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presents
50 Million People
Changing the World!
by Sarah Ruth van
Gelder
Sociologist
Paul Ray and psychologist Sherry Anderson make an
outrageous claim. They say that, in the US alone, there are over 50
million people who care a lot about the environment, women's rights,
spiritual and psychological growth, a better future for all - rich
and poor. Can this be so? I interviewed this couple that did
demographic research and came up with some very interesting...and
mind-changing numbers. Both with PhDs, are co-authors of The
Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World,
published by Harmony Books.
Sarah van Gelder: Maybe you can start by telling me something
about what drew you into researching shifts in values and world
views, and how your findings changed you.
Paul Ray: I initially started doing market research and
opinion polling because I wanted to learn about how values relate to
culture. As I got further into my research, I was shocked to see
that I was getting information not just about why people give money
to good causes, or buy things, or vote a certain way. I was
compiling evidence that pointed to something more fundamental — a
deep shift in the culture.
I was seeing the emergence of a group of people whom we’re calling
Cultural Creatives. This is something new. It doesn’t fit the
standard categories of activist, or right-thinking church people, or
political liberals. These Cultural Creatives are already
creating lots of social inventions that are going to make a new
world, not just reshuffle old political programs. For me personally,
the biggest thing that changed as a result of this research is that
I shifted from being pessimistic — especially in reaction to the
Reagan era — to being very optimistic about what’s possible for our
future.
Sherry Anderson: When I was 35, which is 23 years ago, I was
the head of a research department in the largest psychiatric
teaching hospital in Canada and associate professor of psychiatry at
the medical school at the University of Toronto. At the same time, I
was heading a rape crisis center, helping to create a women’s
counseling and referral service, and heading what became known as
the Ontario Zen Center. However, I didn’t talk about all
these projects except when I was with close friends or colleagues.
I remember that we deeply cared about what was happening to the
world, but we thought in such small pockets. We thought that when we
were protesting the war in Vietnam or when we were meeting in
women’s consciousness-raising groups, we were doing something that
might somehow, in some vague way, affect our society and affect the
world. But I never dreamed that we were part of an immense group of
people who are changing their minds in their own particular ways,
and that we would actually arrive at a powerful common set of
values.
I used to think of culture as being about art, literature, and
music. I didn’t understand that my most personal values and those of
my clients and friends could be so profoundly part of a vast
cultural movement.
We got a call yesterday from a journalist doing an article on straw
bale houses for The New York Times Magazine. She said “Each
time I interview someone who is building a straw bale house, I
wonder what’s at the core of this? What is going on? And I have
finally found the common thread. I realize that they’re all
Cultural Creatives, and there’s this enormous energy behind what
they are doing.” And she said “It’s not what I thought. There is
nothing flaky about this. There is nothing New Age about this. These
people are practical. They love the Earth, and they want to live
their values.”
And this is the way I feel — I never knew that there were so many
people like me, who believe this.
Sarah: Where did all these Cultural Creatives come from? You
say that prior to World War II there were few, if any, Cultural
Creatives. Instead, almost all Americans belonged to one of two
other subcultures. Could you describe what those two were?
Paul: The two subcultures are what we call the
Traditionals and the Moderns. The Modern culture is the
dominant, parent culture of this civilization, and it goes back 500
years to the Renaissance. Then around 1750 to 1800, we started
getting a major backlash against the materialistic, urban,
industrial, bureaucratic, culture of Modernism from the people who
were losing - the Traditionalists. These people were reacting
against the tendencies of the Modern world to undercut the
legitimacy of churches, the Bible, the patriarchal family, and so
on.
Sarah: So beginning after World War II, this third subculture
emerges?
Paul: First of all, we’re talking today about a quarter of
the adults in the United States, 50 million adults, and probably 80
to 90 million adults in Western Europe. These people take the ideas
of ecology very seriously, and they support slowing business growth
in order to save the planet. They also take very seriously women’s
issues and issues of personal growth and relationships.
We found that the typical Cultural Creative cares intensely about
the issues raised by post–World War II social movements. These
movements include those focused on civil rights, the environment,
women’s rights, peace, jobs and social justice, gay and lesbian
rights, alternative health care, spirituality, personal growth, and
now, of course, stopping corporate globalization.
All of those concerns are now converging into a strong concern for
the whole planet.
Sherry: I used to think of the social movement as the people
who were on the rampage — the people who were demonstrating, writing
the newsletters, or carrying the cases forward in court.
Paul: The politicos, in other words.
Sherry: In fact, that’s way too narrow. We started thinking
instead of a great cloud of sympathetic people who are learning from
and listening to the arguments of the various movements. You could
think of it as a bull’s-eye, with the most active and most visible
people at the center, and then whole circles of people surrounding
them who are discussing the arguments, donating money, learning, and
changing their minds. If you include the people in those larger
circles, there are millions and millions of people involved. When
you see the ways those circles overlap, you start to be see where
the Cultural Creatives come from.
Sarah: What makes these movements different from earlier
movements?
Paul: Unlike the social movements of 1880 to 1930 — the
Wobblies, the fascists, the communists, the socialists, and so
on — those involved in the post-1960s movements are not trying to
take over the government. Nor are they primarily concerned with
“more for us” issues, like wages and benefits, for example. Rather
these movements are reframing issues in a way that changes how
people understand the world.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, didn’t say, “It’s time the
Blacks got theirs.” He said, “This is about freedom, and justice,
and dignity, and the Constitution, and who we are as an American
people.” Rachel Carson didn’t advocate NIMBYism —“keep pollution out
of my back yard.” She said, “This is about the death of nature.”
Betty Freidan didn’t just say, “It’s time that women got through the
glass ceiling.” She asked, “Who are we as human beings?” The
alternative health care movement isn’t about getting insurance
coverage for chiropractic care. It’s about the real meaning of
health.
What happens when somebody gets involved in a half dozen of these
issues and has their world reframed six times? Their entire
worldview changes.
Sarah: Of course, many of these movements actually grew out
of earlier struggles. What were some of the early influences on
these post-war movements?
Paul: Well, you could argue that the Quakers started the
whole thing 300 to 500 years ago, along with the early anti-slavery
movement, the feminists, and the Mennonites. Those people did the
first versions of reframing — it’s just that the rest of the culture
didn’t pick up on it at the time.
One of the earliest movements was the conservation movement, which
has since morphed into the environmental movement, which then
morphed again into the ecology movement. In all cases, those
involved were asserting the importance of nature over the right to
ransack nature’s storehouse for wealth. Those involved took the idea
of “nature,” which at the time was thought of as untamed, chaotic
wilderness, and reframed it as beautiful and worthy in its own
right.
Today, more people regard a redwood grove as sacred than regard
churches as sacred. Surveys everywhere in the world show that 70 to
90 percent of the people regard nature and the environment as having
sacred qualities and as under threat. For all practical purposes
that’s unanimity. It’s quite stunning.
Sherry: Another value from the movements that was first
articulated in the Black freedom movement is “walking your talk.”
Authenticity. Reverend C. T. Vivian, who was a firebrand from the
early freedom movement, talks about his days as a minister. He would
tell people that they needed to hold on and come to church and that
they were fighting the good fight. At what point, he asked himself,
do you see their suffering, see people putting their lives on the
line, and see that all you’re doing is talking? At some point, he
decided he had to go out of the church and join the people.
The importance of authenticity carried over into all of the
movements, especially the women’s movement.
Each of the social movements had in effect two arms: one was the
political action arm, and the other was a submerged cultural
network. People would meet in consciousness-raising groups in each
other’s homes and in church basements, discovering together what
they really cared about, trying to understand what was true. And the
evidence that they drew on was their own direct experience, because
they couldn’t trust what was written in the books or the media.
When I was in such a group I remember wondering, “Isn’t there some
book where I can look this up?” But there were no books. We had to
go into the truth of our own lives. One person would put forward an
observation, then somebody else would add a new perspective, and
slowly we pieced together a new understanding of what was going on
in the world. We were looking for evidence; we were looking for what
was real, what was beyond the rhetoric. And that, of course, is the
source of the idea that the personal is political. Just as
scientific evidence is part of what Cultural Creatives draw
from, so too is direct personal experience.
Paul: This seeking for authenticity is part of what links
each person’s own personal and spiritual growth with a concern for
the big picture, including a concern for social justice. What
Christopher Lasch says about a culture of narcissism — that the
people who are concerned about personal growth don’t care about
social justice and vice versa — is flat out not true. Our research
shows that the more a person is engaged in social activism, ecology,
and social justice, the more likely they are to be engaged also in
developing their spiritual lives and in personal growth.
Sherry : Why is the capacity to examine your conscience, to
sit in silence, to listen deeply important in a social movement?
In the gay and lesbian liberation movement, people had to learn to
speak from the pain and the truth of their own lives in the most
genuine way. If they didn’t, they didn’t have anything! In the early
days of the women’s health movement, we didn’t know what we wanted;
we didn’t know what was possible. We had to sit down and talk about
what wasn’t working for us first. We had to learn to sit with that
void, in that place where you don’t have the answers, and to start
asking questions that no one had asked before. Out of that honesty,
out of that naming of what hadn’t been named before, comes something
new. The real seeds that can change society come from being present
to what’s most deeply human in us.
Sarah: So this authenticity and openness allows people to
question the assumptions that they have been living with all their
lives — to explore a different worldview with trusted friends.
Sherry: Right. It also allows you to get beyond outer
authority to what’s most true in yourself and so be open to
listening to what’s most true in other people. And then you begin to
see what isn’t working — what has to be uprooted to allow for the
maturing of the human being.
Paul: A process of social learning has been happening in our
society since the 1960s as people question the assumptions of the
dominant social order that don’t fit their actual experience. That
questioning is reinforced by each successive movement. Even those
who weren’t active in a particular movement were exposed to the
arguments, and the perspectives influenced an enormous number of
people. We’re talking about the creation of a new culture — about
living in a different world. What’s in your house is different. Your
daily concerns are different. The words you use to describe your own
experiences are different. Your life priorities are different. And
in addition to all those up-close and personal changes, you’re
looking at changes in the role of corporations and government in
American life, changes in the relations of humans to nature, changes
in our relationship to people in other parts of the world, changes
in how women and minorities are treated.
We’re going through a process of changing our minds at every single
level. Today we regard as totally unacceptable many assumptions that
were part of how your average, middle-class, moral person would have
thought in the ‘50s. Then, violence and discrimination against
Native Americans, African Americans, Asians, and Hispanics were
accepted as normal. Nasty ethnic jokes were the norm. Discrimination
against women in the workplace was legal, and violence against women
and children at home was perfectly normal.
Today, these attitudes persist in some circles, but they’re widely
seen as quite unacceptable. So in a span of 40 to 50 years we have
reinterpreted the world in fundamental ways, and every last one of
those fundamental reinterpretations comes out of the new social
movements.
Sarah: Since I discovered your work some years ago, Paul,
I’ve had a chance to talk to a number of people about the concept of
the culture shift and the Cultural Creative label. Some are pleased
to discover that they are not alone and encouraged to learn that
this research indicates real possibilities for change. Some are
annoyed at the thought of being pigeonholed. Others, perhaps, are
afraid that they’re not one of the Cultural Creatives and are
excluded from some kind of elite group. Are you finding that there
are people who feel either left out or put down by this kind of
grouping?
Paul: This term for an emerging subculture is not a stick-on
label that goes on somebody’s forehead, or a new campaign button
that says, “I’m a Cultural Creative. Are You?” We’ve seen a lot of
attempts to create stick-on labels, like Yuppies and Generation-X,
that are fictions invented by ad agencies. There are no clear cut
boundaries for the phenomenon of Cultural Creatives.
Here’s how I see it: There is a core group of Cultural Creatives who
are active in living their values and are socially engaged.
Simultaneously, members of this group are concerned about
consciousness issues and personal growth, and they are very strong
on ecology issues and very strong on women’s issues. That group is
two-to-one women, about 12 percent of the population, roughly 25
million adults.
That group shades imperceptibly into a circle you might call the
Greens, who don’t have as many personal growth concerns. And around
the outer periphery is a set of people who are showing signs of
being ready to move toward being a Cultural Creative, if only they
thought it would be rewarded socially, or if only it were safe. I
would guess that if we included all of these people, we would have
perhaps 40 percent of the American population who are Cultural
Creatives or potential Cultural Creatives.
One of the key things that makes a fuzzy boundary is this: It seems
to take about a decade for people to bring their values and beliefs
into alignment with the way they live. So there’s a huge number of
people who are in some kind of life transition, and it’s not clear
where they’re going to wind up in these statistical estimates.
Sarah: If there are so many Cultural Creatives, and if they
are having such a big impact, why is that such a well-kept secret?
Why aren’t they having more of an impact as a political force?
Paul: Oh, because right now they’re saying politics is bought.
In focus groups we did for the US Environmental Protection Agency at
the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999, Cultural Creatives were
saying, “We’re activists at the local community level. We’re
engaged. We’re volunteering. But national politics has been bought.
We don’t feel that it is worth it. It’s dirty. To hell with it, I’m
going to make some real differences where I can have some say.”
When we talk to audiences of Cultural Creatives, invariably some
bright person will say, “Oh my God, 50 million. There’s more of us
than voted for Clinton. We could win!” It’s a new thought to the
people in the room, because they’re convinced that at least when it
comes to national politics, they’re going to lose.
Sherry: How is it possible that 50 million people who share
the same values and the same worldview, imagine that they’re almost
alone? The answer is that we don’t have mirrors in the media that
have been able to show us our own face and our own promise, and so
we imagine that we’re almost alone. And that’s why magazines like
YES! are so important to Cultural Creatives. We have to have places
where we can have discussions, do this kind of exploring, see what
we value, put it all on the table, and see what’s possible.
Sarah: Given the protests at the
World Trade Organization
conference in Seattle, and in
Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Prague, do you feel
Cultural Creatives now have a greater sense of themselves as a
political force? The media keeps talking about the many different
causes represented at these protests. They dismiss it as sort of a
circus — pick a cause and any malcontent will show up.
Paul: How else are you going to explain away what you’re
seeing in front of your face? You try to find a derogatory term that
doesn’t look at the implications or connections. The media lives on
fragmentation, when in fact all these causes are coming out of the
same worldview. Few reporters will acknowledge that somebody else
has a different set of eyeglasses than theirs. They’ve got a sense
that they know the truth. When you talk to the Asians and Europeans,
they instantly get the idea of different cultures and different
worldviews. But Americans and the British kind of scratch their
heads and have trouble taking it in.
Sarah: Because their worldview is the dominant world view,
perhaps?
Paul: Yes, and because part of the defense of one’s own
worldview is to say: “We see things exactly as they are through a
clear pane of glass. No eyeglasses here.”
Sarah: What do you think are the implications of all that
we’ve been discussing for our possibilities as a human species?
Sherry: The word that comes up for me is “muting.” The
Cultural Creatives' voices have been muted because they believe that
few others want to hear what they have to say or would be willing to
act on their ideas.
So the promise that I see is that the mute will be removed and those
in this new, creative subculture will find ways to express what’s
really important to them. The effects will spread out into
literature, theater, music, art — into new ways of meeting together,
into an insistence on the right to question the assumptions of the
dominant culture. It means people will inspire each other to speak
out and, like the women’s movement said, “We will hear each other
into speech.” We will bring the deeper possibilities of our humanity
into the social sphere and begin to find ways to bring that shift
about.
Paul: What would happen if Cultural Creatives knew that they
had lots of company? What if they were aware of themselves? What if
they asked themselves what kind of future we want to live in?” The
way we’ll invent the future is with each other, in conversations
about what’s possible and what kind of world we want. And we won’t
just hear each other into speech. We will actually learn to see
through the eyes of the other person. We won’t get there any other
way than by having huge numbers of people engage with each other in
creative possibilities. The hallmark of this profound culture shift
is going to be reinventing practically every institution of society
from the ground up. And that is not only possible, it is rather
likely.
Resources:
Cultural Creatives FAQ
State
of the World Forum
CulturalCreatives.org
Alternatives Magazine
Wikipedia
Asheville Citizens-Times
The Light Party
PSA
Unusual, Alternative
news items from around the world...
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Cultural Creative
Some
Keywords
(in no significant order)
Environmental
New Age
Harmony
Awareness
Higher Consciousness
Metaphysical
Egalitarian
Vegetarian
Paranormal
Nature
Balance
Vegan
Ecological
Justice
Sharing
Peace
Love
Equality
Enlightenment
Human Rights
Animal Rights
New Paradigm
Humanistic
Intelligent
Spiritual
Planetary
Apolitical
Political
Consciousness
Multidimensional
Progressive
Sustainable
Holistic
Truth
Honesty
Native
Recycle
Reality
Accountability
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