First Turning - High

A HIGH brings a renaissance to community life.  With the new civic order in place, people want to put the Crisis behind them and feel content about what they have collectively achieved.  Any social issues left unresolved by the Crisis must now remain so.

The need for dutiful sacrifice has ebbed, yet the society continues to demand order and consensus.  The recent fear for group survival transmutes into a desire for investment, growth, and strength--which in turn produces an era of commercial prosperity, institutional solidarity, and political stability.  The big public arguments are over means, not ends.  Security is a paramount need.  Obliging individuals serve a purposeful society—though a few loners voice disquiet over the spiritual void.  Life tends toward the friendly and homogeneous, but attitudes toward personal risk-taking begin to loosen.  The sense of shame (which rewards duty and conformity) reaches its zenith.  Gender distinctions attain their widest point, and child-rearing becomes more indulgent.  Wars are unlikely, except as unwanted echoes of the recent Crisis.

Eventually, civic life seems fully under control but distressingly spirit-dead.  People worry that, as a society, they can do everything but no longer feel anything.

The post-World War II American High may rank as the all-time apogee of the national mood.  The Gilded Age surge into the industrial age was supported by a rate of capital formation unmatched in U.S. history, symbolized by the massive turbines in the Centennial Exposition’s Hall of Machines.  In the early 19th century, the geometric grids of the District of Columbia and Northwest Territory townships projected a mood of ordered community that culminated in the Era of Good Feelings, the only time a U.S. President was re-elected by acclamation.  In the upbeat 1710s, poetic odes to flax and shipping conjured up a society preoccupied (in Cotton Mather’s words) with “usefulness” and “good works.”

Recall America’s circa-1963 conception of the future: We brimmed over with optimism about Camelot, a bustling future with smart people in which big projects and “impossible dreams” were freshly achievable.  The moon could be reached, and poverty eradicated, both within a decade. Tomorrowland was a friendly future with moving skywalks, pastel geometric shapes, futuristic Muzak, and well-tended families.  In the Carousel of Progress, the progress remained fixed while the “carousel” (what moved) was the audience.  The future had specificity and certainty but lacked urgency and moral direction.

...from The Fourth Turning (Chapter 4)