Originally Posted by JohnMc82

I think the atonement/advancement paradigm works on the similarities between 1t/3t and 2t/4t. But... as much as those sets of turnings share similarities, I think they're even more accurately described as opposites.

Five years after being elected, Lincoln was dead and the union was saved. Five years after Obama's election, he's still promising to negotiate with the south - no matter what!

Our decade is 1850s redux, not 1860s redux.

The issue of a growing regional culture divide is the same, but the social approach to it is as opposite as it gets. In the mega-high, the result would be greater unification - in a mega-unraveling, the result would be greater fragmentation.

There is no mega-high or mega-unravelling, and we don't know what the outcome of this 4T will be yet, just 5 years in.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

Yes, and I suspect these terms are yet another part of the trend here to knock us.

Why should the terms themselves be based upon the point of view of the "advancement idealists" and not ours?

It's simply the way how society in general views these things and on some level always has. The two viewpoints are diametrically opposed and like to see each other as one another's villains.

Comedic viewpoints are very earth-bound and concerned with life as it is. They don't look beyond themselves because they consider such views to be a waste of time--because what's important is the here and now, not the past and not the future, but what's of concern right now. In fact to be overly concerned with the past and the future is a crime, as it allows insane laws to rule the here and now and thus make life difficult and hard for everyone. Comedy thus concerns itself with overthrowing what it views as "insane dictatorships" or "absurd law", which don't take into consideration the consequences endured by the people "here and now". While Tragedy thinks that human faults are a crime that "holds us back from becoming gods", Comedy embraces faults as simply part of being "human", and is content with simply being human and finding strength in doing so.

Tragedies are very spiritual-bound and concerned with humanity's interaction with something greater than itself as channeled through an individual figure. They usually are obsessed with saving us from the sins of the past so that we might have a future. Tragedy often wants to be greater than it's capable of being and has difficulty accepting faults within itself--seeing them as a weakness.

You're missing the point of the tragedies though, it is by the very act of "punishment" that the wrong is righted, and we in the audience are saved or inspired to go out and continue to right the wrong--depending upon the situation. It's the act of divine retribution in some sense.

This point is made clearer if you study ancient Greek Tragedy or Japanese Noh plays which operate under the same points. Tragedies in that view is that a universal law is broken so that we might be saved perhaps not immediately, but definitely sometime in the future. I had a War Baby professor (1942 cohort) in Grad school who mad a brilliant argument for a how a Tragedy is more "life giving" than a Comedy--but then later we found out that he was so skilled he could argue the reverse as well. He was good at arguing from the viewpoint of any drama you could think of. And could be an impassioned advocate for any dramatic viewpoint that you could imagine--arguing for it and against it equally well.

The Oresteia's final play in the trilogy: The Eumenides definitely is a good example of this, as is Oedipus at Colonus. The structure of the Tragedy Trilogy is thus:

First Play - the back story of why the crime had to be committed, what was "wrong" with the past
Second Play - the crime that had to be committed and its retrubution
Third Play - how that crime was actually a good thing that led to the saving of us all

Satyr Play - a parody of the original crime

In the Oresteia here's the three plays:

Play One: The Agamemnon - Agamemnon, hot on the heels of having won at Troy returns home and is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra. Why? Because she's avenging the death of their daughter Iphigenia who was made a virginal sacrifice (as ordained by the gods) by Agamemnon so he could go to Troy in the first place. Going to Troy enriched Agamemnon and his city-state as he brought back the spoils of war, but ultimately he had to commit a crime in order to achieve that wealth (murdering his own daughter).

Play Two: The Libation Bearers - Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, has to avenge his father's death by the "law of his society and the Gods" but it is a sin to commit matricide... he puzzles over what to do realizing he's damned for not avenging his father's murder by the law of his society and the Gods if he doesn't, and he's damned by the Gods if he kills his mother; ultimately he commits the crime and avenges his father by killing his mother, being punished by the Gods for the crime of matricide by having the Furies pursue him

Play Three: Orestes goes to Athens where he pleads to Athena to try his case. Athena assembles the "first murder case" and in a play that's essentially a propaganda piece for how democracy is better than monarchy, acquits Orestes of his crime (the jury is hung but Athena breaks the tie by siding with Orestes), thus Orestes crime becomes the impetus for the foundation of Democracy in Athens, the Furies are transformed from avenging beast-women spirits into kindly grandmother figures called "the Eumenides". And in that case the avenging murder society of Orestes is replaced with the justice voting society of Athens.

~Chas'88

By the way, these literary theory bits are wonderful. Where and for what did you go to grad school, and what are you doing with it?

I think Chas is one of the first grad students in history to have an audience who enjoys hearing the things he comes up with for his thesis research

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

...and what are you doing with it?

Performing his "Civic-Duty". !


Prince

Here is a piece I found that contains some of the makings for the story bridging the Cluny mega-awakening through the Mendicant mega-awakening and on to the Reformation mega-awakening. The author discusses the involvement of monasticism in European economic development. The author does not mention Cluny, instead focusing on the Cistercians, which was a reform to Cluny. The Cistercian movement was a faster growing movement and came after the Crusades, both of which provided a big stimulus to economic development. But historians now know that the European economy bottomed in the 800's and began a slow rise after this, which was well underway in the 11th century.
Development only accelerated after the Crusades, it did not begin then. The Cluniac monasteries followed the same Benedictine rule as the Cistercians, so if the fast-growing Cistercian movement was an important factor in the rapid 12th century growth, it stands to reason that the slower-growing Cluniac movement would be a factor in the slower 10th and 11th century growth. Also the timing is right: Cluny was established in AD 910, around the time growth was just beginning.

An excerpt follows (my comments are in red):

Self-transforming economic growth takes place under capitalism because under capitalism market niches, new products, and techniques proliferate. (Collins 1997) Giving Weber’s model (in his words) “a Schumpeterian twist,” Collins argues that three organizational conditions are necessary for self-sustaining capitalist growth to exist: 1) Markets must exist for factors of production (land, labor, and capital) as well as for commodities, 2) All factors of production must be controlled by entrepreneurs, 3) Both entrepreneurs and labor should be motivated to work hard and should be willing to give up current consumption for the sake of future gains. These organizational conditions were met as “monasteries, temples, and churches at first formed their own market and property relations, accumulated wealth, and pioneered new economic structures. These made up a substantial sector in medieval economies where religious organization at times held as much as one third of the cultivated land, and perhaps even more of the portable wealth. Within its own sector, religious organization broke through the obstacles to economic growth within traditional societies. In Schumpeter's terms, monasteries were the first entrepreneurs.” (Collins 1997, p. 848) In other words, religion contributed to capitalism not by inspiring lay people’s beliefs and motivations (as Protestant ethic did) but through the material expansion of monasteries.

“Weber and others noted the irony that ascetic Protestants, prohibited by religious scruples from freely spending the rewards of their disciplined labor, ended up growing rich. The mechanism is even more evident in the case of the monasteries, where the fruits of religious discipline became material capital for investment: Because celibate monks could not siphon this off to family consumption, it was the monastic corporation that grew rich.” (Collins 1997, p. 848) “Throughout the medieval era the Catholic Church was the biggest landowner in Europe – and its wealth surpassed the wealth of all nobility in Europe.” (Stark 2006, p.58) Monastic corporations also spearheaded innovations in production techniques which raised productivity. Immense increases in productivity were realized because of the switch to horses from cows when ploughing, the heavy mouldboard plough, three field system. Cistercians incorporated previously untilled tracts and cleared forests and drained submerged areas (Stark 2006, p.59) As a result, monasteries ceased to be longer subsistence economies and they specialized in the production of particular commodities, which they sold at a profit. (Stark 2006, p. 58)

The spill over to a secular economy takes place first through the spread of proselytizing movements that began in the monastic orders. “In Europe, China, and Japan alike, there were periods during which burgeoning movements founded new monasteries, typically by reforming orders which tightened monastic discipline such as the Cistercians (began in Crusade awakening 1095-1122). These movements had the effects of geographically expanding the monastic economy and amassing wealth. Religious organizational growth was accompanied or followed by movements led by monastic preachers proselytizing among the common people (Augustinian, Franciscan, and Dominican friars, (began in Mendicant awakening 1204-31) hybrid forms of quasi-ascetic lay religiosity were the result. On the material side, these movements spread market relations and disciplined economic practices in lay society. Still later, full-scale transformation to a secular economy came about by "reformations," politically based confiscations of the old monastic property holdings (Bohemia during Hussite awakening 1406-35 and England during Reformation awakening). Monastic wealth was transferred to secular channels, and religious motivations for salvation were forced into worldly channels, including economic activities.” (Collins 1997, p. 849)

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

The saeculum seems to alternate between outward and inwardly-focused. The civil war was inwardly-focused, on an internal crisis in America, and was powered by a culturally-focused prophet generation, the Transcendental.

All 4Ts feature an internal struggle.

Although the great-power saeculum also featured an internal crisis, it prominently featured an external threat, WWII....while the Wars of the Roses and Glorious Revolution were more internally-focused

The Glorious Revolution featured the same pattern of initial internal crisis followed by external threat (War of the League of Augsburg, War of Spanish Succession) as did the Depression crisis. I don't see how they are different.

The Revolution would have fit into the outward-centered turning because of the invasion of British troops, and so would the Armada Crisis,

The colonists at the time of the Revolution were Englishmen and considered themselves as such. This makes the Revolution seem to be more of an internal struggle, like the Civil War and War of the Roses. On the other hand, Spain was a foreign power so that makes the Armada crisis consistent with outward-focused. Thus, I see these two 4T as opposite in this categorization.

This gives for the six 4Ts in chronological order: inner, outer, outer, inner, inner, outer, no pattern that I can discern

So, uhm, I was working the timing for the MegaSaecula out and I wanted to see how it jibed with everyone else's.

So, if this saeculum just ending was the MegaUnraveling of the Modern age, with the rise of PoMo and other ideological ills, the Midern Age would start with the American and French Revolutions. The previous cylce would be about 400 years long and would have started around 1400, with the Reformation being its MegaAwakening and the 30 years war kicking off its MegaUnraveling. We can call this the Renaissance cycle. This would make the previous cycle start around 1000 AD, the traditional start of the High Middle Ages. The entire 14th century would then be it's MegaCrisis. We can call this the Medieval cycle. The previous cycle, if this pattern continues, would start right around the post classical population minimum.

So at first glance, the theory seems to fit very well. I'm sorry, I haven't caught up on all the old threads yet. Is thus the timeline everyone else is working on?

Eric excepted of course.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

Kepi,

I think I have an idea what you are getting at. You are thinking why cannot each turning impact the generations through COA or other mechanism, in a way similar to how social moments are supposed to impact generations? This idea rests on an assumption that an Unraveling is very different from a High and so generations reared in or who COA in one are different than those from another. That is, all four turnings create generations and vice versa...

I've been trying to figure out how best to consider this information, and I'm wondering if we're not encountering a situation where our culture has run away with it's narrative. It would explain the shorter cycles in a way if the generations are the driver of both themselves and the cycle, as a social moment is simply a socially driven event, just the culmination of a series of other events that is amplified by magnitude. Over time a pattern develops from the naturally occuring rhythm of the cycle, as it's how humans adapted: generational types.

These generational types, raised in the context of their society adapt to one another because the stories they tell more or less tell que people in to where they are in the cycle, so each generation knows how to interact with all the others. Over time, this knowledge ensures a faster response to eachother, meaning the K-cycle is no longer the driving force, it's the story itself, and now the K-cycle is what follows the generations rather than vice versa?

Nothing I'd consider set in stone, because narratives are, by nature, not scientific. However, they are a very human response, as we have all probably known people who've used scientific data to draw conclusions which are definitely beyond the scope of pure science. Unfortunately, once you move into a realm of narrative, it's becomes impossible to objectively verify cause.

Originally Posted by Kepi

I've been trying to figure out how best to consider this information, and I'm wondering if we're not encountering a situation where our culture has run away with it's narrative. It would explain the shorter cycles in a way if the generations are the driver of both themselves and the cycle, as a social moment is simply a socially driven event, just the culmination of a series of other events that is amplified by magnitude. Over time a pattern develops from the naturally occuring rhythm of the cycle, as it's how humans adapted: generational types.

These generational types, raised in the context of their society adapt to one another because the stories they tell more or less tell que people in to where they are in the cycle, so each generation knows how to interact with all the others. Over time, this knowledge ensures a faster response to eachother, meaning the K-cycle is no longer the driving force, it's the story itself, and now the K-cycle is what follows the generations rather than vice versa?

Nothing I'd consider set in stone, because narratives are, by nature, not scientific. However, they are a very human response, as we have all probably known people who've used scientific data to draw conclusions which are definitely beyond the scope of pure science. Unfortunately, once you move into a realm of narrative, it's becomes impossible to objectively verify cause.

Eventually the narratives themselves become their own causes, I'd conjecture. Eventually getting to the point where they stop being relavent and new narratives have to be forged, which then would slow the Saeculum back down, is my guess. Sort of like if you twist something on a piece of string so much that the string begins to bunch up and "shorten" until it can go no further and then it suddenly reverses course as you let the object go.

~Chas'88

Hah!! Just as I expected. The Crusades and the Renaissance of the 12th century both occurred right where the timeline would predict a MegaAwakening.

The day is mine!! Well, mine and whoever else came up with the same timeline... The day is ours!!

Jordan--as to your earlier questions: Villanova University, and Theater.

~Chas'88

Originally Posted by Chas'88

Eventually the narratives themselves become their own causes, I'd conjecture. Eventually getting to the point where they stop being relavent and new narratives have to be forged, which then would slow the Saeculum back down, is my guess. Sort of like if you twist something on a piece of string so much that the string begins to bunch up and "shorten" until it can go no further and then it suddenly reverses course as you let the object go.

~Chas'88

This was the overall type of motion that I was looking for in conjunction with the K-cycle over time (sort of another wave within the K-cycle's mini wave, though possibly more yo-yo like) that's just not reasonably verifiable. However, I wasn't associating it with the duration of the saeculum in my thinking. However, this could also be very significant as postmodernism and deconstruction would signal a lot in the realm of constructing a new narrative.

As an aside, did you ever get to check out The House of Leaves? It'd be pretty pertinant to this train of thought, specifically in the realm of the stories we tell having value in terms of providing a template for real world expectations, and how we handle without them.

Originally Posted by Kepi

I've been trying to figure out how best to consider this information, and I'm wondering if we're not encountering a situation where our culture has run away with its narrative.

What does "culture has run away with its narrative" mean. Culture doesn't DO anything. It's like saying the marriage failed. Marriages don't DO anything either. It's people who are the actors.

It would explain the shorter cycles in a way if the generations are the driver of both themselves and the cycle, as a social moment is simply a socially driven event, just the culmination of a series of other events that is amplified by magnitude.

Culture doing stuff cannot explain anything because culture is not an actor. The rest seems to me to be what S&H propose, which I showed does not work at all for the long cycles, and is problematic for the modern cycle because of the observed fact that generations are not all that different from each other. For every Eric who fits into the prophet archetype you have someone like me who doesn't. You may identify with the Hero archetype, but Wiz '83 very emphatically does not. There was a poster at the old site, The Dude, who made what I thought at the time was a compelling case for this.

Over time a pattern develops from the naturally occurring rhythm of the cycle, as it's how humans adapted: generational types.

This doesn't really say anything. No offense intended, but it’s kind of amorphous.

These generational types, raised in the context of their society adapt to one another because the stories they tell more or less tell people in to where they are in the cycle, so each generation knows how to interact with all the others.

To what stories are you referring? Don't you think that if we were being told stories that instructed us to conform to some sort of archetypical behavior, we would be aware of it? It seems to me that what you get out of a narrative is a function of what you bring to it.

On the other hand my experience when coming of age is quite different from yours simply because I came of age in a world very different from the one we have today. It was in its dying phase and I saw the Prophet->Nomad generation change happen in real time over 1981-1982 when I was in grad school (although I had no idea what it was at the time). Someone like Marx and Lennon is old enough to remember large amounts of the ancien regime, I remember less, but I do remember the sort of advice I got from Silents in the late 1970’s (rules based on the mechanics of that dying 1T world).

Learning a set of rules for a world that no longer exists when the time comes to apply them is a powerful coming of age experience, the sort of thing that can affect a whole swath of like-aged people helping to brand them as a generation type. This sort of mechanism isn’t role development from consuming stories, it’s more like learning from “the school of hard knocks”.

Over time, this knowledge ensures a faster response to each other, meaning the K-cycle is no longer the driving force, it's the story itself, and now the K-cycle is what follows the generations rather than vice versa?

Why should the cycle speed up because we tell stories? Haven't we always told stories?

Nothing I'd consider set in stone, because narratives are, by nature, not scientific. However, they are a very human response, as we have all probably known people who've used scientific data to draw conclusions which are definitely beyond the scope of pure science. Unfortunately, once you move into a realm of narrative, it's becomes impossible to objectively verify cause.

This seems to me to be a bit of a cop out. It seems to say we cannot say anything verifiable about this and so the normal requirement to provide evidence for our beliefs should be waived. Part of our 4T problems is that so much of our discourse is based on these kinds of unverified ”knowledge”. The result is many policymakers inhabit an alternate reality divorced from the real world. For example, a dominant view of how the economy works is what I call the Field of Dreams school of economics, which says “if you build it (promote investment) they (good economy) will come. It worked in the film because it was a fantasy but it doesn't work in the real world.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

There is no mega-high or mega-unravelling

Whether you believe in them or not, this is a thread about them, and you're posting in it

Originally Posted by Mikebert

This seems to me to be a bit of a cop out. It seems to say we cannot say anything verifiable about this and so the normal requirement to provide evidence for our beliefs should be waived. Part of our 4T problems is that so much of our discourse is based on these kinds of unverified ”knowledge”. The result is many policymakers inhabit an alternate reality divorced from the real world. For example, a dominant view of how the economy works is what I call the Field of Dreams school of economics, which says “if you build it (promote investment) they (good economy) will come. It worked in the film because it was a fantasy but it doesn't work in the real world.

Anyone looking to find a scientific level of verifiability in social data is going to be disappointed. Even if we could identify every single variable, the experiments required to determine weights would be unethical in any sense of the word. Repeatability is just entirely out of the question.

Before 9-11 I thought I'd major in chemistry, but that event pushed me very strongly to my other passion in politics & economics: so I know a bit about lab sciences, and I know a bit about social sciences. The main thing I know is that despite using similar mathematical tools, they are entirely different animals with entirely different uses. Sure, political science and econ use a lot of math to build informational charts & cause-effect narratives, but it is not scientifically verifiable and there is a huge gap that philosophical bias can sneak in under the cover of illusory objectivity.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

Hah!! Just as I expected. The Crusades and the Renaissance of the 12th century both occurred right where the timeline would predict a MegaAwakening.

The day is mine!! Well, mine and whoever else came up with the same timeline... The day is ours!!

If you go to the first few posts, which defined the scheme you get this (working backwards)

1946-202? U Boomer Awakening = divisive; Current 4T = Mild crisis
1865-1946 A Missionary Awakening = mild; Depression = Triumphant crisis
1794-1865 H Transcendental Awakening = spiritual; Civil War = Bitter Crisis
1704-1795 C Great Awakening = Intellectual; Revolutionary Crisis = Revolutionary Crisis
1594-1704 U Puritan Awaekening = divisive; Glorious Crisis = Mild crisis
1487-1594 A Reformation = mild; Armada = Triumphant crisis
1381-1487 H Hussite Awakening = spiritual; WoR = Bitter crisis
1282-1381 C Avignon Awakening = Intellectual; Plague = Revolutionary crisis
1176-1282 U Mendicant Awakening = divisive; 2nd Baron's war = Mild cris- is
1071-1176 A Crusade Awakening = mild; Henry II = Triumphant Crisis
963-1071 H Cluniac Awakening (HRE emperor embraces Cluniac reforms; Dane Canute desposes Saxon kink 1016) = spiritual; Norman Conquest = Bitter crisis
855-963 C Photian Awakening (East-West split over filoque issue) - Intellectual; Ottonian Crisis (civil war in HRE, English defeat Vikings in 937,941) - Revolutionary crisis

You have the timing right, although I don't know if the Awakening label on the saeculum means what you think it does.

I have a bit of a problem assigning the Plague crisis to the revolutionary category; same with the tenth century crisis. I can see assigning the Norman invasion to the bitter category, and since Henry emerged from the 12th century crisis as ruler of England and half of France that would be triumphant.

I also don't see the Mendicant awakening as divisive; it was more spirtual. The Reformation Awakening comes out as mild, like the Cistercian Awakening, but clearly these Awakenings can not be more different; the former tore apart the Church, the latter built it up. Surely the Reformation is as divisive as any Awakening can be.

In short I don't see a four saeculum cycle repeating pattern here.

Originally Posted by JohnMc82

Anyone looking to find a scientific level of verifiability in social data is going to be disappointed.

This seems like another cop out.

Even if we could identify every single variable, the experiments required to determine weights would be unethical in any sense of the word. Repeatability is just entirely out of the question.

Since identifying every variable is not necessary, nor is determination of weight, this point is not really valid.

Physiology is complex, probably as complex as social interactions. It is not understood. Nevertheless, medicine made considerable progress against disease during a time when virtually nothing was known about how the body functioned. South American genetic engineers 1500 years ago were able to develop maize without knowing anything about DNA.

Chimpanzees tend to live in groups with 30-50 members because interpersonal conflict becomes too much of a problem with larger groups. For most of our history humans lived in similar-sized groups, probably for the same reason. But around 15000 years ago humans somehow learned how to live together in larger groups and the sizes of dense populations has risen ever since. Today literally millions can live in a single city without it going up in flames. Somehow they pulled off that stunt while knowing a lot less about how societies work that we do.

And social scientists do run experiments. There are experimental economists and psychologists who can get repeatable results.

My point is complete knowledge is not required. What is required is verification. Verification in medicine came when the patient got better, or stealing the handle of a pump led to fewer outbreaks of cholera. Verification of genetic engineering came with an improved form of maize. Verification of the effectiveness of new social mores came with some groups becoming larger and thus able to take the best habitats away from smaller groups. Verification of the effectiveness of anti-financial panic measures (technically measures to suppress dangerous asset bubbles) taken in the 1930's was the absence of any new financial panics for the half century that the measures were fully in place, during which there should have been 2 or 3. Further verification came when these measures were completely withdrawn and we got a financial panic after 75 years without one.

What makes the social world different is that certain experiments cannot be done for the purpose of discovering new knowledge because of ethics. But that doesn’t mean experiments are not run, they are just done for stated purposes other than gaining knowledge, but that doesn’t means scientists cannot learn from those experiments. Not all science takes place in a laboratory (e.g. astronomy, ecology).

Originally Posted by Mikebert

Since identifying every variable is not necessary, nor is determination of weight, this point is not really valid.

Well, we either include all relevant and statistically significant variables, or we're forced to make subjective value judgments on which ones to include. Social science research man-hours are also an extremely limited commodity, and a lot of the funding comes from think-tanks founded on philosophical biases.

Physiology is complex, probably as complex as social interactions. It is not understood. Nevertheless, medicine made considerable progress against disease during a time when virtually nothing was known about how the body functioned. South American genetic engineers 1500 years ago were able to develop maize without knowing anything about DNA.

No, not really. In some ways, physiology is less complex than something like public health because public health is physiology times 300 million. Repeatable scientific experiments can show that penicillin kills bacteria, or how genes are sequenced, or how a specific allele can cause a certain condition, but it isn't until you try to translate these lab results in to social action that you discover all of the exceptions to the rule (allergies, drug interactions, side effects). Some of these rare results won't even be revealed until decades after the social changes that made the pure science practical.

Once you try to quantify and research those physiological anomalies discovered by application across a large population, conclusions become much murkier. For example, it took decades for the U.S. Government to conclude that tobacco was a health hazard. Hell, there are even still a few cancer-tobacco deniers! Studying mortality rates of a large population over a century and trying to isolate the link to cigarettes leaves a level of uncertainty that anyone with a bias can exploit.

Physiology is the study of a complex system. Public health is the study of systems composed of complex systems.

"Society" is not just a system composed of complex systems, it is composed of every complex system humanity has created.

And social scientists do run experiments. There are experimental economists and psychologists who can get repeatable results...
What makes the social world different is that certain experiments cannot be done for the purpose of discovering new knowledge because of ethics. But that doesn’t mean experiments are not run, they are just done for stated purposes other than gaining knowledge, but that doesn’t means scientists cannot learn from those experiments. Not all science takes place in a laboratory (e.g. astronomy, ecology).[/QUOTE

Yeah... I do wish they still taught ethics, though. I'm not convinced we can have both. A lot of the experiments run on that ethical borderline, and a lot of them kinda stink of psueo-science. A cousin-in-law is working on grad studies in experiment psychology, and he's becoming a bit discouraged lately because the methods being used are as flimsy as the old polygraph tests. These "ethically valid" testing methods are taking pretty broad liberties in making assumptions based on minor variations in mechanical behaviors.

Verification of the effectiveness of anti-financial panic measures (technically measures to suppress dangerous asset bubbles) taken in the 1930's was the absence of any new financial panics for the half century that the measures were fully in place, during which there should have been 2 or 3. Further verification came when these measures were completely withdrawn and we got a financial panic after 75 years without one.

Ok, but why is regulation the only variable for consideration here, and exactly which measures created the panic? It isn't a textbook case of ceteris parabus because the financial industry, monetary system, population, and general economy wasn't exactly static between Glass-Steagall and Graham-Leach-Bliley. Which changes were necessary to deal with modernization of international economies and which changes triggered the panic? What if external forces or other internal forces (access to and quality of education, popular media culture, proliferation of relatively new and relatively untested medications, shifts toward factory farming, changes in popular religious belief, just to name a few things that might positively or negatively effect a population's economy in the long run) contributed more significantly than some regulation about which hoops an investor has to jump through?

But... even if we could identify every competing variable... there's still that shortage of research man-hours and limits to experimentation to even decide which ones are the ones we should "set our calendar" by. I'm not saying that social science is useless or a waste of time, either, but the most it can do on its own is raise new questions and add some meat to the very subjective social debates of the day. I mean, it's one thing to prove that smaller classes result in better educated students, and you could probably even show a strong relationship all the way to average community incomes. However, that study isn't suddenly going to change the way every voter and politician feels about taxes, not the same way or timeframe that a breakthrough study on a new drug can put that drug in pharmacies.

It is not a cop out... it is a great challenge that cannot be underestimated

Originally Posted by JohnMc82

In some ways, physiology is less complex than something like public health because public health is physiology times 300 million.

This is like saying if I run a bigger fermentor it is more complex than a small one because it contains more cells. In actuality we often can say more about the behavior of a collection than an individual. For example we can accurately predict what fraction of quantity of radioactive material will decay over a specific period of time, but we cannot say when an individual atom will decay. Similarly, climate is predictable over long periods, weather is not.

Repeatable scientific experiments can show that penicillin kills bacteria, or how genes are sequenced, or how a specific allele can cause a certain condition, but it isn't until you try to translate these lab results in to social action that you discover all of the exceptions to the rule (allergies, drug interactions, side effects).

Allergies, drug interactions, side effects can all be discovered through experiments (and often are, such experiments are called drug trials). Experiment does NOT equal laboratory.

For example, it took decades for the U.S. Government to conclude that tobacco was a health hazard.

That was pretty much established in the 1930's.

Hell, there are even still a few cancer-tobacco deniers!

Well of course there are, and there are climate change deniers and evolution deniers too.

Studying mortality rates of a large population over a century and trying to isolate the link to cigarettes leaves a level of uncertainty that anyone with a bias can exploit.

No it doesn't. There is no uncertainty, there is ignorance, both of the honest and willful kind, and that is what is exploited.

Originally Posted by Kepi

This was the overall type of motion that I was looking for in conjunction with the K-cycle over time (sort of another wave within the K-cycle's mini wave, though possibly more yo-yo like) that's just not reasonably verifiable. However, I wasn't associating it with the duration of the saeculum in my thinking. However, this could also be very significant as postmodernism and deconstruction would signal a lot in the realm of constructing a new narrative.

As an aside, did you ever get to check out The House of Leaves? It'd be pretty pertinant to this train of thought, specifically in the realm of the stories we tell having value in terms of providing a template for real world expectations, and how we handle without them.

I was rereading Northrop Frye and I came across this quote which talks about the evolution of narratives over the course of hundreds of years. He has a theory about how there are "repeating modes" to literature in Western Civilization--it's a Super Saeculum view to translate it into our dialog, with each cycle being its own MegaSaeculum IMO.


"Our survey of fictional modes has also shown us that the mimetic tendency itself, the tendency to verisimilitude and accuracy of description, is one of two poles of literature. At the other pole is something that seems to be connected both with Aristotle's word mythos and with the usual meaning of myth. That is, it is a tendency to tell a story which is in origin a story about characters who can do anything, and only gradually becomes attracted toward a tendency to tell a plausible or credible story. Myths of gods merge into legends of heroes; legends of heroes merge into plots of tragedies and comedies; plots of tragedies and comedies merge into plots of more or less realistic fiction. But these are change of social context rather than of literary form, and the constructive principles of story-telling remain constant through them, though of course they adapt to them."

~Chas'88

Originally Posted by Chas'88

It's simply the way how society in general views these things and on some level always has. The two viewpoints are diametrically opposed and like to see each other as one another's villains.

Comedic viewpoints are very earth-bound and concerned with life as it is. They don't look beyond themselves because they consider such views to be a waste of time--because what's important is the here and now, not the past and not the future, but what's of concern right now. In fact to be overly concerned with the past and the future is a crime, as it allows insane laws to rule the here and now and thus make life difficult and hard for everyone. Comedy thus concerns itself with overthrowing what it views as "insane dictatorships" or "absurd law", which don't take into consideration the consequences endured by the people "here and now". While Tragedy thinks that human faults are a crime that "holds us back from becoming gods", Comedy embraces faults as simply part of being "human", and is content with simply being human and finding strength in doing so.

Sounds related to what we know in MBTI as S and N.

Tragedies are very spiritual-bound and concerned with humanity's interaction with something greater than itself as channeled through an individual figure. They usually are obsessed with saving us from the sins of the past so that we might have a future. Tragedy often wants to be greater than it's capable of being and has difficulty accepting faults within itself--seeing them as a weakness.

You see a difference between the Missionaries who campaigned against industrial abuses, eventually resulting in the New Deal, and the transcendentals, who campaigned against slavery, resulting in the reconstruction amendments. I'm not sure I see a difference, or that the missionaries were earth-bound, while the transcendentals/boomers were concerned with becoming gods in that respect. Same with boomers who campaign against war and environmental damage. I think there's a difference, but I don't think the comedy vs. tragedy idea captures it very well.

You're missing the point of the tragedies though, it is by the very act of "punishment" that the wrong is righted, and we in the audience are saved or inspired to go out and continue to right the wrong--depending upon the situation. It's the act of divine retribution in some sense.

This point is made clearer if you study ancient Greek Tragedy or Japanese Noh plays which operate under the same points. Tragedies in that view is that a universal law is broken so that we might be saved perhaps not immediately, but definitely sometime in the future.

In the history of saeculum and turnings though, the salvation occurs immediately. The wrong is not righted through punishment. So the analogy does not seem entirely justified.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

All 4Ts feature an internal struggle.

That's true

The Glorious Revolution featured the same pattern of initial internal crisis followed by external threat (War of the League of Augsburg, War of Spanish Succession) as did the Depression crisis. I don't see how they are different.


The colonists at the time of the Revolution were Englishmen and considered themselves as such. This makes the Revolution seem to be more of an internal struggle, like the Civil War and War of the Roses. On the other hand, Spain was a foreign power so that makes the Armada crisis consistent with outward-focused. Thus, I see these two 4T as opposite in this categorization.

This gives for the six 4Ts in chronological order: inner, outer, outer, inner, inner, outer, no pattern that I can discern

I'm not sure I see the Glorious Revolution as different from Depression/WWII, except maybe that the previous 2T leading to it was a more-drastic internal struggle; but I think once the Revolutionaries declared independence, and then were invaded, I could see that as an external/outer struggle. Just in what order this sequence happened could be a matter of debate though.

Since as you say the colonists were British, then the "revolution" that really changed Britain was the Great Rebellion/Glorious Revolution cycle, whereas the American Revolution was simply the expulsion of the British overlords from what the colonists now saw as their country.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

So, uhm, I was working the timing for the MegaSaecula out and I wanted to see how it jibed with everyone else's.

So, if this saeculum just ending was the MegaUnraveling of the Modern age, with the rise of PoMo and other ideological ills, the Modern Age would start with the American and French Revolutions. The previous cylce would be about 400 years long and would have started around 1400, with the Reformation being its MegaAwakening and the 30 years war kicking off its MegaUnraveling. We can call this the Renaissance cycle. This would make the previous cycle start around 1000 AD, the traditional start of the High Middle Ages. The entire 14th century would then be it's MegaCrisis. We can call this the Medieval cycle. The previous cycle, if this pattern continues, would start right around the post classical population minimum.

So at first glance, the theory seems to fit very well. I'm sorry, I haven't caught up on all the old threads yet. Is this the timeline everyone else is working on?

Eric excepted of course.

Of course.

The previous mega-cycles fall into the astrological pattern of the 500-year cycle of civilization, because your saecula are stretched out very long. The Modern one does not, since modern saecula are shorter. I of course think the cycle of civilization still operates, which makes the new cycle begin with the 1890s and the following halocaust, rather than with the Revolutions, which only set the stage for the new civilization to emerge later, much like the proto-renaissance era and the times of Charlesmagne, Constantine, etc.. I don't see a mega-saeculum as existing, because the correlations to the other supposed mega-turnings are so bad; not to mention that we are not in a mega-unravelling now. The new modern saeculum extracts the speeded-up cycle from the previous ones, and applies it to the United States and Western Europe only; whereas before most civilizations resonated to the one cycle (and still do IMO).

I see Post Modernism as originating in the 1890s era, which is where philosophy historian Richard Tarnas places it, as originally taking the form of Nietzsche's philosophy and existentialism. Post-modernism is a natural outgrowth of the fall of the older order, which began then and is continuing. But that does not mean there has not been a new order and a new age of cultural creativity rising at the same time.

We have just emerged from an unravelling turning, and younger people here cannot see the history and experience of the previous turnings, but only their own recent experience. They also have a faulty and limited experience of the Awakening, and therefore tend to knock it and boomers along with it.

From your viewpoint (and that of others here), in which you see the mega-cycle as speeded up in modern/post-modern times, and departing from the 500-year cycle that operated 10 times previously, you would see the next saeculum (roughly corresponding to the remainder of the 21st century) as a mega-crisis, presumably seeing the Fall of the United States and Western European Democracy as we know it, and a new mega-high would only arise in the 22nd century, starting in 2113 at the latest (and would consist of the founding of some new kind of constitution, the end of the ideology of "progress" (already decaying today), and probably little else of note).

It seems plausible, but then you have to accept the tortured and inadequate correlations the precede it; seeing the 1780s-1865 cycle as a "high" even though it led to and resulted in division and the worst bloodbath in our history, and although it saw relatively-little building, but was instead individualist and romantic-oriented; and the 1865-1945 cycle as an "awakening," even though it was oriented to collectivism and external "great power" building, and contained awakenings only in its own awakening turning-- and then mostly in Europe as a "fin de siecle" decadence and sensibility. In that awakening (which I see as the start of the current cycle of civilization) there was a switch of party ideology, as the Democrats became populists in 1896; but I don't see the ideologies as having originated then. The socialist cycle was already on-going. Seeing the previous cycle as a mega-awakening, confirms the tendency of younger people here to misunderstand and dismiss what an awakening really is.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

In the history of saeculum and turnings though, the salvation occurs immediately. The wrong is not righted through punishment. So the analogy does not seem entirely justified.

Again, I'm moving more and more towards how we mythologize history and how that mythology impacts us.

~Chas'88