppy and may cause people to question my
credibility or even my motivations. And that's a fair criticism.

But you also have a responsibility to maintain your own credibility,
and to imply that typographical errors, no matter how many, present a
serious challenge to the theory itself makes me question what your
motivation is.

I'm genuinely puzzled about this. When I gave my presentation to the
e-club on April 20, and you were sitting in the audience, you made it
clear through facial expressions and body language that you wanted to
disparage the entire subject - and that was barely before I opened my
mouth, so it couldn't have been based on a great deal of information.

So I'd like to know what it is about generational dynamics that makes
you feel so motivated to disparage it? As I said, I'm genuinely
puzzled.

> Perhaps the most serious such problems are the invention of
> "crisis wars" when there is no evidence for any war at all.
> Inferring the existence of a war, not just any war, but a crisis
> war, solely because your theory requires that there be one at some
> point in history, is bad history. You can't do that and expect to
> be taken seriously, yet I detected several cases of this.

> For example, the Pilgrim fathers report seeing dead bodies in the
> villages of the Wampanoags, suggesting a plague of some sort just
> before 1620; it would be a forerunner of the impact diseases
> imported from Europe would have on the native population, but you
> turned this into a hypothetical war between the Wampanoags and the
> Narragansetts.

I did no such thing. I did not infer a crisis war from a few dead
bodies. I'm not that dumb.

What you "detected" was my clear desire to show applications of
generational dynamics to infer crisis wars where we have no other
written records. Using generational dynamics in this way does not
"prove" that a war existed in the indicated time frame; instead it
provides information that archeologists and other researchers can use
to narrow down the number of places to search for other evidence that
the crisis wars occurred.

The book by Schultz and Tougias that I referenced contains vague hints
about previous wars. They write, "The Wampanoag and Narragansett were
less cordial, carrying on sporadic warfare in the early and
mid-seventeenth century," and they write, "Based in upstate New York,
the Mohawk were universally dreaded by New England's native
population." [[pp. 11-12]]

Now you're thinking, "That doesn't mean there was a crisis war," and
of course you're right. But here I'm applying the generational
dynamics methodology. First, it's clear that there must have been
wars between these tribes in the past, even though no written records
exist. Generational dynamics tells us that some of these wars must
be crisis wars, and also tells us that one of these crisis wars began
in the 1580-1600 time frame.

I'll admit that I might have explained this in more detail. This was
one of the first chapters that I wrote, and I'd probably have been
better off if I'd gone back and rewritten it. Today I would not
write this chapter in this way -- I'd at least use this as an
opportunity to explain what I'm doing a little better.

> Likewise with the Exodus from Egypt. There is no evidence,
> either archaeological or Biblical, for a crisis war (or any other
> kind of war) accompanying the departure from Egypt reported in the
> Bible.

I wrote what I wrote a bit too hastily, and you may well be right
that there was no crisis war. In fact, looking at this now a year
and a half later, the Exodus looks more like an awakening event
rather than a crisis event. However, I only used the Exodus to lay
the foundation for the fact that Jews consider themselves the "Chosen
People." There is nothing in the generational paradigm that requires
that the Exodus be a crisis period or an awakening period. The mere
fact that it occurred is all that's relevant.

> Every once in a while, you got lucky. For example, the crisis war
> you infer leading to the rise of Islam is known to history; it is
> the collapse of a state known as Himyar, the culmination of South
> Arabian civilization, which was based at least in part on trade
> between the Mediterranean basin and South Asia and East Africa
> through the port at Aden.

As I mentioned in my last message, if this can be confirmed it would
be an exciting affirmation of the generational dynamics methodology.
However, I can't be sure until I've done much more research. You
mention that the time frames may be wrong, and that would imply that
this is a different war from the crisis war that I inferred.

Crisis war timelines are not global; they apply only to a local
region to people with a common cultural memory. In the year 600, with
such undeveloped communication and transportation technology, regions
were pretty small, and so there are several possibilities. One
possibility is that this war is totally unrelated to the war I
inferred, because they're in different regions. But another
possibility is that they're related, and occur within the same crisis
period within the same region, but the crisis war rolled from one
place to another over a period of 15-20 years. A third possibility is
that the war you mention is a mid-cycle "momentum" war (like the
Korean war following WW II). I'd have to do a lot more research to
figure out what's really going on.

This illustrates an important fact, however: I've found that it takes
me several days to research each crisis war, and requires referencing
several historical sources. So there's nothing trivial about
analyzing generational crisis periods.

> While you were right about the existence of this war, your theory
> doesn't appear able to reconcile with the timing of it, or with
> the probable actual objective of Muhammad's army: to restore order
> along the trade route in the belief that the caravans would then
> resume, restoring prosperity. If I understand you correctly, the
> last thing a society will do within four years of a cataclysm
> such as the collapse of South Arabian civilization, is resort to
> war, yet that is what Muhammad did.

No, that isn't true. As I mentioned above, we went to war with Korea
just a few years after WW II. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait very
shortly after the end of the Iran-Iraq war. More research is needed
on these "momentum wars," to understand why they happen and what
their characteristics are.

> I think you should also know that Arabs and Jews have not lived in
> friendship and peace as you state in several places. The ability
> of Jews (and Christians) to live in Muslim societies at all
> depended on their willingness to accept status as dhimmis,
> second-class, "protected" citizens whose freedoms depended on the
> whims of the rulers. Conflict between Jews and Muslims in
> Palestine started almost immediately after the British conquered
> the territory in World War I; there was a massacre of Jews in
> Hebron in 1920 and other attacks in Jerusalem shortly thereafter
> because the local Muslims believed "their" Jews would be liberated
> from dhimmitude by the British.

Well, there have been attacks against Jews in all nations throughout
history. Perhaps I was a little overzealous here in trying to make a
political point, but as I understand the hostilities began in earnest
in 1936. Maybe I should have written something like "mostly in
peace." I wanted to make a contrast: That things were really MUCH
worse as the Jews fleeing Nazi occupation poured into Palestine, and
then became genocidally deadly after the partitioning of Palestine.

> This category of error appears to be related to depending on a
> single source for a narrative that supports your theory in a given
> region. Reliance on a single source, particularly on subjects
> that are outside your area of expertise, is a very risky
> proposition; you never know when you have chosen to rely on
> someone who is basically a nut.

I agree with this. In analyzing crisis wars, I almost always
referred to several sources. For many marginal issues, I often
relied on just one source, simply because I didn't have the time.

Did I mention that I spent roughly 4000-5000 hours researching and
writing this book? I could easily have spent another 10,000 hours,
but I really had to get the book out before the "Clash of
Civilizations" war began in earnest!

> I believe there are three identifiable elements in the theory.
> The first two, trend analysis (or cyclicality), and the role of
> youthful experience in forming values that influence behavior for
> the remainder of one's life, are not new, and while not accepted
> as received wisdom, are certainly intellectually respectable.

> The third element, the notion of a crisis war, is new, and as a
> result, you have an obligation to demonstrate its validity.

There's a lot more to it than that. The concepts of generational
changes, crisis wars and awakening periods, etc., were developed by
William Strauss and Neal Howe and described in their books,
Generations and The Fourth Turning. These books are
brilliant, incidentally, and well worth reading.

They use a "bottom up" method for defining generational timelines.
There are four generations in each 80-year period -- heroes (who
fight the crisis war), prophets (the heroes' kids, who rebel during
the awakening), 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.

I had a huge debate with myself about how much of their their work I
could comfortably use. Their analysis applies only to English and
American crisis periods since the middle ages, and I needed the
theory to apply to all countries at all times in history, or it would
be of little use to me. I didn't know whether I could prove that
their generational analyses weren't too America-centric.

In the end, I decided I had to use a completely different "top-down"
approach, starting from the crisis wars, rather than the generations.
I developed a set of criteria for crisis wars (book, page 81).

> To some minor extent, you have done this, but your notion of a
> crisis war has far too much wiggle room, its character changes
> depending on what you have been able to find in history. An
> example of this is that you present the landing of the Pilgrims at
> Plymouth Rock as a kind of crisis war. While this event was
> certainly historic, it hardly matches the notion of a high-energy
> war involving genocide, etc. Unless "crisis war" means something
> specific, it ceases to mean anything at all.

Once again, Plymouth Rock was no crisis war. The crisis war occurred
in the 1580s and 1590s. As I said, I'm not that dumb.

The criteria on page 81 are quite adequate. I've never had any
difficulty applying these criteria.

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.

> But there are some very real problems with the theory as a whole
> and with the crisis war component in particular. For example,
> finding the correlation that these wars happen every eighty years
> or so, doesn't prove your theory. Women have menstrual cycles
> about every thirty days, the same period as the moon to a much
> higher degree of correlation than your theory posits, but there is
> no known causal connection between the two. (Confusing
> correlation with causation is one of the more common sources of
> intellectual errors.)

Well, let's see. Blood comes from sea water, and ocean tides are
controlled by the moon. That's a plausible explanation at any rate.

As I said, I've now examined hundreds of examples, and the results
are always pretty clear. As I said, try two or three of them for
yourself.

However, please spare me the lectures about intellectual errors. I'm
quite aware of the difference between correlation and causation. As
I said, I'm not that stupid.

> You have also failed to present any evidence that the mechanism
> for the cycles is a pattern arising out of remembered fears; the
> same data could support a claim that rising expectations produce
> these cycles. Such an interpretation would work better with the
> varying lengths of the cycles since they depend on reasons for
> expectations to rise rather than waiting for a generation to die
> out. There are other possible explanations for the 80-year cycle
> as well, such as economic recovery followed by technological
> innovation. (If this were the explanation, the cycles should be
> getting shorter to reflect accelerating technological change.)

I don't understand all the points that you're making in this
paragraph, but I think that the explanation I gave, based principally
on the "generation gap" that separates those who fight and/or live
through a crisis war and those born after the crisis war to be a
pretty good explanation.

If you're interested in this subject, you ought to read the Strauss
and Howe books and take a look at their bottom up approach.

> There is also a paradigmatic problem you should understand: Your
> theory is basically what academics call reductionist, assigning to
> one cause, or some small number of causes, the ability to explain
> a great deal. Reductionism is academically taboo these days.
> While it might be possible to change this attitude, you'll need a
> very compelling case to do so, one that is far more convincing
> than what is presented in the book.

This may explain why academics reject it, but it doesn't take away
from the validity of the generational dynamics methodology.

In talking to academics, I've found that they [often] reject
generational dynamics without even considering it. After one or two
sentences, they decide that it's wrong. I attribute this to the
shallowness and superficiality of many academics. Your reductionist
principle is just a rationalization for being superficial.

> Lastly, if you haven't read it already, you would benefit from
> reading Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific
> Revolutions, which suggests an explanation for changes in
> scientific paradigms that might throw some light on your ideas.

I'll check it out.

> I hope you will take these comments as an effort to help you
> advance you work. I am a believer in trend analysis and accept
> the role of youthful experiences in forming one's lifelong values.
> I admit to being unconvinced about the role of crisis wars and why
> they should have the effect you attribute to them. Keep people
> like me in mind as you work on your ideas; try to convince us,
> and then see where you go from there.

I'll do that, but if you enjoy discussing stuff like this, I'd like
to suggest that you join the Fourth Turning forum
( http://www.fourthturning.com/forums ). You'll find a lot of people
there who can discuss a variety of historical subjects quite
intelligently. Most of the discussions today are about politics, and
I avoid those discussions like the plague, but you might enjoy them.
I contribute heavily to the forum in other, more theoretical, areas,
and often I might "try something out" in the forum before posting it
on my web site.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

Since I have a pretty thick skin anyway (a woman that I once dated
told me that the problem with me was that I was "too well-defended,"
an interesting if puzzling characterization)

She figured out that she couldn't change you, which took all the fun out of it for her.

On a more serious note, thanks for posting the critique and your responses!

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

I wrote what I wrote a bit too hastily, and you may well be right
that there was no crisis war. In fact, looking at this now a year
and a half later, the Exodus looks more like an awakening event
rather than a crisis event. However, I only used the Exodus to lay
the foundation for the fact that Jews consider themselves the "Chosen
People." There is nothing in the generational paradigm that requires
that the Exodus be a crisis period or an awakening period. The mere
fact that it occurred is all that's relevant.

One needs to be very careful when using the Bible as history. Last time I checked, ?crisis war? or no, there is no archaeological evidence for the Exodus as recorded in the Bible, period; likewise many other ?events? in the Old Testament. For others there is plenty. For my money, if I was to use the Bible for the purpose of implying or confirming the existence of generational dynamics, I would probably have concentrated on those passages that were bolstered by other recorded history; for instance, the incursions of Alexander and the Macedonians into the Persian Empire, which included the province of Judea. 1st and 2nd Maccabees were certainly attempts at real history of a sort; at least for the period. Moreover, I think one could probably refer to the 12 years of Alexander?s march from the Hellespont to the Indus Valley as a bit of a crisis for all those who did not submit.

Originally Posted by Vince Lamb '59

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

Since I have a pretty thick skin anyway (a woman that I once dated
told me that the problem with me was that I was "too well-defended,"
an interesting if puzzling characterization)

She figured out that she couldn't change you, which took all the fun out of it for her.

On a more serious note, thanks for posting the critique and your responses!

Maybe, but she found other ways to have fun through torture. But
that's a story for another day.

John

Originally Posted by Mike Eagen

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

I wrote what I wrote a bit too hastily, and you may well be right
that there was no crisis war. In fact, looking at this now a year
and a half later, the Exodus looks more like an awakening event
rather than a crisis event. However, I only used the Exodus to lay
the foundation for the fact that Jews consider themselves the "Chosen
People." There is nothing in the generational paradigm that requires
that the Exodus be a crisis period or an awakening period. The mere
fact that it occurred is all that's relevant.

One needs to be very careful when using the Bible as history. Last time I checked, ?crisis war? or no, there is no archaeological evidence for the Exodus as recorded in the Bible, period; likewise many other ?events? in the Old Testament. For others there is plenty. For my money, if I was to use the Bible for the purpose of implying or confirming the existence of generational dynamics, I would probably have concentrated on those passages that were bolstered by other recorded history; for instance, the incursions of Alexander and the Macedonians into the Persian Empire, which included the province of Judea. 1st and 2nd Maccabees were certainly attempts at real history of a sort; at least for the period. Moreover, I think one could probably refer to the 12 years of Alexander?s march from the Hellespont to the Indus Valley as a bit of a crisis for all those who did not submit.

I guess I need to correct my correction: The mere fact that it is
perceived to have occurred is all that's relevant.

You're absolutely right in urging caution in using the Bible for
history, and I appreciate your suggestions for other places that are
at least supported by other sources.

The only reason I mentioned the Exodus at all is because of its
significance throughout history.

For a long time, I've always been puzzled about why Jews have been
victimized by so-called "hate crimes" over the centuries. It's easy
enough to talk about "hate," but that doesn't help. Why the Jews and
not the Slavs or the Zoroastrians? And why the Jews over and over?

And the answer to that question appears to spring from the Exodus
story. The Jews became a "chosen people" without a homeland,
resulting in the development of Jewish law with which Jews could live
anywhere, anytime, and still maintain a Jewish identity, without
merging into the local society. This is what makes the Jews almost
unique among major civilizations of world history, and created the
xenophobia that permitted the development of "hate crimes." And it
also explains why persecution of the Jews seems to be a major factor
throughout Western history.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

Originally Posted by Vince Lamb '59

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

Since I have a pretty thick skin anyway (a woman that I once dated
told me that the problem with me was that I was "too well-defended,"
an interesting if puzzling characterization)

She figured out that she couldn't change you, which took all the fun out of it for her.

On a more serious note, thanks for posting the critique and your responses!

Maybe, but she found other ways to have fun through torture. But
that's a story for another day.

John

Oh, do tell!!! :shock:

I thought I would comment on some of the reviewer's points wrt generalized cycle studies.

Originally Posted by [i

Generational Dynamics[/i] reviewer]The third element, the notion of a turning, is new, and as a result, you have an obligation to demonstrate its validity. Ordinarily, this would be done by setting forth a set of standards and then systematically going through a data base of known relevant historical events, classifying each according to pre-established criteria, and then looking for a pattern. It would be best to include every relevant historical event in the data base, but that would indeed be a lot of work, so you might think about picking a few regions you know relatively little about and then classifying every relevant historical event in those regions before stringing them together into a narrative. (It would be best to work on regions where the details of each relevant historical event could be separated from its date so your classifications could be truly independent of their place in the region's chronology. Knowing the chronology can bias your classifications.)

This criticism can be extended to the notion of turnings, which I did by substituting "relevant historical events" for "wars" and "turnings" for "crisis wars". Do S&H do this in their books? Is this criticism valid? If not, why? If it is valid, how would one go about addressing this criticism?

You will also have to be less selective about the periods you cover: if the concept works, it should be identifiable across many cycles, not just the two or three you usually present. It would be very valuable if you could present data showing that the cycle holds across a thousand years for sampled regions, especially where you allow for substantial variation in the length of the cycle.

What does this say about the tendency here to focus attention on only the most recent cycles? Is this a valid criticism? If not, why? If it is valid, how would one address this criticism?

Dear Mike,

You've asked me several essay questions. I'll address crisis wars in
this message, and turnings in the next message. Also, since you're
asking about "generalized cycle studies," I'll add a third message
describing a recent change in my own views on economic cycles.

It's certainly true, as the critic suggests, that the the crisis war
hypothesis has to be thoroughly tested. The obvious question is how
much can be done in a reasonable space of time.

The critic said,

Originally Posted by critic

> It would be very valuable if you could present data showing that
> the cycle holds across a thousand years for sampled regions,
> especially where you allow for substantial variation in the
> length of the cycle.

In response to this (in a brief message that hasn't been posted
here), I pointed him to this graphic:



That leads to your question:

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

> What does this say about the tendency here to focus attention on
> only the most recent cycles?

Obviously, the most recent cycles are the ones we understand the
best, the ones that are the best documented, the ones that are best
remembered.

However, focusing attention on recent decades is extremely dangerous.
The whole point of the generational paradigm is we don't remember
history and are doomed to make the same mistakes. When we compare
today's events to events in the 50s-90s, then the comparisons simply
don't apply. Comparing what's happening today to anything that's
happened since 1945 is dangerous and extremely misleading.

Mike, you've written a couple of books, so you must know the same
feeling I have, to look at a copy of your book and be struck in
wonderment over how you could ever have found the time and effort to
get such a major accomplishment completed.

I feel that way about my book, but I also feel the same way when I
look at the above graphic. It's incredible to me that I, who have
never particularly liked history, could have put out the enormous time
and effort to complete something like that, which has never been done
before and is potentially very significant to the study of history.

Each of the rectangles on that graphic was itself a major effort,
especially in the beginning. The War of Spanish Succession took me
some 3-4 weeks to analyze, as I recall, because of the complexity of
the merging timelines that had to be sorted out. (The confusion
caused by S&H's bizarre designation of the Glorious Revolution as a
crisis period didn't help.) In later months, analysis of individual
crisis wars got faster, but I don't think any of them took less than
2-3 days, and some much more.

So that brings me to the following graphic from my book:



I stole this graphic from a book that analyzes changes in Europe over
two millennia. Europe is divided into separate geographical units,
based on both terrain features (mountains, coastlines) and ethnic
divisions (language, religion).

Now, it's clear that this diagram indicates a truly overwhelming
amount of work to be done. It blows my mind just to think of it.
Around the year 1000, these were probably 50 separate regions with 50
separate timelines. By the year 2000, this was one or two regions.
How many individual crisis wars occurred in these regions? Hundreds?
How many of them have even been recorded somewhere?

Even when you have "one" crisis war, take again the War of Spanish
Succession, it's still a lot more complicated when you're dealing
with those 50 regions. The war ended in 1714 with the Treaty at
Utrecht, which the statesmen of the time signed because they wanted
to avoid for as long as possible another conflict as violent as the
one that had just ended. A war that violent and widespread would have
had many little wars in many little regions, and all of them would
have to be analyzed.

I estimate that tens of thousands of hours of work have to be done to
do a fully proper job of fully verifying all the timelines for
Europe.

Finally, the critic suggests:

Originally Posted by critic

> It would be best to work on regions where the details of each war
> could be separated from its date so your classifications could be
> truly independent of their place in the region's chronology.
> Knowing the chronology can bias your classifications.

In other words, he wants me to set up some sort of double blind test
where I analyze wars without knowing when they occurred. I really
have to laugh at this.

I believe that the crisis war criteria in my book are specific enough
to be applied reasonably objectively, and I've found no difficulty
applying them.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Dear Mike,

I'll now continue with an analysis of the S&H methodology - using
generations and turnings (what I call a "bottom up" approach) as
opposed to working from crisis wars (a "top down" approach).

First off, let me point out the obvious. Take another look at the
crisis war graphic in the last message. As long as it took to
develop the information in that graphic, how much longer would it
have taken to insert turnings between the rectangles on those paths.
I'm not sure it would have been possible in any amount of time.

There are a number of serious methodological issues in S&H's
approach, which I'll try to outline here.

When does a turning start?

There's probably no better illustration of the methodological
problems in the turning approach than the difficulty in determining
when a turning begins.

And there's no better illustration of that than the fact that the
intelligent people of this forum, almost all of whom have read The
Fourth Turning, are in disagreement over whether America is
currently in a third or fourth turning.

As you know, my view is that the fourth turning (the crisis period)
began with the Nasdaq crash in early 2000 (making it analogous to the
WW II crisis period beginning with the 1929 stock market crash).

Other people believe that the fourth turning has not begun yet, but
will begin soon. As I recall, your view is that the crisis period
will begin around 2012 (sorry if my memory is failing me on this
point). And one person has expressed the view that the crisis period
will begin in 2025, which I find really weird. (Sorry, Virgil.)

One could even make an argument that the fourth turning began in
1998. I was reminded by Saturday's dedication of the World War II
memorial that the movie Saving Private Ryan was extremely
popular, as was Tom Brokaw's book, The Greatest Generation.
It's reasonable to argue that the fourth turning began with those,
and that the previous first turning ended with the last World War II
move in the 50s starring John Wayne.

At any rate, if this group of people can't agree whether the
current time is a fourth turning or not, then how can we possibly
figure out when earlier turnings begin, with any consistency?

By contrast, it's almost always possible to identify the starting and
ending dates of crisis wars and get pretty universal agreement.

Is my turning the same as your turning?

In 1968, America was having anti-war demonstrations by "pot-smoking
long-haired sex-crazed hippies." Germany was having anti-war
demonstrations by the "68ers." Both countries were going through an
awakening period, following WW II.

Now let me ask you the following trick question:

Did Germany and America have the same awakening, or did we all
have different awakenings at the same time?

To clarify this, ask the question: Did Germany and America fight the
same World War II?

The answer to this question is obviously yes. I think we can all
agree that Germany and America were both fighting in the same war
(against each other).

But did they have the same awakening period 20 years later? It's not
reasonable to think so. After all, a war is a conflict between two
enemies, but an awakening is a conflict between two generations.
Therefore, an awakening is bound to be more personal, more local.
There's no reason why the German generational conflict should have
anything at all in common with the American generational conflict.

Indeed, I doubt that German youth would have been stirred to rebel
against their parents over the issues raised by Martin Luther King,
and American youth weren't stirred to rebel against their parents
over the German post-war insecurity and repression of issues
surrounding the Holocaust.

So the point is that Germany and France and England and America had
the same crisis war, but we all had different awakenings, all at the
same time.

Thus, in developing the generational methodology using turnings, it's
necessary to do a lot more work. You can't just identify turnings in
one region; you have to identify them in all regions.

Of course, S&H only consider Anglo-American turnings, but there's
still a problem.

And when do these turnings begin? According to S&H, America's third
turning began with Reagan's "Morning in America" speech. Is that
when England's third turning began? I would think that if it began
with any speech, then it presumably would have been one of Maggie
Thatcher's speeches.

Or how about China? I can say with great certainty that they're in a
third turning unraveling, but when did it begin? Beats me.

So, going back again to the crisis war graphic in the previous
message, it's not enough to identify the three turnings between
crisis wars along each path; you need to identify turnings for all
sub-regions (all nations) for each crisis war. That makes a huge
job much huger.

How long is a crisis war?

According to S&H, crisis periods last 20 years, with allowance for
some minor variation.

However, I have the feeling that S&H were generally confounded by
this problem. That's why they considered the Civil War to be some
sort of exception, in that it lasted only five years.

However, five years isn't the shortest crisis war that I'm aware of.
How about the Rwanda civil war of 1994? It lasted only three months,
and resulted in the massacre of a million people. When did that
fourth turning begin, by the way?

There's also the issue of the time between crisis periods. I found
that there were two different ways to measure the time between crisis
wars: 70-90 years from the beginning of one crisis war to the
beginning of the next, or 50-60 years from the end of one crisis war
to the beginning of the next. I don't believe that the latter figure
was ever shorter than 50 years, though it could go as high as 120
years. How does this variation in the time between crisis periods
affect the lengths of the first through third turnings?

These are serious problems, but S&H didn't make any real attempt to
address them.

And addressing them requires a lot of theory that hasn't been
developed yet.

There's also the problem of merging timelines. This is a very
complex problem that I had to develop theoretically when dealing only
with crisis wars. How are the other turnings affected when timelines
merge? S&H didn't consider this problem, and it's a lot more complex
when using S&H's bottom up approach.

A combined approach

I believe the solution is to combine the top-down and bottom-up
approaches in a unified way. I started this in my book, but it needs
a lot more work.

The outline is the following:

(*) Define the timeline beginning with the crisis wars. They are far
and away the easiest to identify, using the dozen or so criteria that
I've developed, and just from the fact that crisis wars are going to
be fairly well described in every history book, so information about
them is easily accessed.

(*) Define the generational changes beginning with the crisis war
"generation gap." Once again, this is far and away the easiest
generational change to identify. It separates the people who led,
fought in and grew up during the crisis war (the nomads, heroes and
artists) versus the kids born after the crisis war (the prophets).

(*) Define the mid-cycle turnings as a continuum, rather than as
discrete periods. Thus, the crisis period ends and an austerity (S&H
"high") period begins when the heroes and artists define an austere
set of societal restrictions whose purpose is to prevent another war
like that, "ever." These austere restrictions gradually unravel
during the mid-cycle period, and this is the continuum. The prophets
rebel against the heroes during the awakening, refocusing society on
individual rights as opposed to national survival. As society's
purpose continues to unravel, it enters the unraveling period (duh!),
where there is no longer a national direction, but only individual
rights. Then a 9/11 event occurs and the cycle starts again.

(*) If it's possible to determine individual historical events that
define the beginnings of the awakening and unraveling periods, then
by all means identify them. But don't make it a requirement of the
methodology.

(*) With regard to varying length seculae, use the following
guidelines: The crisis war can last from a few months to 15-20
years. The awakening period begins 15-20 years after the end of the
crisis period, as the prophets reach what we would call college age,
and the generation gap rebellion begins. Look for some sort of
"internal rebellion" -- a major, well-defined political event driven
by the prophets (the resignation of Richard Nixon, the Tiananmen
Square protests) as the end of the "active awakening" period, which
may or may not be the same as the beginning of S&H's unraveling
period, but I would call that the beginning of the final unravelling
period. Then the rest of the mid-cycle period, no matter the length,
is the unraveling period.

(*) There is still the problem of very long mid-cycle periods -
America 1675-1772, Russia 1670-1762. This needs more research, but my
theory is that these lengthened mid-cycle periods are caused by
mid-cycle wars that have a lengthening effect (French and Indian wars
and Great Northern War, respectively).

(*) Finally, it's worthwhile mentioning the underlying causes of
crisis wars. Food availability grows by 0.96% per year (according to
my estimates), and population grows 2-4% per year. This is what I
call the "Malthus Effect," and it means that food gets scarcer, and
so more expensive, every year, pushing more and more people into
extreme poverty. This problem never gets better; it only gets worse
every day, every month, every year, until the situation is resolved
with a massive crisis war that brings population and food supply back
into balance.

I believe that the approach summarized in the preceding points
satisfies the requirements of both the bottom-up and top-down
approaches, and merges them in a satisfactory way.

Forecasting methodology

Combining the top-down and bottom-up approaches also provides
opportunities to improve the forecasting methodology.

Generational dynamics provides a long-range forecasting methodology
for predicting things like wars, financial crises, riots and
demonstrations -- things characteristic of crisis and awakening
periods. S&H have developed America-only market forecasting tools
using the generational paradigm within their Lifecourse Associates
firm.

At this point, it's worth distinguishing short-range and long-range
forecasting methods.

An example of a short-range forecasting method is this: "If it rains
on any Tuesday in a leap year, then stocks will go up the next day,
on Wednesday." The characteristics of this kind of rule are: (1) It
applies in the short range (here, the next day); and (2) the
probability is little better than chance that the rule will actually
work.

However, the generational dynamics long-range forecasting methodology
is quite different. Here are rule might be, "A nation will have a
crisis war 70-90 years after the last crisis war." The
characteristics of this kind of rule are: (1) It applies in the long
range (here, a range of 70-90 years), and (2) the probability is very
high that the rule will work.

So, the more accurately one can predict the nature of an event that
will occur, the less accurately one can pinpoint the time, and vice
versa.

(I've noticed, incidentally, that financial pundits on TV don't seem
to understand the difference between long-range and short-term
forecasting techniques. Generally they're never looking ahead more
than a day or two anyway, so they believe that any forecasting method
must be a short-range method, and long-range methods are a great
puzzle to them.)

The idea then is to improve the time accuracy of the generational
dynamics forecasting methodology. In its raw form, the methodology
predicts something to an accuracy of 20 years, a time period that's
way too long to do much good. But once you're within that 20 year
period, you can start to look for short-range forecasting rules to
shorten that time period. This is where the generational work by S&H
in Lifecourse can come into play, with two different classes of
benefits. The first benefit is that by using the Lifecourse work, and
by carefully watching international events, it should be possible to
improve the time precision of forecasted events to an accuracy of 3-5
years, or even 1-2 years in some cases.

Mike, a few months ago I saw you post something in another thread
expressing frustration that you've been unable to predict anything
using the Kondratiev cycles methods you've been developing, but I
believe you could use an approach similar to the one I just
described. As I recall, Kondratiev cycles (which I believe are
global technology cycles) are 40-55 years long. This means that they
can be used to forecast an event to an accuracy of 15 years. However,
once we enter that 15-year period, it should be possible to look for
other signals that have meaning only within that 15-year period, to
improve the time accuracy of the methodology.

The second benefit is that the Lifecourse marketing work can be
extended to other nation, thus providing international marketing
consulting opportunities, using the generational paradigm.

Incidentally, this provides an opportunity to respond to another one
of the critic's criticisms:

Originally Posted by critic

> There is also a paradigmatic problem you should understand: Your
> theory is basically what academics call reductionist, assigning to
> one cause, or some small number of causes, the ability to explain
> a great deal. Reductionism is academically taboo these days. While
> it might be possible to change this attitude, you'll need a very
> compelling case to do so, one that is far more convincing than
> what is presented in the book.

This extended discussion of methodology, including combining S&H's
bottom-up approach with the top-down approach, yields a methodology
of extraordinary complexity.

When I wrote my book, I tried to present Generational Dynamics in
fairly simple terms that people could understand. The downside is
this critic and others think that the entire methodology is simple,
which is far from the truth. The critic clearly didn't grasp much of
the theory if he believes that it's explaining a great deal with a
single cause. What's really happening is that Generational Dynamics
explains a very great deal about how the world works using an
extremely rich and complex theory and methodology. If I understand
the critic's definition of "reductionist," Generational Dynamics
is very, very far from being reductionist.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Dear Mike,

In your message, you talked about "generalized cycle studies," and
this is a good time for me to talk about generational economic cycles
again, because I've developed a fairly significant change of view in
the last couple of months.

In the past, I've associated financial crises with crisis wars. That
association still exists, as I'll discuss below, but the change is
that I now see major global economic cycles as being on a timeline all
their own that's independent of the generational crisis war cycle.

One thing prompting this change in view is something that's been
puzzling me for a very long time: If financial crises occur at the
same time as crisis wars, then how come the South Sea bubble burst in
1721, when the War of Spanish Succession ended in 1714? This violates
my earlier hypothesis that this kind of financial crisis should
trigger a crisis war, not follow a crisis war.

However, now I see the major global financial crises as entirely
independent of crisis wars. It seems pretty obvious when you list
them out:

(*) Tulipomania bubble bursts - 1637

(*) South Sea bubble bursts - 1721

(*) French monarchy bankrupt - 1789

(*) Panic of 1857

(*) Stock Market crash - 1929

(*) Nasdaq crash - 2000

There have been other smaller or local regionalized financial crises,
of course, but the ones above are the major global financial crises
for the last few centuries. And once you list them this way, the
pattern is as plain as the nose on your face.

The intuitive description of the cycle is as follows: A bubble drives
prices up unrealistically based on massive credit - a kind of global
pyramid scheme. When the bubble bursts, the people who live through
that become financially risk aversive. Over the years, those
risk-aversive people run banks, investment houses, and other
financial institutions, and prevent another bubble from occurring.
But when all the people in that generation retire, all at the same
time, and turn control over to a new generation of people who have no
personal memory of the last bubble crash, then there's a new bubble,
and the cycle repeats.

This is clearly what happened in the 1990s, when the stock market /
high tech stock option bubble occurred at exactly the time that the
people in the risk-aversive generation that grew up during the Great
Depression all retired or died at the same time, and turned the
financial institutions over to the next generation, which was more
risk-seeking, financially. (And as I've discussed in other threads,
the Fed has extended the bubble with its near-zero interest rate
policy.)

My change in viewpoint requires an adjustment to the theory.

Regional vs Global Cycles

We now have the crisis war generational cycles and the economic
generational cycles. How do they fit together?

Although the crisis war cycles and economic cycles are both roughly
80 years long, there is at least one big difference: Crisis war
cycles are regional; you don't go to war with your neighbor
just because some country far away went to war with its neighbor.
But economic cycles are global; you do indeed invest in a
bubble market if someone far away, whom you consider to be astute,
invests in the bubble. As an aside, technology cycles are also
global, since technology developed in one region is quickly adopted in
other regions.

I've held for a long that financial crises and war crises go
together. A war crisis creates or worsens a financial crisis because
of the required expenditure of money to pursue a war. Conversely, a
financial crisis worsens a war crisis, because poverty stricken men
who can't feed their families will go to war either to get paid as a
soldier or to look for conquest booty; at any rate, if you're going
to starve to death anyway, then joining the army seems quite
reasonable.

All of that is still true. However, although the major generational
economic cycle is global, there are many regional financial crises,
and when a crisis war is not synchronized with a global economic
cycle, then there's usually be a regional financial crisis associated
with the war.

For example, the American Revolutionary War is not synchronized with
the global cycles outlined above. The Revolutionary War crisis
period was triggered by the British bank meltdown in 1772. This
meltdown was devastating to the colonies, causing many business
bankruptcies (inventory selloffs), but it wasn't a big deal to England
or Europe. However, it's possible that this bank problem began the
third turning in Western Europe, as the French monarchy's financial
controls became completely unraveled, leading to the bankruptcy of the
French monarchy in 1789.

So now we have four different cycles, all independent of one another
but interacting with one another: S&H's 20-year generational cycles,
the 80-year generational crisis war cycle, the 40-50 year Kondratieff
/ technology cycle, and the 80-year generational global financial
cycle.

Of these four, the first two are regional, and the last two are
global. (By the way, the "global" may not entirely apply to China or
Africa, as least for earlier centuries.)

Returning again to the question of workload, there is a huge amount
of work to be done merging these into a unified theory, and testing
that theory over hundreds of regions for centuries. If I live long
enough, I'd like to create a "world model" of the world today. This
model would contain about 500-1000 regions of the world, and the
generational and economic status of each region. It would be used as
a predictive model for a range of things from marketing to war, and
would be useful for everyone from government agencies to
multinational corporations.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

As you know, my view is that the fourth turning (the crisis period) began with the Nasdaq crash in early 2000 (making it analogous to the WW II crisis period beginning with the 1929 stock market crash).

Other people believe that the fourth turning has not begun yet, but
will begin soon. As I recall, your view is that the crisis period
will begin around 2012 (sorry if my memory is failing me on this
point).

No, my view is the same as yours, I specifically advanced it in a post made in August 2000.

One could even make an argument that the fourth turning began in
1998. I was reminded by Saturday's dedication of the World War II
memorial that the movie Saving Private Ryan was extremely
popular, as was Tom Brokaw's book, The Greatest Generation.
It's reasonable to argue that the fourth turning began with those,
and that the previous first turning ended with the last World War II
move in the 50s starring John Wayne.

This doesn't seem reasonable to me.

By contrast, it's almost always possible to identify the starting and
ending dates of crisis wars and get pretty universal agreement.

I don't see this at all. It seems a matter of opinion. One man's crisis war might be another man's regular war.

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

However, now I see the major global financial crises as entirely independent of crisis wars. It seems pretty obvious when you list them out:

(*) Tulipomania bubble bursts - 1637

(*) South Sea bubble bursts - 1721

(*) French monarchy bankrupt - 1789

(*) Panic of 1857

(*) Stock Market crash - 1929

(*) Nasdaq crash - 2000

This seems an arbitrary list. Why is the Panic of 1857 listed, but the more devastating Panics of 1837, 1873 and 1893 ignored?

I don't recall the financial difficulties of the French crown being a global financial crisis. Rather, it was a fatal political crisis for the French monarchy. In that time it was the Dutch who were at the center of the financial world and their crises in 1762, 1772 and 1782 would qualify as global financial crises.

There have been other smaller or local regionalized financial crises,
of course, but the ones above are the major global financial crises
for the last few centuries. And once you list them this way, the
pattern is as plain as the nose on your face.

As I noted above, I cannot see all the crises you listed as the major global financial crises. What criteria did you employ that let you select 1857 (and not 1837, 1873 or 1893) or 1789 (and not 1762, 1772 or 1782). It looks like you picked crises that happened to fall at the appropriate time, but this would be tautological.

Dear Mike,

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

> I don't see this at all. It seems a matter of opinion. One man's
> crisis war might be another man's regular war.

There are two different issues here. I was saying that the starting
and ending dates of wars can usually be determined without too much
controversy.

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

> This doesn't seem reasonable to me.

I agree, but I do think that something happened in 1998. I remember
being quite surprised at the time at the popularity of Saving
Private Ryan and The Greatest Generation, and I suspect
that they wouldn't have been as popular a decade earlier. If that's
true, then it could be that Saving Private Ryan was the first
major harbinger of the new fourth turning. My real point is that
there's a large amount of ambiguity in trying to determine when a
turning begins.

Or, let me put it this way. In my book I have a dozen or so pretty
well-defined criteria for determining whether or not a given war is a
crisis war. But I know of no such criteria for determining when a
turning begins, other than to work backward or forward from a given
crisis war.

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

> This seems an arbitrary list. Why is the Panic of 1857 listed,
> but the more devastating Panics of 1837, 1873 and 1893 ignored?
> ... As I noted above, I cannot see all the crises you listed as
> the major global financial crises. What criteria did you employ
> that let you select 1857 (and not 1837, 1873 or 1893) or 1789 (and
> not 1762, 1772 or 1782). It looks like you picked crises that
> happened to fall at the appropriate time, but this would be
> tautological.

I'll have to do some more research on this question. Perhaps I need
a sharper classification of financial crises.

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

> I don't recall the financial difficulties of the French crown
> being a global financial crisis.

My understanding is that it was indeed. The French monarchy was in
swimming in debt throughout Europe, and the bankruptcy caused a
financial crisis throughout Europe. But I'll do some more research
on this as well.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Originally Posted by Mr. John Xenakis

And one person has expressed the view that the crisis period

will begin in 2025, which I find really weird. (Sorry, Virgil.)

Thank you for the compliment, Mr. Xenakis. It is based upon some fault either my rather Delphic style or your inattention. I would plunk down on the former; I wager that many think Mr. Alexander and yourself as weird here at T4T. That is uncanny or concerned with fate. I am not much interested in the future but in the past. I follow Clio and not the daughters of Themis--Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos.

I am one of the backward (more than the glance of Lot's wife) gaze. It is the Past that I ponder and not the Future. I have, in what I thought a light-hearted way, given my views (unencumbered by Thought) upon the Future and the Nature of the Coming (and not Present) Crisis. I believe what is now here or looming is a sham and the Real Thing is coming in five or ten years time and will be with us (and probably with you here at T4T) for a period quite a bit longer, say 2035, before the Golden, Sunlit Uplands of the Coming Historical High are at last climbed. I posit a self inflicted blow of a genetic nature as armament or accident upon Nature in the manner Mr. Reed would style a Renaissance. I fear it will be an abortion rather than a rebirth that comes from such hubristic humanism; but, we do have a right to choose as the Progressives so often cant.

That we shall choose illness and death should come as no surprise to one who takes a tragic view of the human condition. That it will be scientific insolence rather than the ravings of an Islamic heresy or the capitalisms of the Celestials that deliver the harm and at a date of un-clockwork timing is my view (again un-aided by Thought, but given forth by Sentiment [which is much admired in the Unravelling] instead.)

It is you and yours who devote much time to the future who are uncanny, Mr. Xenakis. And, though I wish I could have the style, it is you who strive in that particular direction. I another.


Yo. once and future servant.
Virgil K. Saari

Dear Virgil,

I've read and reread (each reading rewards me with greater
understanding) your latest posting, and I've begun to see not only
the error of my ways, but also the great richness of being weird or
uncanny - or both.

Perhaps you recall a movie from several years ago - I didn't see it
but I saw the trailers - of a birth that didn't come out as expected.
The new entity was not the human bundle of joy that everyone was
expecting, but a hideous and unrecognizable monster whose spermal and
eggal origins could not be imagined. Analogously, if we are now
giving birth to the future, you're right that we may have the right
to choose. But the choices that we have the right to choose from do
not include a collection of different entities from which we might
select the most robust or happiest baby. No, that choice is not
available to us. The best that the right to choose gives us is a
right to choose between whatever future is now growing within time's
womb or no future whatsoever. But even in that sense, the right to
choose is a less consequential right than one might think. Each
individual human being has the right to choose between experiencing
the fruits of this impending birth or not, but a choice not to
experience it affects only that human being. The right to choose
applies only to oneself, not to time nor to the entity in time's
womb. The nature of that entity has already been determined, and we
can do little to prepare for it except to apply whatever amniocentesis
is available to us.

As I reread your post, I found myself wondering whether you've ever
considered adopting the persona of Janus.




A Janus of both Clio and Clotho might make you even more weird and
uncanny than Mike and me combined! Imagine how exciting that would
be!

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

In 1968, America was having anti-war demonstrations by "pot-smoking long-haired sex-crazed hippies." Germany was having anti-war demonstrations by the "68ers." Both countries were going through an awakening period, following WW II.

Now let me ask you the following trick question:

Did Germany and America have the same awakening, or did we all have different awakenings at the same time?

To clarify this, ask the question: Did Germany and America fight the same World War II?

The answer to this question is obviously yes. I think we can all agree that Germany and America were both fighting in the same war (against each other).

Are you saying that if two countries are fighting a war and for one of them it is a crisis war, then it is a crisis war for the other too? For example. assuming that the War of the American Revolution was a crisis war for the US, was it also a crisis war for the other four belligerents?

If so, then could we say that what makes a crisis war for one a crisis war for all is the intense interaction between the various nations during the war. Could non-political interactions such as trade, financial links, and cultural exchanges also provide aligning interactions? Could not an awakening in one country spread to another through these links, in which case they would all be in the same awakening?

For example, the Reformation began in Germany, but soon spread throughout most of Western Europe. Couldn't we say that Western Europe as a whole experienced the Reformation awakening, rather than saying each nation experienced their own independent awakening?

Re: Crisis war results after retirement and/or death of all with memories of the last one.

Unforetunately, this fits in beautifully-or horribly-with the generational paradign, as it is the Prophet generation that lacks these memories of the last one (not to mention younger generations).

Of course, this same mechanism could work in a society lacking the saeculum, so we can expect that this occurred in the pre-modern West and then continued after the cycle began.

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

In other words, he wants me to set up some sort of double blind test where I analyze wars without knowing when they occurred. I really have to laugh at this.

I believe that the crisis war criteria in my book are specific enough
to be applied reasonably objectively, and I've found no difficulty
applying them.

Can you provide the specific criteria for crisis wars?

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

Are you saying that if two countries are fighting a war and for one of them it is a crisis war, then it is a crisis war for the other too? For example. assuming that the War of the American Revolution was a crisis war for the US, was it also a crisis war for the other four belligerents?

I know he's not saying that because John has pointed out that though (from his POV) the Boer War was a crisis war for the Afrikaaners, it decidedly was not one for Britain.

BTW, John, why didn't the fall of Apartheid not result in a big, bloody mess since it was about one long lifetime after the Boer War?

Originally Posted by William Jennings Bryan

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

Are you saying that if two countries are fighting a war and for one of them it is a crisis war, then it is a crisis war for the other too? For example. assuming that the War of the American Revolution was a crisis war for the US, was it also a crisis war for the other four belligerents?

I know he's not saying that because John has pointed out that though (from his POV) the Boer War was a crisis war for the Afrikaaners, it decidedly was not one for Britain.

BTW, John, why didn't the fall of Apartheid not result in a big, bloody mess since it was about one long lifetime after the Boer War?

Sean, have you come up with a mechanism for the multimodal saeculum?

Dear Mike,

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

> >>> John J. Xenakis wrote: Did Germany and America have the same
> awakening, or did we all have different awakenings at the same
> time?

> Are you saying that if two countries are fighting a war and for
> one of them it is a crisis war, then it is a crisis war for the
> other too? For example. assuming that the War of the American
> Revolution was a crisis war for the US, was it also a crisis war
> for the other four belligerents?

> If so, then could we say that what makes a crisis war for one a
> crisis war for all is the intense interaction between the various
> nations during the war. Could non-political interactions such as
> trade, financial links, and cultural exchanges also provide
> aligning interactions? Could not an awakening in one country
> spread to another through these links, in which case they would
> all be in the same awakening?

> For example, the Reformation began in Germany, but soon spread
> throughout most of Western Europe. Couldn't we say that Western
> Europe as a whole experienced the Reformation awakening, rather
> than saying each nation experienced their own independent
> awakening?

I think you're raising a number of valid questions.

First, with regard to crisis wars: I would think it should be
possible for A and B to have a crisis war, and then for A to be
attacked by C ten years later, with the war so awful that it
should be a crisis war. In fact, I was looking for exceptions like
that when I was developing different history timelines.

I found some exceptional situation in terms of very long seculae,
say, 120 years or something like that.

But even though I was looking for it, I never found a single case
where a new crisis war began for a nation or society less than 50-60
years after the end of the last one. It just doesn't happen.

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.

I always tell people if they want to understand what a crisis war is
like, then think about 9/11, and how traumatized everyone was by that
one attack, and then imagine ten 9/11-type attacks every day for a few
years. For example, nobody who had lived through the bombing of
London in the 1940s would have been particularly traumatized by just
the one 9/11 attack on the WTC.

That's why I just don't believe that other kinds of interactions --
trade, politics, culture -- could cause a society to develop the
visceral energy for a crisis war, even if they had a war.

So, to more directly address your point, if even when two nations are
at war -- and everyone can all agree that they're fighting the same
war -- it's still possible for it to be a crisis war for one and a
mid-cycle war for the other because of these differences in visceral
hatred and energy.

Turning now to awakenings, the reasoning is the same. In 1968, both
German kids and American kids were protesting against the Vietnam
War, but I don't see how the two could have been sharing anything on
a more than superficial level.

It's like two couples, living next door to each other, each having
arguments over the same thing, say, money. If Arnie and Abby are
fighting over money, and if Candy and Carl are fighting over money,
they're still not having the same fight. They're having two separate
fights.

That doesn't mean that there can't be a cross-contamination of
issues. Candy might say to Carl, "I was talking to Abby today, and
she says that Arnie is just as stingy as you are!!!" But they're
still two separate fights. A fight between a married couple is so
personal, it has to be unique.

I would say the same thing for the Reformation. England, Germany and
France have such cultural differences that I would have to say that
their Reformation awakenings would have to have been very different,
even though they had the Reformation issue in common.

Originally Posted by Mike Alexander '59

> Can you provide the specific criteria for crisis wars?

Here's the material from book:

Crisis Wars versus Mid-Cycle Wars

What's the difference between a crisis war and a mid-cycle war?

When I started studying this field, it was clear that I needed a set
of criteria that I could apply objectively. The criteria that I've
come up with are successful in that regard. There's some subjectivity
to them, but when I've applied these criteria to actual historical
wars, in just about every case there really was no question what kind
of war it was.

One criterion I never used was number of battle deaths. I would have
liked to, since it would make things a lot simpler, but I never could
see how to use it for that purpose. How many deaths make a crisis
war? Is it 0.1% of the population? 1% of the population? I could
never answer that question, and in fact, I don't believe that any
numeric measure would work.

Another criterion that can't be used is the behavior of the
country's leader, but this is a little tricky to define. Generational
Dynamics depends on the beliefs, attitudes and actions of large masses
of people, not a single leader or a small group of politicians. There
are many wars that are enthusiastically supported by the population
(such as WW II for America) and those where the population shows
its disapproval (such as the Vietnam war for America).

Generational cycles depend upon the "cultural memory" of the
population, and so by the Principle of Localization, I needed to find
a way to measure the impact of the war on the people of a country or
region with a common cultural memory.

As we discussed in chapter 1, what makes a war a crisis war is the
emotions felt by the population at large: terror, anxiety, fury at the
enemy, and a desire for revenge. If I were to use a single word to
describe the difference between a crisis war and a mid-cycle war, the
word would be "energy." How much energy did the society use to pursue
the war?

This led to a list of questions designed to measure the "energy" with
which the country engaged in the war, and the effect it had. Here's
the list of questions. None of these questions is determinative by
itself, but several of these questions taken together can provide an
answer. The symbol (+) indicates that an affirmative answer
indicates a crisis war, and the symbol (-) indicates that an
affirmative answer indicates a mid-cycle war.

• (*) Did the country plan and prepare for the war in advance
  (+), or was the war a surprise that they didn't prepare for (-)?
  
• (*) Did the country start the war or respond to it energetically (+)?
  
• (*) Or was there an exogenous factor pulling the country into the war
  -- a treaty with another country under attack, or an unexpected
  invasion, for example (-)?
  
• (*) Was the war top-down (-) or bottom-up (+) -- that is, did the
  energy for the war come from the leaders (-) or from the people (+)?
  
• (*) Was there a financial crisis that caused enough poverty to cause
  being a soldier to be the only way to feed his family (+)?
  
• (*) Did the people blame their war opponents for their financial
  crisis (+)?
  
• (*) Was the antiwar/pacifist movement a major part of the political
  landscape (-), or was it just a footnote to the history of the war
  (+)?
  
• (*) Were civilians targeted for attack (+), or did political
  considerations force civilians to be protected (-)?
  
• (*) Was the war particularly violent, bloody or genocidal (+)?
  
• (*) Or was the war a stalemate (even if people got killed) (-)?
  
• (*) Was the military strategy primarily offensive (+) or defensive
  (-)?
  
• (*) Did the war result in a major transformation -- major
  governmental changes, major national boundary changes, for example
  (+)?
  
• (*) Was the country occupied and controlled by enemy forces (+)?
  
• (*) Was the war so horrible that the parties were forced into
  unpleasant compromises just to end the war -- compromises that
  created fault lines that led to the next crisis war 80 years later
  (+)?

That's a long list of questions, but my experience is that applying
those criteria makes it almost always pretty obvious whether a war is
a crisis war or a mid-cycle war.

[End of excerpt]

To the above list, I would now add one more: Did the war begin
because things "spiraled out of control" (+), or was it carefully
planned and executed to accomplish some moderate objective (-)?

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Dear Tim,

Originally Posted by Tim Walker

> Unfortunately, this fits in beautifully-or horribly-with the
> generational paradign, as it is the Prophet generation that lacks
> these memories of the last one (not to mention younger
> generations).

I think it's so interesting that it turns out that the baby boomers
run the whole show.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com