Gyres¶
This excitable but nevertheless broadly convincing application of the Strauss & Howe generational theory of historical cycles to recent news headlines is a reminder of the inevitability of story-telling. (Outside in has touched upon this particular tale before.)
The Cathedral is above all a meta-story, a secular-revolutionary usurpation of the traditional Western ‘Grand Narrative‘ (inherited from eschatological monotheism), and its survival is inseparable from the preservation of narrative credibility. As it frays, alternative stories obtain a niche. The Strauss & Howe account of rhythmic historical pattern is highly competitive in such an environment. Events subtracting from the plausibility of progressive expectations are exactly those that strengthen omens of an impending cyclic ‘winter’. Winter is coming, as popularized by Game of Thrones, might have been designed as a promotional tool for The Fourth Turning.
Anarchopapist begins his most recent musings on ‘The Neoreactionary Project’ by asking “What is a meme?” It is a better starting point, in this context, than the question: How correct are Strauss & Howe? Memetics subsumes questions of factual application (as aspects of adaptive fitness), but it reaches beyond them. The successful meme is characterized by aesthetic features irreducible to representational adequacy, from elegance of construction to dramatic form. Even more importantly, it is able to operate as a causal factor itself, and thus to produce the very effects it accommodates itself to. A society enthralled by its passage through the winter gate of a fourth turning would in very large measure be staging the same theatrical production its ‘beliefs’ had anticipated.
Among the greatest memetic strengths of the Strauss & Howe story is its remarkably concrete sense of timing. It offers prospective dates, within a tight predictive range that alternative narratives are hard-pressed to match, in keeping with its claim to have identified historical ‘seasons’. The anticipations of contemporary Marxist, Singularitarian, or Eco-catastrophe story-lines are unmistakably nebulous in comparison. (Notably — NRx has, as yet, no formulated theory to support dated predictions at all.)
Among the most significant memetic latch-functions is a confidence graft. Any cultural virus communicating a definite sense of what is coming finds host tolerance relatively easy to obtain. The history of (precisely dated) millenarianism attests to this overwhelmingly, with the rider that vulnerability to subsequent falsification is necessarily entailed. To some definite extent, such sensitivity to empirical contradiction also has to apply in the Strauss & Howe case, despite the complicating factors of contagious auto-confirmation already noted.
As S&H prophecy in the book:
Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II. […] The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and efforts — in other words, a TOTAL WAR.
It is this admirably determinate forecast, in combination with the ominous content, that lends this work its purchase upon the apocalyptic imagination of our time.
Gathering ‘Fourth Turning’ expectations are part of the memetic landscape in which NRx finds itself, and thus an involved, strategically-relevant fact. A consistent and compelling story about them would be valuable — and almost certainly, in the relatively short-term at least, increasingly valuable.
ADDED: Double doom