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The
Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
Book
Review by Phyllis L. Thompson
Flagstaff Resident
The
Cultural Creatives is a book with a mission. It aims to name an
emerging culture in American life and thus to show members of that
culture that they are not alone. In this way, it hopes to inspire
Cultural Creatives to “help our civilization develop the fresh
solutions that we need so urgently now.”
The
main features of the thorough-going argument carried out by authors
Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson are, first, that American
social activism of the 1960s and 1970’s lives on. In two
generations, anti-war activists have become peace activists,
feminists have turned to human rights, and psychedelic adventurers
now seek deeper spiritual development. As they have matured and
raised children, a diverse group of 50 million Americans has
emerged, say Ray and Anderson, who agree on core essentials like
valuing the perspective of women and the importance of engaged
action, globalism, ecology and authenticity.
Then,
after describing and interviewing many Cultural Creatives in depth,
the authors construct their case that the skills and interests of
approximately half this group — 24 million people whom they call
the Core Cultural Creatives — are exactly what the world needs to
help humans back away from our planetary precipice. An unfettered
market economy and the rapacious use of natural resources have
arguably brought earth to the limits of adaptability. But Anderson
and Ray argue that Core Cultural Creatives in every niche of U.S.
society are living lives that are more whole and less destructive to
the earth. And they demonstrate at length why these people are in a
position to help others live the same way.
What
Ray and Anderson hope is that the insights and skills shared by
Cultural Creatives can enter mainstream U.S. culture and help shape
solutions at every level. They explain in detail the many ways this
is already happening — the Rocky Mountain Institute’s hypercar
design, a perfectly recyclable fabric, Amory and Hunter Lovins’
natural capitalism, and the dramatic rise in the use of alternative
health care. And they argue passionately for other avenues that need
to be explored.
We
need to value elders, community and story, they explain. We need to
develop a sense of kinship with all life. And we need to ground
these values everywhere in our society — in associations, in
commerce, on the Internet, and in government policy. They interview
people who are doing these things today, and they summarize
mountains of evidence that a positive vision of earth’s future is
not only possible — it is necessary for human survival.
Dr.
Ray is a macrosociologist who designs and carries out consumer
surveys and public opinion polls. He is responsible for the thread
of statistics and charts which weaves throughout the book. Dr.
Anderson has been an associate professor and a research
psychologist. She is behind the book’s inclusion of in-depth
interviews with Cultural Creatives and is doubtless the source of
its deep understanding of the yeasty potential of uncertainty and
the place called Between. Together, they weave a coherent and
comprehensive argument for why the emerging culture of Creatives
should take account of its own existence. But both Anderson and Ray
are urbanized European-Americans, and this generates what they might
call two “blind spots” in their analysis.
One
blind spot springs from a common human tendency to see other
cultures in terms of what they lack when compared with our
own. Ray and Anderson are middle class Cultural Creatives themselves
(they hint at this on p. 234). They do not understand the primarily
rural and working class culture they call Traditionals at all. They
see these people in almost strictly negative terms — as defensive,
conservative, “just getting by in life,” the losers in a
long-term “culture war” with Moderns. At the end of the book,
Anderson and Ray speak passionately of the need for genuine
community if humans are to survive long into the future. Yet they
seem unaware that many of the “defensive” and “conservative”
criticisms that Traditionals make of Moderns (and of Cultural
Creatives, too) spring directly from a Traditional village and rural
understanding of the importance of building community and of how
many ways the Modern world undermines it.
Another
blind spot in this book is the result of an ethnically biased
sample. Information from the Cultural Creatives Web site shows that
one of the main studies which generated the profile of Cultural
Creatives included only 8.5 percent African-Americans and 7.5
percent Latinos. This is well below each groups’ percentage in the
U.S. population as a whole, and no Asian-Americans are noted at all.
Yet each of these “hyphenated American” cultures has (among
other values) a well-developed, active respect for elders —
another crucial element in a healthy future for our planet,
according to Ray and Anderson.
The
Cultural Creatives is a fine book which creatively reframes some
of the most difficult challenges to optimists in our era. Anderson
and Ray’s re-seeing of the love-hate relationship that Cultural
Creatives have with profit, for example, and their attempts to
discover a mythos for our time are insightful and provocative. It is
quite possible that both authors would agree to frame the existence
of blind spots in their own vision as, paradoxically, one of the
keys to achieving their mission.
If
this book can generate discussion about both the vision and the
blindness of what its authors call a new, invisible nation, perhaps
it will help us all see more clearly how nations need one another.
“An individual’s work may be personally satisfying and a
testimony of great value,” Ray and Anderson say in their epilogue,
“but like mirrors pointed in a hundred different directions,
isolated actions can’t [reflect the coherent vision] that is
needed now.” We need to learn now how to work together.
It
is possible that, like the Cultural Creatives, each of us needs to
see that we are part of a culture and that every culture is both
insightful and blind. Then we might be able to turn to one another
with respect and humility and ask the deeper question that could
emerge from this book: “How can our strengths and weaknesses
combine to help us build a sustainable world together?”
The
Cultural Creatives; How 50 Million People Are Changing the World by
Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson (NY: Harmony Books, 2000). See
also their Web site: www.culturalcreatives.org.
Phyllis
Thompson has lived in Flagstaff for 4 years, and before that in 25
other places around the world. Currently, she teaches and writes for
professional interculturalists.
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