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Metahistory

The Long View 2003-03-08: Terminal Notes

In his 1997 review of William Strauss and Neil Howe's The Fourth Turning, John predicted that a crisis would erupt in the early twenty-first century. In the cyclical historical model of The Fourth Turning, a crisis successfully averted produces a generation of heroes, for example the Greatest Generation

The Long View: Permanent Interests

This is a short essay by John, now nearly 20 years old. It bears recollection now. Would that John had remembered this wisdom in the run up to the Iraq War: The fundamental reality is that Earth is Eurasia. The important parts of Eurasia are its extremities. The rest of

The Long View: Spengler's Future

When I did the site upgrade, John's online book, Spengler's Future, got jumbled up because I had it hosted on separate pages. I rolled everything up into one page, and added it to the navigation bar. Spengler's Future was an interesting exercise, a book

The Long View: Warrior Politics

The opening entry of this review explains much of John's views on the Middle East. And also why this article was published in First Things. Robert Kaplan has spent these past 20 years reporting on local collapses of civilization, chiefly in sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle

The Long View: The Prophet of Decline

Spengler with hairOswald Spengler remains of interest in the early twenty-first century because he managed to eerily predict some features of the world today. He didn't get everything right, for example his prediction that the United States would not survive the stress of the Great Depression, but he

The Long View: The Twilight of Democracy

Unlike the secretive NSA, sometimes it seems that everyone who retires from the CIA gets a book deal along with their pension. This book review is now nineteen years old, but it seems pertinent to understanding how the Deep State works. The Deep State might seem like a re-tread of

The Long View: On the Nature of the Coming World Government

As a proponent of a mild version of the cyclical theory of history, John thought that the development of a world-spanning universal state was inevitable in the 21st century. I am inclined to agree, and like John, I think it will probably be for the best. John felt that historical