Yesterday’s BLOTT described the reference to the Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming” in the introduction Jeff Goodell’s book The Heat Will Kill You First.
I think we need to look at a few more peripheral issues before diving into the poem.
The Pillaging of Poetry
“The Second Coming” may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (Perhaps Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury” monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats’s lines for Things Fall Apart[1] in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, in mediums ranging from CD-ROM games to heavy-metal albums to pornography. These references have created a feedback loop, leading ever more writers to draw from the poem for inspiration. But how many of them get it right?
The Paris Review
[1] For your literary yam dollar, Things Fall Apart is your best value.
And we can now add WLBOTT to the list of pillagers.
Yeats believed in a cyclical nature of history and this is reflected in his poem. He thought history was divided into grand, 2,000 year cycles that he called “gyres“. With all that was going wrong in his personal life and the outside world (more on this later), he thought mankind was ending a Christian gyre and entering into a much darker, sinister period.
And you know who else believes in a cyclical perspective of history?
Steve Bannon
Your friend and mine, the man with the visibly pulsating liver and darling of Gentleman’s Quarterly, also has a cyclical view of history.
Bannon is currently summering at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. As Ned Flanders might say, “Hi diddly ho, Incarcerino!”
The Darling of GQ
Bannon’s Cyclical View of History
During the early dark days of the tRump regime, sBannon was an influential figure. He has a cynical/cyclical view of history, and he basically wants to exploit an upcoming time of crisis for his own authoritarian goals.
Neil Howe, the author of The Fourth Turning, provides an overview of his thesis, and how sBannon hijacked his narrative.
The headlines this month have been alarming. “Steve Bannon’s obsession with a dark theory of history should be worrisome” (Business Insider). “Steve Bannon Believes The Apocalypse Is Coming And War Is Inevitable” (the Huffington Post). “Steve Bannon Wants To Start World War III” (the Nation). A common thread in these media reports is that President Trump’s chief strategist is an avid reader and that the book that most inspires his worldview is “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy.”
We reject the deep premise of modern Western historians that social time is either linear (continuous progress or decline) or chaotic (too complex to reveal any direction). Instead we adopt the insight of nearly all traditional societies: that social time is a recurring cycle in which events become meaningful only to the extent that they are what philosopher Mircea Eliade calls “reenactments.”
We live in an increasingly volatile and primal era, in which history is speeding up and liberal democracy is weakening. As Vladimir Lenin wrote, “In some decades, nothing happens; in some weeks, decades happen.”
America entered a new Fourth Turning in 2008. It is likely to last until around 2030. Our paradigm suggests that current trends will deepen as we move toward the halfway point.
From a Washington Post article By Neil Howe on February 24, 2017
Strauss–Howe Generational Theory
When I was young, I was pretty gullible. A lot of that came from being force-fed pre-Vatican II horseshit since birth. I remember reading “Chariot of the Gods” in 9th grade and totally believing it.
So I want to be careful when describing the Strauss–Howe Generational Theory. I’m catching a whiff of “Chariots” here.
In the Strauss–Howe Generational Theory, history is grouped into four 21-year cycles (called “turnings“) that make up a “saeculum“. Here they are (edited for brevity):
High
The first turning is a high, which occurs after a crisis. During the high, institutions are strong and individualism is weak. Society is confident about where it wants to go collectively, though those outside the majoritarian center often feel stifled by conformity.Awakening
The second turning is an awakening. This is an era when institutions are attacked in the name of personal and spiritual autonomy. Just when society is reaching its high tide of public progress, people suddenly tire of social discipline and want to recapture a sense of “self-awareness”, “spirituality” and “personal authenticity”. Young activists look back at the previous High as an era of cultural and spiritual poverty.Unraveling
The third turning is an unraveling. The mood of this era they say is in many ways the opposite of a high: Institutions are weak and distrusted, while individualism is strong and flourishing. The authors say highs come after crises when society wants to coalesce and build and avoid the death and destruction of the previous crisis. Unravelings come after awakenings when society wants to atomize and enjoy.Crisis
Wikipedia
The fourth turning is a crisis. This is an era of destruction, often involving war or revolution, in which institutional life is destroyed and rebuilt in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s survival. After the crisis, civic authority revives, cultural expression redirects toward community purpose, and people begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group.
The reviews on Wikipedia are not kind.
The Strauss and Howe retelling of history through a generational lens has received mixed reviews.
It has also been criticized by several historians and some political scientists, and journalists, as being overly deterministic, non-falsifiable, and unsupported by rigorous evidence.
Brooks wrote: “This is not a good book, if by good you mean the kind of book in which the authors have rigorously sifted the evidence and carefully supported their assertions with data. But it is a very good bad book.“
Human Resource Planning that stated “the emphasis on generational differences is not generally borne out by empirical research, despite its popularity”.
“[I]t is too vague to be proven wrong, and has not been taken seriously by most professional historians. But it is superficially compelling, and plots out to some degree how America’s history has unfolded since its founding”
A May 2017 article from Quartz described the Strauss–Howe generational theory as “pseudoscience“
Pulitzer-winning journalist Jeremy Peters wrote that “many academic historians dismiss the book as about as scientific as astrology or a Nostradamus text.”
Sweeping theories of history are long out of fashion in the halls of ivy, and the authors’ lack of academic standing won’t help their cause.
“[A]n elaborate historical horoscope that will never withstand scholarly scrutiny.”
Wikipedia
Semi-Sequitur
It is not know what Steve Bannon’s opinion of Richard Clayderman is. Mr. Bannon has not responded to our unsent emails.
