In the 1980s, France started 43 nuclear reactors across 14 sites. On average, each reactor took just seven years to build. Forty years later, all but one of these reactors are still running, and they continue to produce nearly half of France's electricity.
Can you imagine France doing something like this today? Or any other country in the West for that matter? The past is a foreign country. But why is this? Why did the West lose the will to power?
A popular meme would explain it as the inescapable good-times-hard-times circle: Hard times (WWII) create good men, good men create good times (Les Trente Glorieuses), good times create weak men (The End of History), weak men create hard times (now).
The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe offers a theory for this wheel of time by tracing the last five centuries to the same four recurring phases: High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis.
It was the good men of France's hard times who planned the country's incredible nuclear build out. This hero generation, as Strauss and Howe calls them, planted the trees of power that would provide shade for several generations to come. It seems inconceivable to expect similar bold plans and action from the current cohort of the European political establishment.
But The Fourth Turning argues this was ever thus. The decline that always sets in once we enter the unraveling phase of the century (or saeculum, as the book calls it) inevitably leads to a crisis. We're on the cusp/in one of those right now. So pessism is perhaps a rational response.
And yet, the night is darkest before the dawn, and the current Crisis is likely to lead to another High, if the past five centuries and Strauss and Howe's theory are any guide. If so, we should expect the next hero generation to reject this managed decline of our present turning, and once again taking up the mantle of ambition.
The circle of the saeculum is both a prophecy and a roadmap. We're not supposed to live like this forever: weak, ineffectual. This too shall pass. And when it does, once the Crisis becomes another High, we'll marvel at the time wasted, but with the pity due a pathetic period of the past, not from within an eternal prison of decline.
We just have to make it out of the current Crisis alive. The last one brought us a total war. Would be nice if we could get back to the High without something quite as devastating, but don't bet on it.
