Yes...but!

March 17 2008

Home > Columns >Yes...But! Year 8-19

President Bush frightened me when he announced that Vice President Cheney was going to the Middle East to seek peace, because in the Bush dictionary 'peace' means 'war.' Cheney is going to dot the 'I's' and cross the “T's” on the final agreement with Israel to attack Iran. That suspicion became certainty when Admiral William J. Fallon, the overall US commander for the Middle East, resigned in an obvious dispute with the real boss in Washington: Dick Cheney. We now face an “All-Out-War,” a truly “Fin de Siecle” event.

“Siecle' sounds like 'Cycle', which is a time period where events repeat themselves. A Russian agricultural expert has a 'cycle' named after him, the so-called ‘Kondratieff Cycle’. Going back hundreds of years he detected a 50-60 year interval between economic depressions, which prompted two economists to predict that the 1990's -sixty years after the Dirty Thirties - would be disastrous. James Dale Davidson wrote “The Great Reckoning” , sub-titled: “How the World will Change in the Depression of the 1990's”, while Dr Ravi Batra wrote: “The Great Depression of 1990”, and “Surviving the Great Depression of 1990”.

We sailed through that decade without major financial upsets, thanks to Alan Greenspan who, by flooding the market with money, prevented a severe downturn. Call him “the monetary Viagra man” as he managed to keep the economy erect even though, by all normal standards, it should have gone limp.

Now all financial testosterone has disappeared: it's pay-up time because “The Great Reckoning” has not been revoked: merely postponed.

Today we see the converging of three cycles: first, the belated Kondratieff one; second, the final phase of “The Fourth Turning” a book by William Strauss and Neil Howe, and third, the End of a 1000 year Super cycle.

“The Fourth Turning” divides history into four seasons, each lasting about two decades, consisting of growth, maturing, stabilizing, and destruction.

In recent America history, the first phase includes the Trueman - Eisenhower- Kennedy years – the American Dream period, followed by the Johnson- Carter- Reagan maturing stage. The first Bush- Clinton- second Bush period has just been concluded, typified by national drift and institutional decay, indicating the unraveling of the American Dream.

We are now in the Fourth Turning: a crisis mood, where the very survival of the nation is at stake. Says this book: “If there is a war,it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war.... America could become a society that is good... (or) the next Fourth Turning might end in apocalypse.”

To me an Iran attack signals apocalypse. Human history started in the Middle East: will it end there as well? There is no doubt that we are facing a major crisis.

Then there the Super Cycle of a thousand years. Going back 4000 years, we see how, after a thousand years of relative stagnation, around the year 1,000 BC King David emerges, and slowly the world awakens, with, around 500 BC the birth of Rome and the rise of the Greek civilization. This period reached its peak in the time of Christ, making the spread of the Gospel possible.

Then we see a thousand years of decline: five hundred years of gradual disintegration leading to the collapse of the Roman empire in the late fifth century. That descent continued for another 500 years, the time period we now call the Dark Ages, when commerce and public order collapsed, a full millennium of downhill development.

Then sometime around the end of the Tenth Century Western Europe began something new and vital: five centuries of slow revival, known as the Middle Ages. They brought a rebirth of money, art and social mobility, a true renaissance, which increased its pace for the next 500 years, arriving where we are today. Thus again a thousand years of deterioration was followed by a thousand years of progress.

All signs now point to immense future negatives.

It is striking that today we see a host of books that have the word “End” in it. I have a number of those: “The End of Nature” by Bill McKibben; “The End of Science, Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age”, by John Horgan; “The End of Oil, on the Edge of a Perilous New World,” by Paul Roberts.

Perhaps there is some merit in these long and short cycles. If Bush-Cheney- Israel do attack Iran – and I'm sure they plan this – then, indeed, we face an ever more dangerous world.

No wonder the price of gold and oil is steadily increasing.