Millennials Meeting the Moment

 

              So, I’m watching the Foundation TV show on Apple+, and it has got me thinking a bit about historical forces, and particularly Generational Theory. I’m one of those people who read Strauss and Howe’s giant Generational Theory book back when it was in vogue. These two studied every generation of Americans from colonization to the present. They noticed a pattern of four generations that seemed to reoccur over and over again. This theory has been adopted by Church Growth folk, Political Consultants, and undergirds much of the language we use to talk about generational shifts and strife.

-One generation meets and defeats a crisis. Their ways of doing so shape how they re-set society after the crisis.

-Then the next generation who were too young to participate as adults in the crisis, take the previous generation’s reshaped society and improves it, often times softening its edges to do more than meet a crisis, but have a life.

-Then the next generation, who never knew the crisis and have experienced the boon of the new society, reacts to it, usually with a spiritual fury. Think the Great Awakenings and/or “Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out”.

-Finally, the fourth generation takes that spiritual energy and turns it into the physical and social work of dismantling the society set up by the first generation. This in turn prepares the way for the next generation to meet and defeat the next American crisis.

              Obviously there is a lot more to it than that, but that’s the broad stokes of the idea. You can see where the current living generations fit into Howe and Strauss’ system in my little chart above.

              According to Strauss and Howe there was only one break to this pattern, the Civil War. Their explanation was that the crisis broke out too soon, the generation who should have met and defeated the crisis weren’t adults when the crisis hit, as such there was an awful and bleak period in American life that almost ended our country and way of life.

              Now, since September 12^th 2001, most of the Strauss-Howe people have been announcing that my generation, the Millennials, were too young when the crisis hit. We could only be foot soldiers in the War on Terror, so the Baby Boomers grasped onto the national agenda and did the changing for us. Then, when the Great Recession hit, the Strauss-Howe folk again said, “Shoot, the Millennials are too young to lead us out of this great crisis.”

              I think, the War on Terror and the Great Recession weren’t the crisis points that Millennials are fixing and rebuilding society in reaction to. Instead, I think the Crisis my generation are meeting and will meet, are the Pandemic and the Climate Crisis. It seems like the post-COVID re-set that is currently happening in society is the Millennials reshaping American norms and values to meet those twin challenges. I’m shooting from the hip on this, but just something I thought was worth sharing.