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Cultural Creatives
An Wisdom Archive on Cultural Creatives
Cultural Creatives
Cultural Creatives is a term coined by sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson to describe a large segment in Western society that has recently developed beyond the standard paradigm of Modernists and Traditionalists.
It is estimated that there are 50 million adults in the United States and about 80-90 million in Europe who have the worldview, values and lifestyle of the Cultural Creatives.
While Cultural Creatives are a subculture, they lack one critical ingredient in their lives: awareness of themselves as an emerging and already strong force in the world society. When this group is fully aware of its size and when they start to connect with each other ďż˝ the world will change rapidly!
So a quarter of the population of the United States and Europe are "cultural creatives"?What's that mean? Why is it important?
”It means that if you hunger for a deep change in your life that moves you in the direction of less stress, more health, lower consumption, more spirituality, more respect for the earth and the diversity within and among the species that inhabit her, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. You are one of a growing number of people who want to see deep, integral change in the cultures that have evolved in industrialized nations. One of the main reasons we have written this book is that we want to make cultural creatives visible to each other. We want cultural creatives to realize that we are the isolated many, not the isolated few. We want to invite cultural creatives to find new ways to work and learn together.
Like everyone else, we're radically uncertain about what happens as more and more of us answer this call to be in service to the world, in service to this emergence of a new, integral culture.
Systems theory helps us understand that none of us can fully see the culture that is emerging. It's a process. It's a birth. And we have to work together to get from here to there.”
Are you a Cultural Creative? This list compiled by Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Andersoncan give you an idea. Choose the statements that you agree with.
You are likely to be a Cultural Creative if you...
1. ...love Nature and are deeply concerned about its destruction 2. ...are strongly aware of the problems of the whole planet (global warming, destruction of rainforests, overpopulation, lack of ecological sustainability, exploitation of people in poorer countries) and want to see more action on them, such as limiting economic growth
3. ...would pay more taxes or pay more for consumer goods if you could know the money would go to clean up the environment and to stop global warming
4. ...place a great deal of importance on developing and maintaining your relationships
5. ...place a lot of value on helping other people and bringing out their unique gifts
6. ...do volunteering for one or more good causes
7. ...care intensely about both psychological and spiritual development
8. ...see spirituality or religion as important in your life, but are concerned about the role of the Religious Right in politics
9. ...want more equality for women at work, and more women leaders in business and politics
10. ...are concerned about violence and abuse of women and children around the world
11. ...want our politics and government spending to put more emphasis on children's education and well-being, on rebuilding our neighborhoods and communities, and on creating an ecologically sustainable future
12. ...are unhappy with both the Left and the Right in politics, and want a to find a new way that is not in the mushy middle
13. ...tend to be somewhat optimistic about our future, and distrust the cynical and pessimistic view that is given by the media
14. ...want to be involved in creating a new and better way of life in our country
15. ...are concerned about what the big corporations are doing in the name of making more profits: downsizing, creating environmental problems, and exploiting poorer countries
16. ...have your finances and spending under control, and are not concerned about overspending
17. ...dislike all the emphasis in modern culture on success and "making it," on getting and spending, on wealth and luxury goods
18. ...like people and places that are exotic and foreign, and like experiencing and learning about other ways of life.
If you agreed with 10 or more, you probably are a Cultural Creative.
The distinctive values, commitments and beliefs of the Cultural Creatives - the most conspicuous representatives of the emerging Integral Culture - may be summarized as follows:
·Ecological sustainability, beyond environmentalism: If you can name an aspect of ecology and sustainability, they are emphatically for it, and are leading the way. Cultural Creatives demonstrate awareness of a large range of issues, including wanting to rebuild neighborhoods and communities, ecological sustainability and limits to growth, seeing nature as sacred, wanting to stop corporate polluters, being anti-big-business, wanting voluntary simplicity, being willing to pay to clean up the environment and to stop global warming.
·Globalism: Two of the top values for Cultural Creatives are xenophilism (love of travel to foreign places, of foreigners and the exotic) and ecological sustainability, which strongly includes concern for the planetary ecology and stewardship, and population problems.
·Feminism, women's issues, relationships, family: The fact that Cultural Creatives are 60 percent women is a major key to understanding this subculture. Much of the focus on women's issues in politics comes from them-including concerns about violence and abuse of women and children, desire to rebuild neighborhoods and community, desire to improve caring relationships, and concerns about family (though they are no more family-oriented than most North Americans, it is near the top in their list of values).
·Altruism, self-actualization, alternative health care, spirituality and spiritual psychology: This is a complex of highly interrelated beliefs and values centered on the inner life. In reality, this is a new sense of the sacred that incorporates personal growth psychology and the spiritual and service to others as all one orientation. It also includes a stronger trend toward holistic health and alternative health care as part of this complex.
·Well-developed social conscience and social optimism: Contrary to some social critics, an emphasis on the personal does not exclude the political or social conscience, though individuals may focus on them in sequence. Cultural Creatives are engaged in the world just as much as in personal and spiritual issues. Rebuilding and healing society is related to healing ourselves, physically and spiritually. With that goes a guarded social optimism.
Lifestyle Preferences of Cultural Creatives
Cultural Creatives are, typically, middle to upper-middle class people with a lot of spending power, but much of US business ignores them, so they have developed a number of ways to get what they want anyway. Here are some sweeping generalizations, from many highly targeted studies:
·Readers and radio listeners, not TV watchers: Cultural Creatives buy more books and magazines, listen to more radio, including classical music and NPR, and watch less television, than any other groups. They are both literate and discriminating, and dislike most of what is on TV.
·Arts and culture: Cultural Creatives are prodigious consumers and producers of culture. They are more likely to be involved in the arts, are more likely to write books and articles, and to go to meetings and workshops about books they have read.
·Stories, whole process, and systems: Cultural Creatives appreciate good stories, and demand systems views of the "whole process" of whatever they are reading, from cereal boxes to product descriptions to magazine articles. They want to know where a product came from, how it was made, who made it, and what will happen to it when they are done with it. They also want symbols that go deep, and actively resent advertising and children's TV more than most Americans.
·Careful consumers: Cultural Creatives are the kind of people who buy and use Consumer Reports on most consumer durables goods: appliances, cars, consumer electronics. For the most part, they are the careful, well-informed shoppers who do not buy on impulse, and read up on a purchase first. They are practically the only consumers who regularly read the labels as they're supposed to.
·A different kind of car, please: Cultural Creatives are far more likely to want safety and fuel economy in a mid-price car. If they could also get an ecologically sound, high mileage, recyclable car, they'd snap it up. |
·Technology moderates: Cultural Creatives are less likely to be innovators, and more likely to be early adopters, of technological products.
·Soft innovation: However, Cultural Creatives do tend to be innovators and opinion leaders for some knowledge-intensive products, including magazines, fine foods, wines, and boutique beers.The foodies: A high proportion of Cultural Creatives are "foodies": people who like to talk about food (before and after), experiment with new kinds of food, cook food with friends, eat out a lot, do gourmet and ethnic cooking, try natural foods and health foods, etc.
·Desire for authenticity: Cultural Creatives invented the term "authenticity" as consumers understand it, leading the rebellion against things that are "plastic", fake, imitation, poorly made, throwaway, cliche style, and high fashion. If they buy something in a traditional style they want it authentically traditional, with a story. This also includes a desire for authenticity and human contact in the service sector.
·A different kind of new house, please: Cultural Creatives tend to buy fewer new houses than most people of their income level, finding that they are not designed with them in mind. So they buy resale houses and fix them up the way they want. They abhor the status display home that shows a lot to the street, strongly preferring to be hidden from the street by fences, trees and shrubbery. All that militates against buying the kinds of new homes that builders are prone to put out there for the upper-middle class. They also like authentic styling in homes-whatever fits into its proper place on the land is good. They want access to nature, walking and biking paths, ecological preservation, historic preservation, and to live in master planned communities that show a way to re-create community.
·Personalization of the home: Interior decoration for Cultural Creatives is typically eclectic, with a lot of original art on the walls and crafts pieces around the house. Many Core Cultural Creatives seem to think a house is not properly furnished without a lot of books. The same house that vanishes from the street should be personalized so that status displays happen inside the house, not outside, though it is not blatant: It is display of personal good taste and a creative sense of style.
·Experiential consumers: Core Cultural Creatives are the prototypical consumers of the experience industry, which tries to sell you a more intense/enlightening/enlivening experience rather than a thing: psychotherapy, weekend workshops, spiritual gatherings, personal growth experiences, vacations-as-self-discovery, vacations-at-health-spas, etc. The providers of these services have to be Cultural Creatives too, or they can't do it authentically (the kiss of death), and so one sometimes gets the impression that everyone is taking in everyone else's wash-or workshop.
·The leading edge of vacation travel: Cultural Creatives define the leading edge of vacation travel that is exotic, adventuresome-without-(too much)-danger, educational, experiential, authentic, altruistic and/or spiritual. They don't do package tours, fancy resorts, or cruises, and resent having to take the kids to Disneyland.
·Holistic everything: Cultural Creatives are the prototypical innovators in, and consumers of, personal growth psychotherapy, alternative health care and natural foods. What ties these together is a belief in holistic health: body-mind-spirit are to be unified. They are forever sorting out the weird from the innovative. They may include a high proportion of people whom some physicians describe as "the worried well": those who monitor every twitch and pain and bowel movement, in a minutely detailed attention to the body, which may be why they spend more on alternative health care and regular health care even though most are fairly healthy. They may live longer, because they do at least some kinds of preventive medicine-in contrast to the Modernist executive pattern of treating the body like a machine that you feed, exercise, and vitaminize, and otherwise ignore until it breaks down.
In our chaotic world hurtling towards an uncertain future, three kinds of responses have emerged. The fundamentalists are clinging to or going back to values of a distant past. The neo-fundamentalists, represented by global corporatism, are trying to substitute the reality of chaos and change by an artificial form of reality. Then there are Cultural Creatives, whose saner and evolutionary response is to forge a new, higher and integral synthesis.
Some say a critical mass of more conscious individuals can shift our evolution away from wanton destruction toward a positive future for living things on the planet. Bay-area researcher Paul Ray has found that we may be living through a rare population mind-set shift -- something that happens only once or twice a millennium. A growing number of people, according to Ray's research, express concern about ecological sustainability (green issues) and a core group express a commitment to personal and spiritual development in addition. He calls these individuals "Cultural Creatives".
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