The End is Nigh

Not really, but Francis Fukuyama is reviewing some books in the NYT and I'm listening to the Bible.

I promise it’s not actually the apocalypse, just because I woke up on a Saturday morning and decided, for the first time in years, to write a blog post. The thing is, once you start cleaning and rearranging, the domino effect makes it hard to escape the mayhem and think about anything else, like what sorts of links are of interest on Arts and Letters Daily.

Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash

Though, it probably still is the apocalypse, as so many have noticed.

When the paper of record starts to admit things are not all peaches and sunshine, one starts to feel less like Cassandra, and more like any old MSNBC pundit. So here is Francis Fukuyama himself reviewing books about the coming deluge:

Howe writes that Anglo-America has gone through five century-long “saecula” and is now at the end of a sixth. Each saeculum encompasses four generations corresponding to the seasons of the year. There is a “High” (spring) period, a new beginning; an “Awakening” (summer) when the next generation turns against its parents; an “Unraveling” (fall) when institutions start to decay; and a “Crisis” (winter) when everything falls apart, preparing the way for a new saeculum. Each Turning produces its own character type (“Prophet,” “Nomad,” “Hero,” “Artist”). According to Howe, we are now in the Crisis stage or “Fourth Turning” of the Millennial Saeculum that began after World War II. “Winter is here,” he announces, and we can expect a new First Turning sometime in the 2030s. He acknowledges that history is full of contingencies — the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the invention of the locomotive — but he argues that the succession of generational cohorts has its own internal dynamic that has prevailed over the centuries.

It isn’t the locomotive that I hate so much, it is the automobile and the washing machine. Whereas, I love the dispassionate tone of Mr. Fukuyama, blithely pondering, as he does at the end, war, mayhem, disease, and societal disintegration: