turnings
History creates generations, and generations create history. This symbiosis between life and time explains why, if one is seasonal, the other must be. If generational archetypes repeat in a fourfold cycle, this implies a recurrence of social moods or eras that form these archetypes sequentially. This is precisely what Strauss and Howe discovered as they investigated generations in American history: Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has traversed a four-stage cycle of social moods or eras. At the start of each era—or “turning” as the authors call them—people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Each turning tends to last about twenty years: roughly the span of a generation, and the amount of time it takes to pass through one entire phase of life. Four turnings comprise a full cycle of about 80 to 90 years, or the length of one long human life. The Romans named this length of time the saeculum, meaning both “a long human life”