“When ships were wood and men were iron…” Mr. Midshipman Hornblower by C.S. Forester

The most popular modern saga of the days when ships were wood and men were iron.

New York Times Book Review

That is, perhaps, one of the best blurbs I’ve ever read for a book, and it’s certainly fitting for the Horatio Hornblower books. These are the classics that inspired David Weber to write Honor Harrington, Lois McMaster Bujold to write the Vorkosigan Saga, and Gene Roddenberry to make Star Trek—except where all those space opera stories are clearly fantastical, the Hornblower novels are so deeply rooted in the Napoleonic Era that they could have been pulled from the pages of history. And the way that C.S. Forester writes them, you hardly realize that you’re reading a book until you look up bleary-eyed, and realize in shock that a couple of hundred pages have gone by. If Honor Harrington is what Star Trek wants to be when it grows up, then Horatio Hornblower is the wise old grandparent that Honor Harrington hopes to someday become.

As historical novels, the thing that interests me the most is how the Hornblower books fit into the generational cycles described by Strauss and Howe in The Fourth Turning and The Fourth Turning is Here. The theory is pretty simple: once every 80 to 100 years, or once in every person’s natural lifespan, society experiences a major crisis that completely reshapes their civilization. The reason it happens every 80 to 100 years is because that’s how long it takes for everyone who lived through the last crisis to die, thus leaving society with no one who remembers it well enough to prevent it from occuring again. This crisis is called a fourth turning, because it marks the end of the generational cycle, a generation being approximately 20 years, or one quarter-phase of a natural human life.

For us in the US, the generational cycles are pretty easy to pick out. We are currently in the midst of our own fourth turning, which appears likely to culminate in either a civil war, a global war, or both. About 80 years before that was World War II, and before that, the first US Civil War, and before that, the Revolutionary War. Strausse and Howe can trace back another three or four cycles, and argue fairly convincingly that the entire anglosphere can be treated as one monolothic civilization, as far as these generational cycles are concerned.

But what about other cultures? I’ve seen some geopolitical commentators argue that Russia is currently in a second turning, not a fourth—and you’d be hard pressed to claim that the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent Russian civil war of the 1910s and 1920s was not a fourth turning of its own. Also, for continental Europe, WWI was even more devastating than WWII, arguably marking the death of European civilization itself. How was that not a fourth turning crisis? And if you mark it as one and trace back another 100 years, you have the Napoleonic wars, which certainly reshaped European civilization in the manner of a fourth turning crisis.

Which brings us back to the Hornblower books, and why I think I love them so much. C.S. Forester published the first book, Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, in 1950, shortly after the last fourth turning, and the books themselves are set in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, which was arguably a fourth turning crisis for continental Europe. But England herself was experiencing a first turning at the time, when society comes together and rebuilds, so there’s also a strong sense of unity, patriotism, cameraderie, and personal duty—basically, all of the conservative values of yesteryear that we’ve thrown out. And indeed, since these books were written in the 40s and 50s by someone who wasn’t a beatnik, it should come as no surprise that there’s a very conservative strain to them.

But these books aren’t political—or at least, Mr. Midshipman Hornblower isn’t. Instead, it’s more of a cultural conservatism, teaching values like duty, responsibility, honesty, integrity, etc. Basically, all of the values that become ascendant in a first turning, because they were so totally lacking in the fourth turning (hence why everything came to a crisis in the first place—weak men, bad times, and all that). It also helps that we have some historical distance from the events of these books—or indeed, that C.S. Forester had some historical distance—because I’m sure that if these books had been written in the 1830s, there would have been a lot more partisan polemic stuff that wouldn’t have aged well.

Precisely because we are in the midst of a fourth turning, it seems that most of our fiction these days is gloomy, dark, dystopian, and nihilistic. Many of the prevalent tropes these days, such as “death is chic,” “victimhood is virtue,” and “you slay, girl!” stand in direct opposition to the values on which a stable and virtuous society is built—and to the extent that there is a conservatism backlash, it’s almost all reactionary instead of visionary, conserving all the worst aspects of society from twenty years ago. For that reason, the older classics like the Hornblower novels really stand out, especially today.

Hard times make strong men. Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men. Weak men make hard times. And since the times are growing harder, and we find ourselves surrounded by weak and mewling men, let us read of times when ships were made of wood, and men were made of iron.