The Fourth Turning
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
This aphorism, attributed to Mark Twain, draws into focus how the reward of a historian is to locate patterns that recur over time and to discover the natural rhythms of social experience. In fact, at the core of modern history is an undeniable pattern of a new turning, every 20 years or so. At the start of each turning, the way citizens view themselves, and their roles within society, evolves. The culture changes, the nation changes, as do perceptions and attitudes about the future. Turnings come in cycles of four and each cycle lasts the length of a human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time that the Etruscans called the saeculum. The first turning is an era of strengthening institutions. The second turning is a period of spiritual upheaval. The third turning is an era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions. Finally, the fourth turning is a period of secular upheaval where there is a replacement of the old order with a new one.
We can see this pattern play out with reference to modern Anglo-American history. Every 80 years or so, the fourth turning rears its head and a new institutional order emerges from the rubble of the old. The 1770s saw the Wars of Independence and what emerged was the world’s first democratic republic. In the 1860s, slavery threatened to tear the Union apart as the nation descended into civil war. Out of the ashes, emerged a new nation that enshrined liberty and equality. The Great Depression and US involvement in the Second World War paved the way for the most powerful superpower in history. At the end of each fourth turning, as the saeclum arrives at its finale, a new body of institutions and values emerged. A new type of citizenry also emerged; one that was shaped, scarred and irreversibly moulded as a new value system was created and embraced.
This pattern also reveals itself in modern Southeast Asian history. Colonisation characterised this region throughout the 19th century. The French colonised Vietnam following victory in the Sino-French War of 1884–5 and then took over Laos as a protectorate in 1893. The Philippines, under Spanish colonial rule since the early 16th century back, was ceded to the United States after its victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Following the Second World War, Vietnam, Laos and Philippines then won independence in 1945, 1954 and 1946 respectively. Today, as the hopes and promises of independence have become increasingly muted, once novel and revolutionary institutions have now become sterile and moribund as the civic order gradually decays. The fourth turning, triggered by a crisis, will galvanise the citizenry and will propel them to replace the old civic order with a new one.
The social, economic and political impacts of Covid-19 represent the fourth turning. The developing world will be changed in a multitude of ways once the pandemic is finally brought under control. However, there are two ways in particular that Covid-19 will alter the future landscape.
First is the role of institutions, or more specifically the public perception of institutions. In past crises, nation states relied on the trust and the resilience of the institutional structure in the eyes of the citizenry to survive. Nation states draw their legitimacy, first and foremost, from protecting the citizenry from harm. It is a fair premise to assume that vast swathes of the urban poor will not think that their respective governments have done an effective job in this regard. It is no exaggeration to say that the woefully overcrowded and under resourced healthcare systems as well as the lack of a welfare state has failed to protect the most vulnerable in society. While it would be unfair to blame governments for the onset of Covid-19, there is ample justification to scrutinise government reactions and overall preparedness to the virus. The trigger to a crisis is never the same and often unpredictable but when it does happen, it reveals the underlying fault lines, divisions and failings in society that have existed and persisted for generations. Nation states will lean on the notion that “crisis triggers” are black swan events and therefore not planning for them is excusable. This is a convenient but ultimately ineffective excuse. Nassim Taleb, in a recent essay, coherently argues that any nation state that legitimises its existence by protecting the citizenry should have foreseen the pandemic not as a black swan but rather as a white swan event. A pandemic of some form was highly likely, if not mathematically inevitable, given the historical patterns of pandemics over the centuries as well as the high geographic density of billions of people living in squalid conditions and the interconnectivity of the world. Indeed Taleb writes, in his 2007 book Black Swan, words that today seem prophetic “As we travel more on this planet, epidemics will become more acute — we will have a germ population dominated by a few numbers and the successful killer will spread vastly more effectively. I see the risks of a very strange acute virus spreading throughout the planet.” With Southeast Asia firmly in its fourth turning, legitimate questions will be raised as to whether the institutions that are meant to protect the citizenry are fit for this purpose. At the very least, they need to be reformed urgently.
Second, the egalitarian nature of Covid-19 sheds an uncomfortable light on the quotidian inequality that blights the lives of hundreds of millions of people across Southeast Asia. A streak of vulnerability upon a hitherto impenetrable political and economic elite highlights how the powerful are not shielded from harm. The virus does not discriminate along lines of power, class, income, social stature, religion or race. The sheer simplicity and disinterest of who the virus infects may trigger a change in narrative around what it means to be human and how we organise ourselves as a collective society.
Institutions will have a role to play in the post Covid-19 world, albeit a reformed role. The age of narrow all-encompassing centralised institutions has now passed; they have failed the ultimate test of protecting its citizenry. If they do not reform, then what is their purpose? The future, the pastures beyond the current fourth turning, is a blend of centralised institutions providing an infrastructural framework with decentralised networks creating bottom-up impact.
In the depths of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt said “there is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation has a rendezvous with destiny.” As the prospect of another Great Depression looms larger than at any point since the 1930s, his words feel especially poignant. It is up to this generation to propel humanity into the first turning of the new cycle and to write the next chapter of human history.
Join us at ARCC as we embark on an innovative model of economic development for the new turning; a model that is underpinned by the power of decentralised networks and financial inclusion from the bottom-up.
7 April 2020
Research of IBMR.io & ARCC
Editors: Eric Tao, Head of Media IBMR.io & Sinjin Jung, Managing Director IBMR.io.
