The Third Turning
An Unraveling begins as a society-wide embrace of the liberating cultural forces set loose by the Awakening. People have had their fill of spiritual rebirth, moral reform, and lifestyle experimentation. Content with what they have become individually, they vigorously assert an ethos of pragmatism, self-reliance, laissez faire, and national (or sectional or ethnic) chauvinism.
While personal satisfaction is high, public trust ebbs amid a fragmenting culture, harsh debates over values, and weakening civic habits. Pleasure-seeking lifestyles coexist with a declining public tolerance for aberrant personal behavior. The sense of guilt (which rewards principle and individuality) reaches its zenith. Gender differences attain their narrowest point, families stabilize, and new protections are provided for children. As moral debates brew, the big public arguments are over ends, not means. Decisive public action becomes very difficult, as community problems are deferred. Wars are fought with moral fervor but without consensus or follow-through.
Eventually, cynical alienation hardens into a brooding pessimism. During a High, obliging individuals serve a purposeful society, and even bad people get harnessed to socially constructive tasks; during an Unraveling, an obliging society serves purposeful individuals, and even good people find it hard to connect with their community. The approaching specter of public disaster ultimately elicits a mix of paralysis and apathy that would have been unthinkable half a saeculum earlier. People can now feel, but collectively can no longer do.
The mood of the current Culture Wars era seems new to nearly every living American but is not new to history. Around World War I, America steeped in reform and fundamentalism amidst a floodtide of crime, alcohol, immigration, political corruption, and circus trials. The 1850s likewise simmered with moral righteousness, shortening tempers, and multiplying “mavericks.” It was a decade, says historian David Donald, in which “the authority of all government in America was at a low point.” Entering the 1760s, the colonies felt rejuvenated in spirit but reeled from violence, mobs, insurrections, and paranoia over the corruption of official authority.
Look at how Americans conceived of the future throughout the ’90s: Think-tank luminaries have exulted over the history-bending changes of the Information Age, while the public has glazed at expertise, cynically disregarded the good news, and dwelled on the negative. From movies like The Terminator and Deep Impact, to novels like Neil Stevenson’s Snow Crash, the culture has raked with futuristic images of individuals struggling to survive in a random, ‘every-man-for-himself’ world.
