Beyond The Fourth Turning: Neil Howe's Vision for a High-Tech, Unified Society

Following up his 1997 bestseller, The Fourth Turning, historian Neil Howe expands on his ideas of a cyclical pattern in human history divided into roughly two-decade increments he calls turnings. According to Howe, these turnings repeat every 80 or so years, which he calls a 'saeculum'.

The First Turning represents an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism. The Second is a turbulent era when the new order comes under attack. The Third is a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, and the Fourth heralds a crisis, when values change and another civic order moves in.

Howe believes the current saeculum began after World War II, at the onset of the Third Industrial Revolution, when institutions cemented their power over the individual. This was followed by the 1960s era of personal liberation and increasing disorder. The third turning occurred during what the author refers to as the raucous “Culture Wars” of the last two decades of the 20th Century, leading up to 9/11 and the Middle Eastern wars that followed.

We are now embroiled in the fourth turning – what he calls the “Millennial Crisis” - which began with the global market crash of 2008 and continued with the rise of authoritarian populism. In his original thesis, Howe had predicted that a period of great crisis would arrive around 2020, though he did not foresee a pandemic

Although not part of Howe’s thinking, it is worth noting that this period also coincides with the onset of what we refer to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution - the fusion of powerful, emerging digital technologies and human interaction.

I was struck by the author’s use of generational analysis and Big Data to predict the crises to come. Polarization, economic inequality, social tension, political fragmentation, and the growing digital divide are used as evidence of turmoil that will accompany the end of this saeculum. Howe hedges his bets by conceding that:

“Beyond our imagining as well will be all the technologies yet to reshape how we are linked to machines, how we are linked to one another, and, for better or worse, how machines are linked to one another.”

In reading this treatise, I was also reminded that in May of this year, more than 350 technology executives, researchers, and academics signed a statement warning of the existential dangers of artificial intelligence, stating that “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

“Winter is here,” says Howe. Yet he believes we can expect a new First Turning sometime in the 2030s, which also happens to be around the time Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is expected to assume full cognitive capabilities and signal, in the words of Henry Kissinger, “the partial end of the postulated superiority of human reason.”

On a brighter note, the author believes the new society born in the coming saeculum will herald an increased degree of economic equality and cohesion. Out of today’s polarization will emerge a confident and unified society - a high-tech version of the post-World War II years.

Howe provides a comprehensively researched history of recent human evolution and a fascinating glimpse of our possible future.