Spiritual wickedness in high places

“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” II Corinthians 5:17

Paul understood that before you could embrace any new idea the old idea had to die. In order to fully embrace your spirituality, for example, you have to let go of your materiality through the death process.

Similarly, the generational historians who wrote The Four Turnings suggest that the cyclical ways that generations interact produce a birth to death process for our country that repeats itself every hundred years or so.

The first of those turnings is a high, or rebirth of vision and optimism based on a shared sense of purpose. That new vision and common purpose is forged in crisis that marked the death of the previous social order.

The second of those turnings is an awakening when individualism starts to assert itself by questioning the values of the new social order.

The third turning is an unraveling where social order has been eroded to such a degree by the growth of individualism that it begins to break down. The current culture wars are a perfect example of that unraveling.

If these generational scholars are correct, the next turning will be a crisis of sufficient scale to overwhelm our individual differences and force us to create a new social order to survive.

The interesting thing, if you look back at history, is that few could have predicted the past three crisis (revolutionary war, civil war, depression and WWII) in the years just before those crisis gripped our country. Though it isn’t widely taught, a significant percentage of the colonial population was sympathetic to the British cause and at least in their minds revolution was unthinkable. Lincoln did all that he could to prevent a civil war and Grant may have been the only person who realized the savagery that was going to be required for a union victory. Hitler invading Poland was a surprise to everyone at the time and Neville Chamberlain carried the hopes of the old social order when he wrongly assumed that he has negotiated “peace in our time”.

In thinking about what the next crisis may be, I don’t think that it will be military. We’ve already seen in Iraq that overwhelming military force is no longer an effective tool for peace or stability. There is a possibility that a deep recession in the US will destabilize China by reducing our consumption of Chinese goods and putting a lot of people in Chinese cities out of work. That could force the Chinese military to take over and invade either Taiwan or eastern Russia in order to keep their economy going. If the rest of the world chose to oppose China, we’d have another very large war between countries that have nuclear weapons. Seems unlikely at the moment.

What is also possible in the China scenario is that they react to the economic downturn by becoming much more isolationist and threaten to bring down the world economic system by calling in their loans.to us and forcing us to default.

What I think is a more likely crisis could be the rapidly accelerating effects of global warming.  Rising sea levels and dramatic changes in weather patterns could force this country and the rest of the world to dismantle our fossil fuel-based economy and come up with a new way to produce, distribute, and consume things. We would also have to figure out massive infrastructure changes to deal with major population centers all around the world threatened by rising sea levels, droughts, and floods.  The new order flowing out of this crisis could be lead by science and technology and focused globally rather than regionally  or nationally..

It is also possible that a massive natural disaster, Yellowstone blowing up again, a large meteor striking the earth, or perhaps enough volcanoes going off at the same time to cause a mini-ice age – an event of sufficient magnitude that it would dramatically alter the fabric of the now highly interdependent global economy.

If the generational theorists are correct, the bad news is that the crisis in unavoidable. The good news is that our children will be the heroes who will save us and we will be the architects of the new social order which they will implement. We may not live to see the next golden age, but our children will prosper in it. And the cycle will start again.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 12:53 am and is filed under Environment, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.