1. A dominant, inner-fixated IDEALIST GENERATION grows up as increasingly indulged youths after a secular crisis; comes of age inspiring a spiritual awakening; fragments into narcissistic rising adults; cultivates principle as moralistic midlifers; and emerges as visionary elders guiding the next secular crisis.
2. A recessive REACTIVE GENERATION grows up as underprotected and criticized youths during a spiritual awakening; matures into risk-taking, alienated rising adults; mellows into pragmatic midlife leaders during a secular crisis; and maintains respect (but less influence) as reclusive elders.
3. A dominant, outer-fixated CIVIC GENERATION grows up as increasingly protected youths after a spiritual awakening; comes of age overcoming a secular crisis; unites into a heroic and achieving cadre of rising adults; sustains that image while building institutions as powerful midlifers; and emerges as busy elders attached by the next spiritual awakening.
4. A recessive ADAPTIVE GENERATION grows up as overprotected and suffocated youths during a secular crisis; matures into risk-averse, conformist rising adults; produces indecisive midlife arbitrator-leaders during a spiritual awakening; and maintains influence (but less respect) as sensitive elders.
And second, as referenced throughout those descriptions, the alternating coming of ages in these successive and repeating generations gives rise to a regular order of eras, namely:
1. An AWAKENING ERA (Idealists coming of age) triggers cultural creativity and the emergence of new ideals, as institutions built around old values are challenged by the emergence of a spiritual awakening.
2. In an INNER-DRIVEN ERA (Reactives coming of age), individualism flourishes, new ideals are cultivated in separate camps, confidence in institutions declines, and secular problems are deferred.
3. A CRISIS ERA (Civics coming of age) opens with growing collective unity in the face of perceived social peril and culminates in a secular crisis in which danger is overcome and one set of new ideals triumphs.
4. In an OUTER-DRIVEN ERA (Adaptives coming of age), society turns toward conformity and stability, triumphant ideals are secularized, and spiritual discontent is deferred.
The Strauss & Howe theory is really the interplay of these two cycles, and is well illustrated in this diagram from the text.
This book was written in 1990, so the most recent generation that they could accurately describe was the “Thirteenth” Generation -- the then-as-yet-unnamed Generation X. With that substitution it should be easy to see the interplay that these most recent generations have had as the people that populate them age and move through both their different life stages and the different eras that their own coming of ages help create.
To wit, and maybe most familiar to modern readers, look at 1981 -- where society has navigated the spiritual awakening that was the counterculture revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and is now moving towards its next Inner-Driven Era. At that time, Generation X is the Reactive generation in youth, underprotected and criticized, the Boomers are the Idealist generation, fragmenting into narcissistic rising adults, the Silents are the Adaptive generation, serving as indecisive midlife arbitrators, and the G.I.s are the Civic generation, busy maintaining the institutions they built in midlife and attacked during the spiritual awakening.
An Xer’s Reaction to the Reactive Generations
What’s remarkable about this theory is how durable and descriptive it is throughout much of American history -- and part of the fun of reading the book is seeing explicitly how these cycles repeat themselves again and again. As a member of that unnamed “Thirteenth” generation, I got a special satisfaction out of reading how other “Reactive” generations in history have been treated and have acted in extremely similar ways to my own.
In the Colonial Cycle (~1580-1760), the Reactives were called the Cavalier Generation, and they were the ones literally burned at the stake during the Salem witch trials:
The witches about to die were their own age, as were the leading magistrates who condemned them. In their hearts, Cavaliers knew they all shared the guilt. Since childhood, they had always been told they were a “lost generation,” that their spirit was “corrupt” and “unconverted.” Their only escape was the stick of silver, piece of land, or ship passage that could separate them from Puritan judgment. But when they were caught, this generation of traitors and rebels, predators and prey, rarely protested the punishment. More their style was the response of a Cavalier Virginian, William Drummond, when Puritan Governor William Berkeley informed him he would be hanged in half an hour: “What your honor pleases.” No excuses. No righteous denial. Cavalier leaders like [William] Stoughton, Increase Mather, and Joseph Dudley -- men of brutal realism -- would later take America over the threshold of the next century and into a new era of caution and stability. Chastened and mellowed, most Cavaliers were about to enter old age unthanked, forgiving their juniors as they had never been forgiven by their own elders.
Remember, the Puritan Generation referred to here was the Idealist generation of this cycle, the kissing cousins of our modern day Idealist Boomers, just as the Cavaliers bear this striking resemblance to our Reactive Xers.
In the following Revolutionary Cycle (~1700-1860), the Reactives were the Liberty Generation, those forced to fight for no reward:
The Awakeners’ inner fire was something they had learned to avoid, something that had scorched them once as berated children and again, during the 1750s, as despised foot soldiers in a murderous crusade against the French. … From George Washington to Daniel Boone, from Francis Marion to Benedict Arnold, the French and Indian War had left its mark of devilry and cynicism on their entire generation. “Rifleman” Daniel Morgan even had the scars of 499 British lashes on his back to prove it. (His punishment called for 500, but when the quartermaster miscounted, Morgan joked, “I got away with one.”) As for the younger soldiers on Bunker Hill, [William] Prescott and his peers did what they could to teach them the grim realities of life and war. The Liberty entered the Revolution without counting on a good outcome for themselves. No matter which side they chose or which side won, these hardbitten peers of John Adams -- a generation whom historian Cecilia Kenyon has called “men of little faith” -- fully expected to be blamed. Most of them would indeed reach elderhood getting just what they expected: little thanks and precious little reward.
Those Awakeners mentioned at the very top? You guessed it; they are the Idealists in this cycle, the ones making the mess that the Reactive Liberties would have to clean up, all the while being denigrated and ignored.
“Let sin be slain!” boomed [Awakener] theologian Joseph Bellamy in 1762 as he addressed his late-fortyish peers in the Connecticut assembly while decrying the “luxury, idleness, debauchery” of the rising generation. Entering midlife, Awakeners at last began turning their principles toward the outer world. In the early 1760s, far from delighting in the victorious end of the French and Indian War, they expressed horror over America’s growing moral decadence, especially the “gangrene” and “vice” of the wild young Liberty.
Is this sounding familiar yet?
A similar pattern manifests itself in the following Civil War Cycle (~1800-1940), where the Reactives are the Gilded Generation, who…
…comprised the “ghastly wretches” Congressman Riddle saw scrambling away across Bull Run Creek. They had signed up for what they had expected to be a quick adventure, with maybe a little glory and profit mixed in -- not much different from the California gold field to which many had rushed as teenagers. Most expected that their sheer energy and derring-do (“Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy,” advised [Stonewall] Jackson) would end the war quickly and let them get on with life’s practical challenges. For Gilded whites, any resolution at all to the thundering hatred between elder abolitionists and elder “Southrons” would at last allow them to settle the western frontier. For Gilded blacks, including the slaves who began fleeing northward on the “underground railroad,” Bull Run marked a necessary first step (albeit a tactical setback) toward flesh-and-blood freedom. But as the war settled into its meaner, later years, the jaunty opinion of this generation would sour. The scrappy adventurers whom Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., saw as “touched with fire” in their youth would later turn bitterly cynical about passionate crusades. The same 25-year-olds who had shrieked (or heard) the rebel yell would, much later in their sixties, remember Bull Run -- and Antietam, Gettysburg, and Atlanta -- and warn the young against the horrors of war. Few would listen.
And the preceding Idealists are the Transcendental Generation -- the abolitionists and the fire-eaters, each “fully prepared to shed younger blood to attain what they knew was right.” The sad story that Strauss and Howe tell in this section are of the Reactive Gilded, torn up in the meat grinder of the Idealist Transcendental’s inability to compromise.
Ultimately, a bulldog Gilded general (Ulysses Grant) toughed out a reputation for slow wits and hard liquor by throttling [the Transcendental] “Gentleman Lee” -- who surrendered just days before a self-loathing Gilded assassin (John Wilkes Booth) put an end to [Transcendental] “Father Abraham.” Afterward, while 55-year-olds declaimed over principle, 35-year-olds saw mostly ruined farms, starving widows, diseased prisoners, dead bodies, and amputated limbs (carried away from Gettysburg by the wagonload).
Next, in the Great Power Cycle (~1860-2020), the Reactives are Harry Truman’s get-it-done Lost Generation, who provided a different war with the…
…pragmatic midlife generals, including the gruff careerist Leslie Groves, who managed the Manhattan Project. “The war’s over,” said Groves after a glance at the test blast. “One or two of those things and Japan will be finished.” Truman delighted that America had “spent two billion dollars on the biggest scientific gamble in history -- and won.” Groves, Truman, and their midlife peers understood that America looked to them less for Roosevelt-like vision than for Patton-like action. “To err is Truman,” chided many editorials two months earlier after this relative unknown had become Commander in Chief and had first learned of the A-bomb project (a secret none of FDR’s seventyish cabinet had bothered to share with him). Yet unlike his elders, President Truman knew from personal experience what human slaughter might accompany a yard-by-yard conquest of the Japanese mainland. So he “let the buck stop” with him -- and ordered Hiroshima bombed. Soon enough, Truman and his peers would cope with further thankless tasks: cleaning up after the debris left by FDR’s visionary Yalta plan, eyeballing the Soviets with a gaming “brinksmanship” that younger leaders would deride as irrational, and keeping America on a steady, cautious course while hearing the expressions “old,” “tired,” and “reactionary” hurled at them. No big deal: The Lost had grown used to such negative judgments.
By this time it should be a familiar story -- a generation of pragmatists tackling tough problems, neglected by Idealist elders focused on their own actualization and derided by Civic youngers focused on building something they thought better.
It is a perfect introduction to Strauss and Howe’s take on the “Thirteenth” generation, the one too-newly recognized to even be branded.
Wherever Boomers rented old Woodstock videos to celebrate the occasion, the punkish part-timers behind the checkout counter probably belonged to the THIRTEENTH GENERATION (Reactive, age 8 to 28). For the most part, these $6-an-hour youths kept their mouths shut while overhearing 40-year-olds revel in their culture and exude an air of having defined forever what every person should be around age 20. To these kids, rehashing Woodstock was a waste of time: Just look at the mess it left behind -- for example, the drug-related deaths of seven festival performers (and who knows how many thousands of participants) over the ensuing two decades. But, never having known anything remotely like Woodstock themselves, they were also aware of the possible Boomer comeback: Okay, so what did you guys ever do together -- invade Grenada? Go wilding? Watch the Challenger explosion? And they wondered themselves. A few 13ers revealed a rising alienation in their letter-to-the-editor reactions to Boomers commemoratives: like John Cunningham, whose attitude was “Woodstock -- blech,” and Jeffrey Hoogeveen, who pointedly told Boomers “the Sixties are history -- history that the rest of us don’t need repeated and crammed down our throats.” Hoogeveen’s peers had been the forgotten toddlers of the Woodstock era, kids who by now were old enough to check out such hippieish videos as Easy Rider and Hair -- and who, like The Wonder Years’ Olivia D’Abo, knew how to imitate or avoid Boomerisms, whichever came in handy.
That’s right. Even when describing this generation, the references are almost entirely to the Idealist Boomers that preceded them -- a dynamic that evidently caused some struggle and controversy at the time of this writing.
“My generation was born on Friday the Thirteenth,” insists Bowdoin College’s Gregg Linburg. “That’s a day you can view two ways. You can fear it, or you can face it -- and try to make it a great day in spite of the label. That’s what my generation is going to do.” Counting back to the Awakeners, Linburg’s peers are, in point of fact, the thirteenth to call themselves American citizens. Demographers have so far given them a name at once incorrect and insulting: “baby busters.” Population is not the issue. Thirteeners outnumber Boomers by ten million in 1990, a gap widening by the year, and their first wave (1961-1964) cohorts are among the biggest ever. “Baby bust” theorists see in the name some new youth advantage in a world of easing youth competition -- but try telling that to collegians born in the smallish late-1960s cohorts. Yet the worst aspect of this “bust” nomer, and why 13ers resent it, is how it plants today’s 25-year-olds squarely where they don’t want to be: in the shadow of the “boom,” and negatively so -- as though wonder has been followed by disappointment.
And so they start their sociological existence as a nameless generation -- defined more by their interactions with the Boomers that preceded them (and today more by their interactions with the Millennials that followed them) -- a situation that barely changes when they are given their lasting name: Generation X.
Predicting the Future
So that’s all fun. Speaking as an Xer, we just can’t resist reveling in how much we’re neglected and derided by our generational cousins. But a more serious reaction to this work is understanding its utility not just in describing the past and present, but in predicting the future. Take a look at the following chart:
At the top you see a summary of their theory of alternating eras, driven by the rising and fading of the different generational types. But below that you see nine factors that better parse and describe the “mood” that possesses society in each era. The degrees to which children are nurtured, sex roles are divided, personal risk is tolerated, etc. At any moment in time, these factors, these social indicators, may seem static and permanent, but they are not. According to this theory, they change in predictable ways, and understanding what is coming next can come from a close understanding of where these factors currently reside and how they will be changing.
Readers who reflect on these social indicators (and on the cyclical trends noted in Figure 12-2) will have no problem recognizing where we are today: approaching the middle of an Inner-Driven era. Nor will they have trouble figuring out where we have been over the last several decades and, more important, where we are headed.
That was written in 1990 and, if true, then that means in 2022, we should have reached the near end of the next Crisis era and are about to move into an Outer-Driven era. And what was that Crisis -- a Crisis that the authors would have predicted occurring sometime around the year 2001?
Suppose authorities seriously suspected that a band of terrorists, linked to a fanatically anti-American nation, had smuggled a nuclear bomb into New York City. How would America respond?
That’s almost too eerie. But don’t get lost in the shock of reading that sentence. The authors are clearly saying they don’t know what the next Crisis will be nor even when it will occur. “History,” after all, “is full of sparks. Some have blazed for a moment, then died. Others have touched off conflagrations out of all proportion to the sparks themselves.” The larger point is that when the Crisis occurs, it is the constellation of generational factors that exist at that time, that will dictate our response to it.
…suppose the terrorists were to strike during the upcoming Crisis constellation… …the generational constellation would prompt a response that, from today’s perspective, seems unrecognizable. Boomer leaders in their sixties would neither hide nor ponder the rumor; instead, they would exaggerate the threat (who said there was a bomb in only one city?) and tie it to a larger sense of global crisis. Unifying the nation as a community, these leaders would define the enemy broadly and demand its total defeat -- regardless of the human and economic sacrifices required. Evacuation would be mannerly, with cooperative Millennial youths seeking and accepting orders from elders and with pragmatic midlife 13ers making sure no time is wasted. The nation would act promptly and decisively as a single organism. For better or worse, Americans would be far more inclined than in other eras to risk catastrophe to achieve what its leaders would define as a just outcome.
And that’s pretty much what happened. Close enough for jazz, at least.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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