The First Turning

“See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone. Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come.”
— Song of Songs 2:11–12

I've been writing my chapter on the Fourth Turning for weeks when the news comes: Roberto has had a stroke.

Roberto has been like an uncle to me since I was a boy. He took us scorpion hunting with glass bottles and sticks. He piled us into the trunk of the car when there wasn't enough room in the cab and made us sing so he'd know we were still alive. He floated us out to sea on inflatable cushions as the sun set. Just this morning, I found a bright green caterpillar in the garden and a feather with a bright green streak on it, and I conjured up a little magic trick for my kids to “turn the feather into a caterpillar.” That was exactly the sort of thing Roberto would have done when I was their age.

Now I'm hearing the words "funeral home."

And it hasn't only been Roberto. In the last month, a close friend's father passed away. Then my wife's uncle. Then the father of someone at Endless. Then someone else's father-in-law. Another friend’s dad has just started cancer treatments. Today's daily scripture email was about caring for an ailing parent.

My generation is clicking forward a notch.

As Steve Jobs put it in his Stanford commencement speech, “Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

"Each generation," Strauss and Howe wrote, "would age through time as surely as water runs to the sea." That became tangible for me this week. I'm not a child anymore. Roberto is no longer the uncle taking me on adventures; I'm the uncle taking my kids and nephews on them. The people who led us through the last epoch are moving into the dusk of their lives. The people who will lead us through the next one are…us.

As Howe put it, “so often, when experts speculate on what will happen to America ten or twenty or thirty years from now, they ask us to envision a sci-fi world of anonymous strangers. This is a needlessly impoverished view of the future. What the experts forget is that we actually know a great deal about those who will inhabit that future America. They will be all of us – only older.”

When we look to the years ahead it is more useful, he writes, to foresee how we will change than to foresee how the world will change. Because in the 2040s and 2050s, it won't be a future breed of post-humans writing the laws, running the companies, teaching the children. It will be the Millennial who was ten years old when The Fourth Turning was first published, now in her fifties. It will be the Gen Xer who was thirty then, now approaching eighty. It will be us.

Which means the question of what the First Turning will look like, the High that follows this Crisis, is really a question about who we will have become by the time it arrives. The First Turning is not a destination we stumble upon when the storm finally breaks. It is the harvest of everything we plant now.

Rebuilding
Highs are eras of robust economic and demographic expansion. Immense waves of publicly subsidized infrastructure redefine public space. After the Revolution came the turnpikes, the steamboats, the canals, culminating in the Erie Canal, a 363-mile engineering miracle that turned New York into America's commercial capital. After the Civil War came the railroads and the municipal utilities. After World War II came the interstate highway system, the great river dams, the expansion of the state university system, the suburban growth, the fiber build-out. Highs build.

In many cases, it was precisely the scale of the destruction that drove the rebuilding. The Belgian city of Ypres was 99% destroyed in World War I. Today, it’s full of such historical architectural masterpieces that you can hardly see a mark of the war. When a Polish uprising failed, Hitler personally ordered his specialized “Burning and Destruction” units to entirely raze Warsaw in retribution. He ensured that the entire old city was reduced to rubble. The Poles spent thirty years building it back perfectly. When all that’s left are ashes, there is no choice but to build.

And in many cases, it was the societies most left in tatters that rebuilt the strongest. Tokyo was the target of the single most destructive bombing run in history, as low-flying bombers delivered 700,000 bombs of a newly invented chemical, napalm. As Major General Curtis E. LeMay said, “This fire left nothing but twisted, tumbled-down rubble in its path,” burning 15 square miles of Tokyo, 25% of the city. That raid took as many lives as the atomic bombs would a few months later.

Berlin endured five years and 363 bombing runs, destroying 80% of the city center. The Dresden firebombing burnt 90% of the city in one night. A friend’s uncle was there that night. He told me that he could see the roads bubbling with the heat.

They all rebuilt. Why? They were nations of builders.

Today, Tokyo is a thriving metropolis, the largest city in the world, by a large margin. And these two defeated nations, Germany and Japan, so utterly destroyed by war, have since gone on to build the third and fourth largest economies in the world. Yes, their countries were destroyed, but their capabilities as builders were not. And so they rebuilt.

The Shape of a High
"In a High," Howe writes, "people want to belong; in an Awakening, to defy; in an Unraveling, to separate; in a Crisis, to gather."

When the Crisis ends and the High begins, the whole mood of a civilization shifts. The rancor recedes. The fragmentation heals. People who spent the preceding decades at each other's throats rediscover something like shared purpose. The change happens almost overnight.

Howe and Strauss identify six First Turning Highs across the past five centuries: the Tudor Renaissance (1487–1525), Merrie England (1597–1621), the Augustan Age of Empire (1706–1727), the Era of Good Feelings (1794–1822), Reconstruction and the Gilded Age (1865–1886), and the American High that followed World War II (1946–1964).

And economic inequality continues to decline even after the Crisis itself is over. A society emerging from a Fourth Turning feels it has a fresh start on more equal terms. Highs are, Howe adds, "always family-oriented eras."

One small detail is worth sitting with: every generation living through these Highs described its era as "post-war." We assume that our post-war era since V-J Day is somehow singular. It isn't. Every generation that has emerged from a Fourth Turning has experienced its own post-war, and the social texture of each was remarkably similar.

Civic participation rises. Political debate turns constructive, even decorous. Public trust in leadership strengthens. New laws are followed with less enforcement because families and communities have knit themselves back together.

If you're reading this inside the world we currently inhabit, that may sound like science fiction.

The pattern goes further.

I linger on this description because I want you to see, in concrete detail, what we are working toward. Sitting in the middle of the present, a High is as hard to imagine as the Crisis itself was in the peace of the 1990s. But if the cycle holds, a High is what comes next. Sometime in the early 2030s, the world order will break, the crisis will conclude, and we will begin to build again.

But Highs Are Not Given
I have to be careful here. The pattern I just described is, for the most part, a Western pattern, in a by-and-large positive slice of history. In the West, Crises have tended to give way to Highs.

Zoom out, and the pattern gets messier.

Russia's Fourth Turning in the early twentieth century did not produce an American High. It produced the Bolshevik Revolution, and eventually Stalin. China's mid-century Fourth Turning produced Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Iran's Fourth Turning produced the 1979 Revolution and nearly half a century of theocratic autocracy. North Korea emerged from the same upheaval as one of the most closed and brutal regimes on earth.

Not every crisis ends in renewal. Some end in a darker kind of consolidation.

And the longer the timescale, the worse the pattern looks. Rome disintegrated, and Western Europe spent the better part of a thousand years clawing back toward the literacy and infrastructure it had lost. The dynasties of China rose and fell on cycles that always ended in famine, in warlordism, in the grinding collapse of order that Chinese historians gave a name: “the chaotic age.” Persia, once the largest empire the world had ever seen, was swallowed by Alexander and never again ruled itself on the scale it once had. Egypt, the civilization that invented civilization, became a pawn to other people's empires for two thousand years. The Islamic Golden Age ended in 1258 when the Mongols sacked Baghdad and threw the libraries into the Tigris until the river ran black with ink.

In each case, what followed was hundreds of years of darkness, so total that literacy itself was forgotten in some places. This is the pattern most of human history follows. Great civilizations decline. Libraries burn. Languages die. Skills are lost. And the people who come after spend centuries trying to remember what their great-great-grandparents knew.

The Western experience of the last five hundred years (crisis, renewal, crisis, renewal, each one leaving us richer and freer than the last) is actually historically unusual. We have come to treat it as the rule. It is, in fact, the exception. The nobles have won the last five hands in a row. There is no law of history that says they will win the next one.

Historians who study these transitions tend to see three broad paths out of a Fourth Turning.

The first is the Collapse Path. The Late Bronze Age offers the archetype: institutions fail, no adequate replacement emerges, and what follows is not a High but a dark age. The literacy, the trade networks, the technologies, the complexity: all of it unwinds. Recovery takes centuries, if it comes at all.

The second is the Caesarian Path. The Roman Republic is its template. The old order is not so much reformed as replaced. A strongman consolidates power, restores stability, and trades liberty for security. At its best, this path produces Augustus and two hundred years of Pax Romana. At its worst, it produces Stalin.

The third is the Phoenix Path. America's emergence from the Great Depression and World War II is its most recent great example. A society is tried in fire and comes out stronger: stronger institutions, stronger economy, stronger civic fabric. The next eighty years are shaped by what was built in the decade after the crisis ended.

We do not know which path we are on.

This, I think, is the most important thing to understand about the First Turning. The Fourth Turning may largely be out of our hands. The big political, economic, and military decisions that will determine how the Crisis resolves are being made by a small number of people in extraordinary positions of power. But the First Turning is not out of our hands. What comes after the storm depends on what we do now, on the saplings we plant in the present soil.

Yes, winter is coming. And then spring will come. What that spring looks like will come down to one question: who have we all become?

The Rot and the Strike
The path a civilization takes out of a Crisis is shaped, more than anything, by the condition it was in when the Crisis began. If you look at how empires actually fall, not how we imagine them falling, but how they actually fall, across history, a pattern emerges.

Rome. Byzantium. The Abbasid Caliphate. The Maya. The Mughals. The Ottomans.
In nearly every case, the story is the same. The empire decays from within first. Corruption. Rigidity. Inequality. A ruling class that stops renewing itself. A public that loses faith in shared institutions. A civilization that forgets how to build. And then, and only then, does the external blow come: the Germanic tribes, the Mongols, the Ottomans, the British. The barbarians do not knock down walls that are still standing strong. They walk through walls that have crumbled. Empires fall when they are already hollowed out.

Which means the best defense is not at the wall. It is in the classroom, the hospital, the workshop, the family, the town square. It is in the soil. Civilizations live or die on the quality of their internal life.

At the start of the nineteenth century, Britain became the first modern industrial power. Not, originally, because of its navy. Because of its schools. Britain invested in education. That investment produced the engineers and scientists who powered the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution produced the technology that gave Britain its economic and military dominance. The economic and military dominance gave Britain its empire. Education was the first domino. And then, over the course of one long human lifetime, roughly the span of Queen Elizabeth II's life, from her birth in 1926 to her death in 2022, Britain stopped investing. Society ossified. Opportunity narrowed. The majority of the population stagnated. And eventually, rightfully angry, they voted to be heard. In the span of a single reign, the empire upon which the sun never set withered back to the little island from which it had come.

A civilization stops rising when it stops investing in its people. It is that simple.

Today, America is in the position Britain was in a century ago. We are still, by many measures, the strongest civilization on earth, but the internal signs of decay are everywhere. Widening inequality. Collapsing public trust. Political polarization. Declining educational outcomes. Entire towns hollowed out by the extraction economics of private equity. A public that is angry.

We have two choices. We can invest in the next generation of our civilization and renew ourselves from the inside out. Or we can let the rot continue, and wait for the external strike.

Fields of Saplings
It is springtime. I've been staying at my parents' house, my childhood home, while we have been displaced by the war in the Middle East. Today, I went for a run around the neighborhood I grew up in. It feels like the world is bursting forth from the slumber of winter in a colorful display.

I don't think I understood, growing up, how much the New England trees had shaped me. I left the Northeast. I lived all over the world. And it wasn't until I came home as an adult that I realized where my obsession with trees had come from. It was those hundred-year-old oaks and maples, masterpieces of nature whose roots had grown into my heart and pulsed their nutrients into some deep place in my soul. Old skyscrapers of rippled bark. An ancient book and an ancient tree have so much in common. They are both history in physical form, like time travel.

On this run, I couldn't focus on the spring flowers. All I could see were the gaps in the canopy. The feel of each corner of this town is so deeply embedded in my psyche that I can sense, at every bend, where there once stood towering canopies of trees. Now there are gaps of empty blue sky. Trees that had taken a lifetime to grow had been cut and stuffed into chippers. Each one felt like the hole left by a grandfather's passing. Great elder trees had been laid low. Only those of us who were there can still remember how tall they once stood. I mourn the loss.

When I came back up my childhood driveway, I looked down at the grass and saw something. Little sprouts of what I thought was poison ivy. A carpet of them. My kids crawl over that grass. Worried, I pulled out my phone, took a photo and asked what it was.

They were tree saplings.

Hundreds and hundreds of tree saplings.

An entirely fresh generation of what could one day be the great majestic oaks of my grandchildren's lifetimes, already there in the grass, asking only to be allowed to grow.

The sprouts are there. All they need is time.

The next canopy is not in some distant future. It is already here, in kindergartens and middle schools and universities, in village classrooms in Rwanda and refugee camps in Jordan, in favelas in Brazil and ghettos in the Bronx. Three billion young people, a third of them in poverty. The next generation of towering oaks, asking only to be allowed to grow.

Our job is to nourish them. To make sure the saplings are not mistaken for weeds. To make sure they have the soil and sunlight and water they need to become what they can become.

It is these young people who will determine how many flowers blossom in the coming spring.

It is our responsibility to make sure they can.

If I thought the future was already written, I would be apathetic too. But the future is not written. That is why I work. That is why I write. That is why this book exists.

That is why Endless exists.