When I mentioned Neil Howe’s 2023 book, The Fourth Turning is Here, sparking a conversation around the table over the holidays, and then brought my copy out so people could look at the figures, my UC-Irvine business prof brother-in-law expressed surprise. “I didn’t take you for that kind of guy,” he said. In a series of books, all but the last co-authored with the late William Strauss, Howe argues for a cyclical view of history. Any cyclical view of history, by the nature of the case, integrates human events with natural processes, introduces an element of determinism, of predictability, reduces the influence of human agency, and leads—if one travels far enough down the path—to the orbits of the planets, the push and pull of the stars, evidence of which can be laid out in charts and—why not?—read in the wrinkles of palms. What my brother-in-law was really saying was, “I didn’t take you for a nut.”

I didn’t take me for a nut, either. I blame it on the times, our crazy and dangerous moment, which seems to have lasted well over a decade now, and I blame it on my stage in life, hovering on the verge of elderhood, and wondering what I have left, if anything, to offer in the way of aid. As the days seem to rush toward apocalypse, rickety and manic like sped-up frames of film, a linear, ‘one-damn-thing-after-another’ view of history just ain’t cutting it anymore. I need some stronger medicine.

To be clear, Howe never ventures into astrology. But he does reach back to the pre-modern for his central unit of measure, the saeculum, a term used by historians in ancient Rome. History plays out in recursive saeculum, Howe explains, each one lasting more or less a century in length, broken up into quarters or ‘turnings’ that are analogous to the seasons the year. During the Spring / High, a new social order emerges from the rubble of the previous collapse. Order remains strong during the Summer / Awakening but comes under attack on moral grounds. Cracks appear, which widen during the Fall / Unraveling, and social order grows increasingly fragile. The Winter / Crisis is an “era of maximum darkness … the saeculum’s hibernal, its time of trial.” The Crisis, the fourth turning, is here.

Howe calls it the Millennial Crisis, partly because it began in the first decade of the 21^st century, and partly because those who came of age during it belong to that generation we call the Millennials, a term Howe and Strauss coined in their 1991 book, Generations. Because it isn’t only that these turnings recur in seasonal patterns, but that generations of people respond to them in iconic ways that drive the next turning. If, following the current crisis, a new social order regenerates, and a new saeculum begins, it will come from the collective actions of the Millennials, aided by the pragmatic management of Gen X and the tidbits of wisdom passed along by the Boomers as they exit the stage.

Over the years, I’ve had numerous arguments, some bordering on contentious, over what generation I belong to, the Boomers or Gen X. The most common measure identifies me as among the last of the Boomers, but I object to that. Yes, I have Boomer qualities. The music of the 1960s is woven into my viscera, but my memory of that decade is restricted to its last year or two, and even that’s murky. I saw hippies, not in movies or old photos, alive and in the wild, but they weren’t my peers. My grandfather was an old draftee in World War II—my dad wasn’t yet a teenager. Douglas Copeland and I were born the same year, and I thought he was writing about us in his book Generation X, with which he coined the term. (That Gen X’s chronological scope was later scooted forward proved his thesis, it seemed to me.) Of course, anyone born at the edges of these fuzzy categories can expect to be pulled both forwards and backwards. But another reason I am inclined to listen to Howe is that he draws his lines in a way that includes me, Obama, George Clooney, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus within the Gen X cohort.

Because Howe’s calculations and categories are ones I find myself thinking with a lot lately, they were in my mind, not long ago, when my spouse and I went over to the historic Longhorn Ballroom to see the historic Mavis Staples. Is any introduction at all necessary? Mavis Staples was the primary singer of a family gospel group called The Staples Singers, led by her father, “Pops” Staples, that performed and recorded from the 1950s through the 1970s, mixing country gospel, blues, and crossover R&B. Pops had moved his young family up to Chicago from Mississippi, part of the Great Migration, and he worked in a meat packing plant as he trained and assembled the group. The Staple Singers came up with the Folk Revival. They provided memorable cuts to the soundtrack of the Black Freedom Struggle, stood on pulpits and stages with MLK and other giants of the period. Their most well-known songs—including “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There”—were recorded for Stax Records, the legendary Memphis soul label. The Staples’ sound had many distinctive components: Pops’ ghostly vocals and tremolo-laden guitar; haunting backwoods harmonies; an uprightness and reserve in presentation; messages of uplift and social consciousness; and probably most of all, Mavis’s spookily low singing voice, which she punctuated with extra-verbal bursts of feeling.

About half the songs Mavis performed at the Longhorn that night were Staple Singers songs from the classic period. But it wasn’t an oldies show. The solo records Mavis cut in the 80s and 90s met with middling success, but not long into the new century, she released a string of records on Anti-, an indie label that specialized in placing older and semi-forgotten artists in tastefully hip settings. The other half of Mavis’s set came from this third act, including several songs from Beautiful Strangers, the latest album in the series. Her eighty-six-year-old voice isn’t what it once was, but with sensitive arrangements and song selections that seem to acknowledge the heartsickness of the moment, it remains effective. Two of the songs won Grammys this year, and in one, the title cut, Freddie Gray gets a call out. Hearing that live evoked a host of other names. George Floyd, Brionna Taylor. Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Comparisons have been made between the unrest of the civil rights and anti-war crusades of the Long Sixties and that of recent days. In response to the public murders of Good and Pretti, for example, the Kent State shootings of 1970 were revisited on social media posts. Those comparisons are apt, as far as it goes. But Neil Howe would make the following distinction. The later events of the Civil Rights Movement and the Moratoriums took place during the summer quarter of the saeculum that Howe calls an Awakening. That Awakening, by his count, is the fourth that has occurred since the British colonized North America. Awakenings are prophetic eras during which cultural and religious norms come under “passionate and moralizing attacks … spearheaded by young people.” Those norms constitute a social order which is, at the time, firmly in place and fundamentally secure.

That’s the difference. Today we’re at the other end of the saeculum, not the Awakening but the Crisis. The times are similarly troubled. But, according to this cyclical perspective, what we feel today is the absence of stability, the fragility of order, not its oppressive massiveness and strength. Look, for instance, at what that order was called back then: The Establishment, The Combine, The System, The Technocracy. It’s telling that the term more in use today has a less threatening—and increasingly fond—connotation: the Liberal Consensus.

“An Awakening is the other solstice of the saeculum,” Howe explains. “It is to Crisis as summer is to winter, Love to Strife. Within each lies the causal germ of its opposite.”

This solstice relationship between Awakening and Crisis is one point where I find myself beginning to be persuaded, and this was especially the case that night at the Longhorn seeing Mavis Staples. Many concerts I’ve attended this past year have been emotionally weighted with a collective awareness of current politics, emotions not so different from what one feels at protest gatherings. With Mavis this impression was even more pronounced. She made few direct references to present-day troubles—she didn’t have to. Every song, every comment was understood to address the mood and was received with gratitude. The Longhorn’s stage is a tall one. The dance floor in front of it was set up with polite tables, and behind them, rows of folding chairs. But one by one, people would approach and reach up to her. They wanted to talk to her. They wanted to touch her. Of course they did, I thought. Is there any living person more representative of the spirituality and idealism of the last Awakening than Mavis Staples?

Granted, there are other ways to think about this. Times have been ripe, this past decade especially, for portents and conspiracy theories. Some are vulgar, others more abstract. Either way, people get swept up in them for the same reasons that a concert by a famous gospel singer might sweep someone up and make them feel a little daffy. Such an experience could dull the critical skills and studied rationality of any sensible person, even a scholarly type with a terminal degree. “Most academics neither look for social cycles nor ponder the causes of those they stumble across,” Howe writes. Okay, but sometimes they do.

In a dismissive 2023 New York Times review of The Fourth Turning is Here, Francis Fukuyama complains that Howe’s historical turning points are “arbitrary.” If by this he means that the events Howe chooses to mark where a saeculum and its seasons begin and end, and that he fudges a bit when necessary to serve the overall scheme, it’s a fair point. Fukuyama charges, too, that the book “represents an updated version of Whig history.” Crisis is inevitably followed by progress, a new order, ordained by a set of values appropriate to the new day. And so the reassurance this offers is tempting to those who are anxious and agitated by the daily news. Not to worry, it says. We’re headed in the right direction, and this was all meant to be.

Again, one can find in Howe’s book support for the charge. Yet on the question of whether we will survive our current crisis and pass into a better world, Howe is understandably cagey. “Society always evolves in a correctional direction,” he writes on one page. “In cyclical time,” he writes on another, “people strive to mend the errors of the past, to correct the excesses of the present, to seek a future that provides whatever they feel to be most in need.” At the same time, Howe informs us that “[t]he saeculum does not guarantee good or bad outcomes.” And he includes the following passage:

We may think of history, if we wish, as a progressing spiral. However—and this must be emphasized—progress is not the purpose of the saeculum. … The saeculum contributes to long-term progress only to the extent that it keeps society alive and adaptive. In this sense, its purpose resembles that of natural evolution: The saeculum may or may not make us better, but it does foster our survival.

The crisis years do that especially, Howe tells us. They are “how modern societies reverse entropy.” Other ideas here also resonate with systems theory and the ecological imagination: that histories are complex systems composed of informational loops, that negative or ‘correctional’ feedback serves to protect the system’s core integrity; that, nevertheless, systemic collapse is a distinct possibility. An addict may hit bottom and not get back up.

Howe identifies the start of the Crisis era as 2007, 2008. That would put us well past halfway through. The climax of the Crisis, the release of the accumulated energy of “unmet needs, unpaid debts, and unresolved problems”—what Howe calls the Ekpyrosis—isn’t scheduled to arrive for another four or five hard years. Coincidentally, Mavis’s third act, the string of solo records on Anti-, began with releases in 2007 and 2008. For me, the high point of the Longhorn set was when she sang the title cut from the series’ breakthrough record, 2010’s Grammy-winning You Are Not Alone. It’s a message that does the heart good. The Me Decades—those of my Gen X young adulthood, Mavis’s fallow period, and Howe’s Fall Unraveling—are now history. Today’s Crisis years are “years of renascent community,” Howe writes. People gather in refuge. We want to see the values we prize in each other.

This essay was first published at Society for US Intellectual History.