A Question Deserves Another Question

A friend recently asked me whether I think we are living through the “Fourth Turning.”

Being Jewish, I will answer him in the traditional way: with another question.

Not “Are we living thought the fourth turning?”

But rather: How did the people living in each age understand the world they believed they inhabited?

The older I get, the more I suspect this is the more interesting historical question. We usually debate what happened. Increasingly, I think we should ask how people understood what was happening while they were living through it.

Philosophers call those background assumptions an ontology—our understanding of what is real, what counts as truth, who possesses authority, and who we imagine ourselves to be. Those assumptions then shape our lived experience. I have begun calling this the ontology–phenomenology pipeline: the categories we inherit become the world we experience.

Many large civilizations mistake its ontology for reality itself.

Mark Twain once wrote:

History never repeats itself, but the kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.

History never repeats itself, but the kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.

That image strikes me as more profound than the familiar saying that history “rhymes.”

A rhyme suggests repetition. A kaleidoscope suggests accumulation. The same fragments remain inside the instrument, but every turn creates a different picture. Nothing disappears. The pieces are simply rearranged.

That image also captures something else I have come to appreciate. We are always tempted to explain history through a single pane of glass: economics, religion, technology, institutions, class, race, or generations. Each reveals something true.

But every additional pane complicates the image. The picture becomes less tidy, less ideological, and—if we are fortunate—closer to reality.

One of the oddities of learning history is that we are taught almost entirely through nouns.

Those categories are useful, but they freeze what were actually dynamic processes. The people living through those eras did not experience themselves as historical periods. They experienced slow transformations whose destination they could not yet see.

The six panes that follow are my attempt to recover a few of those........

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