This is probably going to be the longest 3-star review that I’m ever going to write.

Don’t get me wrong. This is a very important book, perhaps one of the most important books of our time. Anyone who wants to understand why our world has gone so crazy and where we can expect things to go from here needs to read this book.

With that said, I found that this book falls frustratingly short. About 60% of the predictions are scarily accurate (for example, the authors predicted we would experience a “Great Devaluation” or major market crash in either 2002 or 2008; they were off by one year for the Dot Com crash, and right on the money for the Great Recession), but the other 40% of predictions are laughably wrong. The authors’ characterization of the last three generations is heavy on myth and stereotype and shallow in real understanding (for example, they characterize the proto-2A movement as a group of “hobbyists”). The ideas in this book are brilliant, but on close inspection, they appear to be half-baked.

The book’s central thesis is that “history shapes generations, and generations shape history.” In other words, the generational cycle is key to understanding our history and predicting the course of future events. This cycle, known by the ancients as the saeculum, consists of four turnings or seasons, each lasting about the length of a human generation. The saeculum itself is the length of a long human life, which means that we all can expect to experience each of these turnings in our lifetimes. Each turning creates a different generational archetype, and the constellation of these archetypes is what determines the course of events within the turning.

Using this theory, the authors trace the history of the modern era back through seven Anglo-American saeculae, starting with the end of the Hundred Years War and the War of the Roses up to the late 90s, when the book was originally published. However, the authors claim that history before this time was chaotic rather than cyclical, and thus did not produce a secular dynamic. This was the first red flag to me, since it smacks of dismissing data that does not fit the theory, rather than adjusting the theory to fit the data.

The main area where I believe the theory falls short is in how rigidly it defines the generational archetypes. For example, because the protestant reformation, the second great awakening, and the so-called “conscientiousness revolution” of the 60s hippy era were all dominated by the generational prophet archetype, the authors portray all of these eras as broadly equivalent. In doing this, I believe they overlook some of the most critical pathologies of the 60s and 70s, and the boomer generation.

Instead, the theory needs an additional dimension, or set of dimensions, to explain the variance between generational archetypes of different eras. For example, the boomer generation was much more materialistic than spiritual, and the GI generation was much more collectivistic than individualistic, whereas the same generational archetypes from previous saeculae (the transcendental and republican generations respectively) were exactly the reverse.

Another area in which the theory falls short is in explaining how societies occasionally fracture, or merge, and how this fits into the secular cycle. This phenomenon is implicitly acknowledged by the fact that the seven Anglo-American saeculae become completely US-centric after the revolutionary war. Clearly, the US and Great Britain branched off at some point in this secular history, but the authors never explicitly discuss this fact, or how it happened. Likewise, the last two saeculae have included a sizeable non-anglo immigrant contingent, and while the authors do acknowledge this fact, they don’t go into any depth about it.

What I noticed in reading their discussion of history was that when a society splits, the seeds of that split tend to be sown in an Awakening era, and when different societies merge, that process tend to have its roots in the Crisis era. This explains the difficulty in tracing any sort of secular cycle in English history and culture before the Hundred Years War, as before that time, medieval society was much more fragmented and localized. It’s not an accident that it took a multi-generational war to forge the English people into a single nation, and thus kick off the modern era. Likewise, it’s not an accident that the classical ancient era (which we can divide into saeculae) came to an end with the fragmentation and collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

In short, my greatest criticism of this book is that it seems to be describing a three-dimensional object in two-dimensional terms, the way a map tries to describe our spherical world. It gets a lot of things right, but it also suffers from distortions and inaccuracies, especially on the edges.

Generally, I found that the most pessimistic predictions of this book were the ones that proved most accurate, where the optimistic predictions fell furthest from the mark. That in itself is quite terrifying. According to the theory, we’ve already passed the climax of our current crisis era, but I still feel that we have a long way to go before we hit rock bottom, and am skeptical that the next secular high will begin anytime before 2030, if it comes at all. At this point, it seems much more likely that our society will permanently fragment, but of course I could be wrong.

Regardless, this is a tremendously important book that deserves careful study and scrutiny, despite what I perceive as its flaws. I would really like to see a book that builds on these ideas and incorporates them into a more expansive theory, as I described above.