The Fourth Turning.

Three years to go before the turn of the century and the Millennium industry is already in full swing

Newsweek has started a weekly millennium column; the president mentioned the word in his State of the Union speech 17 times; there is even a TV show entitled "Millennium," just one in a series of prophetically paranoid programs and movies now showing. Of course, the publishing world isn't about to be left out. "Trade publishers will release books calculated to appeal to broad popular audiences," notes a recent issue of Publishers Weekly, "by tapping into millennial anxieties"

The overwrought millennial fascination is perhaps most conspicuous in the long-standing prophetic religious tradition which sees the century's turn as ushering in biblical visions of apocalypse. But there is a secular version as well that has often found its voice in the commercially successful futurist industry popularized by Alvin Toffler, Faith Popcorn, and John Naisbett.

In The Fourth Turning, William Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of the 1991 book Generations, are trying to inherit the megatrend mantle. What makes their latest book remarkable is not so much the preposterous theory it proposes--crack-pot philosophies with New Age overtones are a dime a dozen--but the fact that their work is being taken seriously. The book hit The Boston Globe's and Ingram's best seller lists and carries blurbs on the backcover from Newt Gingrich and AI Gore praising the authors' previous publication. True, their description of recent historical moods does resonate, and the frequent pop culture references provide amusingly familiar markers.

But while in the popular Generations Howe and Strauss offered interesting observations of generational characteristics, in The Fourth Turning their ambition falls short of their ability. Now they are hawking a comprehensive philosophy of everything--the past, the future, biology, psychology, technology, art, music, movies, baseball heroes, even magazine titles.

The heart of their theory is that all of human history occurs in recurring, approximately 80-year periods, or saecula, that correspond to a human life span. (The fact that demograhers estimate the Romans lived an average of only 20 to 30 years is apparently unimportant.) Each of the four "turnings" of the saecula is characterized by a particular social mood that is determined by the characteristics of various generations. A Prophet generation is born during a High, an "upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism"; a Nomad generation is born during an Awakening, "a passionate era of spiritual upheaval", a Hero generation is born during an Unraveling, "a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions"; an Artist generation is born during a Crisis, "a decisive era of secular upheaval" when the old civic order is brushed away.

This is confusing stuff: Even with the book's numerous charts, understanding the difference between the mid-life Artist in an Awakening and the late- age Prophet in a Crisis can be tough. But, intoxicated with the power of their theory, Howe and Strauss push on, using it to explain just about every social trend and major event in history. Why were women steered out of the workforce after World War II? Not because returning G.I.'s wanted to reclaim their jobs, but because Nomads expand gender differences. What about the genocide of Native Americans? Clearly the result of the clash of their sense of cycles with the settler's misconceived sense of linear time.

But Howe and Strauss don't stop at using their cyclical theory of history to explain the past--they employ it to predict the future. We are on the edge of a Fourth Turning, they warn, which--ever so conveniently--begins after the millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade (perhaps they should have called it the Uh-Oh decade).

Around the year 200s, a sudden

spark will catalyze a Crisis mood.

Remnants of the social order will

disintegrate. Political and economic

trust will implode. Real hardship

will beset the land, with

severe distress that could

involve questions of class,

race, nation and empire...

Sometime before the year

2025, America will pass

through a great gate in

history, commensurate with

the American Revolution,

Civil War, and twin

emergencies of the Great

Depression and World War

II."

Of course Howe and Strauss wouldn't dream of claiming to predict the actual form this cataclysm will take. Like the Oracle of Delphi, they offer a prophecy that is as useless as it is portentious.

The next Fourth Turning

will either end in apocalypse

or glory. The nation could be

ruined, its democracy destroyed,

and millions of people

scattered or killed. Or America

could enter a new golden age,

triumphantly applying shared

values to improve the human

condition. The rhythms of

history do not reveal the

outcome of the coming Crisis;

all they suggest is the timing

and dimension.

It's the thinking man's Psychic Friends Network.

That books like these should be able to tap into millennial anxiety is not without irony. After all, we're no longer frozen in the cold war, when the threat of nuclear annihilation preoccupied statesmen and clouded children's dreams. But if it is a safer world, it is also a less familiar one, where distinguishing between our friends and our enemies is more difficult. In the face of a changing global economy, bewildering cultural influences, and shifting family structures and gender roles, it seems that the only comfort is an explanation--any explanation--that somehow offers a reason for, or at least a narrative of, a seemingly chaotic world. Witness the growing cadres who swear they've been abducted by aliens or have glimpsed the U.N.'s secret fleet of black helicopters poised over Montana. It's enough to make one long for the generation that was soothed by a hot cup of cocoa.

PATRICIA COHEN is the Political and Lifestyle Editor for The Washington Post Style section.