A Culture Gets Creative

While the media is looking the other way, 50 million Americans are recreating our culture. So say authors Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson, interviewed here by Yes! Magazine editor Sarah van Gelder.

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 an 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. But 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 recently 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 patri-archal family, and so on.