In the climactic years between Pearl Harbor and V-J Day, arguments were forgotten, ideals energized, and creaky institutions resuscitated for urgent new purposes. At home or in the military, teamwork and discipline were unusually strong. Anybody who doubted or complained or bent the rules drew the wrath of fellow soldiers, co-workers, or neighbors. People looked upon their elected representatives as moral exemplars. In 1943, the author of The Hero in History described the current age as brimming with leaders who qualified for the title “great man in history.” People were also full of hope, even in the face of terrible adversity. “During the summer of 1940, with France crushed and England hanging by a thread,” writes David Gelernter, a Roper poll found that “a handsome plurality, 43 percent to 36, was optimistic about ‘the future of civilization.’” Energized by visionary leadership and hopeful followership, America attained a stunning triumph.
With the people thus united, that era established a powerful new civic order replete with new public institutions, economic arrangements, political alliances, and global treaties, many of which have lasted to this day. That era also produced a grim acceptance of destruction as a necessary concomitant to human progress. Quite unlike today, that was a time when wars were fought to the finish; when a President could command a prized young generation to march off with the warning that one in three would not come home; when America’s wisest and smartest scientists built weapons of mass destruction; when imagined domestic enemies were rounded up in snowy camps; when enemy armies were destroyed, their leaders hanged. Indeed, while this beloved “Spirit of America” resonates with warm reminiscences from a distance of a half-century, it was also a time of blunt, cruel, even lethal forms of social change.
Today’s elder veterans recall that era fondly but selectively: They would like to restore its unity and selflessness, but without the carnage. Yet how? The only way they can see is a way back, what Bob Dole calls a “bridge” to a better past—an America stripped of the family damage, cultural decay, and loss of civic purpose that has settled in over the intervening five decades. Such a task feels hopeless because it is.
Like nature, history is full of processes that cannot happen in reverse. Just as the laws of entropy do not allow a bird to fly backwards, or droplets to regroup at the top of a waterfall, history has no rewind button. Like the seasons of nature, it moves only forward. Saecular entropy cannot be reversed. An Unraveling cannot lead back to an Awakening, or forward to a High, without a Crisis in between.
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...from The Fourth Turning (Chapter 9)