The “spirit of America” comes once a saeculum, only through what the ancients called ekpyrosis, nature’s fiery moment of death and discontinuity. History’s periodic eras of Crisis combust the old social order and give birth to a new.
A Fourth Turning is a solstice era of maximum darkness, in which the supply of social order is still falling—but the demand for order is now rising. It is the saeculum’s hibernal, its time of trial. In winter, writes William Cullen Bryant, “The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere.” Nature exacts its fatal payment and pitilessly sorts out the survivors and the doomed. Pleasures recede, tempests hurt, pretense is exposed, and toughness rewarded—all in a season (says Victor Hugo) that “changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.” These are times of fire and ice, of polar darkness and brilliantly pale horizons. What it doesn’t kill, it reminds of death. What it doesn’t wound, it reminds of pain. In Swinburne’s “season of snows,” it is “The light that loses, the night that wins.”
Like natural winter, which reaches its solstice early, the Fourth Turning passes the nadir of public order right at its beginning. Just as the coldest days of winter are days of lengthening sun, the harsh (and less hopeful) years of a Crisis are years of renascent public authority. This involves a fundamental shift in social momentum: In the Unraveling, the removal of each civic layer brought demands for the removal of more layers; in the Crisis era, each new exercise of civic authority creates a perceived need for the adding of layers.
As the community instinct regenerates, people resolve to do more than just relieve the symptoms of pending traumas. Intent on addressing root causes, they rediscover the value of unity, teamwork, and social discipline. Far more than before, people comply with authority, accept the need for public sacrifice, and shed anything extraneous to the survival needs of their community. This is a critical threshold: People either coalesce as a nation and culture—or rip hopelessly and permanently apart.
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...from The Fourth Turning (Chapter 9)