Turning

I've said, in odd unguarded moments, that I expect a major world war of such a scale as to potentially end this nation's run to occur in about the year 2022. I've said this, with the same date, for nearly a decade. It is not due to the rise of China, or Iran's obvious ambition, or 9/11, or neocon over-reach. It is not based on the specific actions of countries, but only on the tenor of the passing times, on the larger symphonic rhythms that are playing out under the sonatas and arias of annual news reports. It is based on how my understanding of history and of current events, poor as it may be, merges with the theories of Strauss and Howe, who developed a theory of generational mood based on preceding events which purports to predict events that have not yet occurred.

A little background. In the late 1990s I wrote a paper for a graduate-level computer science course on the Fast Fourier Transform. The FFT is a type of algorithm for performing Fourier transforms in a wide variety of applications. Put most simply, one of its great uses is to take a wave of arbitrary shape and break it down into its constituent frequencies. One use of this is to discover a formula that more or less describes a seemingly random curve. Even though the curve looks random to a human eye, dominant frequency components can be extracted, and the thing reproduced with much noise removed (an application in signal processing) or extrapolated along seemingly hidden trends. For someone like me whose mind sees music as multi-dimensional colored spaces and history as a series of dynamic graphs, the potential application of predicting future history is inescapable. The physicists who were famously recruited into Wall Street no doubt used the FFT to try and predict market trends.

At about the same time I was idly pondering the past couple of centuries and wondered if there was any significance to the fact that the United States' most dangerously defining moments seemed to occur about every eighty years. The Revolution, the Civil War, and World War Two were the only crises that threatened the existence of this country, and if they are tied in any way to the calendar, then we had best prepare for big bad events sometime around 2020.

This led to a net search on the nascent internet (I don't know if we had Google then, but we had WebCrawler and Alta Vista), and I discovered that others had wondered the same thing and even done some research and come up with some theories. The result was Generations, which I bought and lapped up like a hot bowl of chili. You know us science types: We love it when mysterious complex things can be fit into large neat theories, and that book did just that for the past 450 years of Anglo-American history. (Yes, they do explain why the Anglo-American experience from colonization on was particularly well-suited for the exercise. If you are a skeptic, and hey who wouldn't be, I recommend this book and its several sequels.)

The over-riding interest of this set of theories, of course, is what it might say about us and our immediate future. They did write a book prophesying the next few decades, but I forget what they said. I will have to read the series again, I guess. My contention that there will be a major global war in about 2022 is not from the book, however. I made that up myself. I figured that the various trends and pressures would continue, like a complex curve predicted by FFT and which I can a-a-almost envision in my weird graphical brain, and global events and the political and social nature of the U.S.A. would combine to make war unavoidable, just as they did in about 1940 and about 1860; and I figured since 2020 was an election year, the real fun would be at its most intense a couple of years later.

A major component to the slope leading up (or down) to this eventuality is the changing nature of the American public. Those of us who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s sometimes look upon today's rampant if somewhat crude conservatism as an absolute mystery. Yet it is not at all a surprise. We also look at falling crime rates and the often-observed community-minded and cooperative nature of our children's generation as something of an anomaly, quite different from what we knew -- and yet it is neatly predicted. The generation coming to dominate our colleges, soon our industry and military, and not long after that our politics, is akin to the generation that responded to German and Japanese privations by entering World War Two. All things are connected, after all, and Pearl Harbor was not an isolated event that would have had the same result in some other year. No. And 9/11 was not a new Pearl Harbor. That event is yet to come.

I thought about and decided to write all of this after reading Peggy Noonan's commentary called "The Captain and the King", in which she brings together a recent minor news event and a recent minor movie to make a statement about our country today. (Because of the WSJ's savvy in preventing people going around their subscriptions, the best way to read any subscription WSJ article is to google the title as I have done for you here.) Whether or not her mild conservatism resonates, she does describe the world the younger generation is growing up in, and accurately, I believe, suggests at their reaction. Young people are looking for decency and leadership, and I believe they will find it -- and just in time, if other trends also ring true.