More UNITED than we realize!
Cultural Creatives and the Emerging Wisdom Culture
https://www.wisdomuniversity.org/cultural-creatives.htm
Thanks to David Bryce / EVOLVEFEST on Twitter
If you would like to be kept informed of developments of this historic work via future communications, please click here.
Executive Summary
We live in a moment in history when as we look ahead most of us have the deepening intuition that time may be running out to make the necessary decisions that could save civilization as we know it from the threat of global warming. Now, more than ever before, we must catalyze a renaissance of the human spirit to ensure human survival and shape a future based on technical and social innovations in alignment with natural systems infused by a vision of hope.
Dr. James Hansen, Chief Scientist for NASA, has stated in Science magazine that "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm." Dr. Hansen details six irreversible tipping points that we will soon cause to happen if we do not get our carbon emissions back down to 350 ppm very soon. These include massive sea level rises and dramatic increases in extreme weather events.
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian scientist who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, puts the matter even more forcefully: "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment." He said this in December 2007.
Nothing is more urgent than a mass mobilization of people and ideas that can compel our governments and international institutions to confront head on the challenge of global warming and the reformation of politics this implies. It is this challenge to which we all must address ourselves. We must become a potent social and political force at a crucial moment in our history when only a strong and global public demand will suffice to wake our politicians up. What we must know is that after building ourselves up through all the social movements that have shaped our social landscapes since the Second World War, we are now at critical mass. We can make a significant difference. We only need become self aware and organized.
It is in the spirit of contributing to this movement of people and ideas that Wisdom University's Institute for the Emerging Wisdom Culture, directed by sociologist Dr. Paul H. Ray, is conducting a major new study on America’s Cultural Creatives. The findings of the study will be released in the Summer of 2008. This work is being done in conjunction with similar studies in France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, and Japan on the Cultural Creatives, who are emerging as a global social, economic and political phenomenon. The implications of this emerging wave of cultural creativity are as profound as the consequences of global warming are imminent. What we will discover in this emerging cultural group are the values that we need to undergird our next phase of human development as we move into an intensely ecological phase of our history.
The findings of these studies will support a documentary film produced by Taylor Thomson, a Canadian film producer, on how this emerging group supports our capacity to deal creatively with the global challenges confronting us, especially global warming. Paul Ray and Dr. Jim Garrison are writing a book designed to summarize the current research, support the themes of the documentary film, and explore the historical and cultural implications of the new values represented by the Cultural Creatives.
Finally, in partnership with Wisdom University, the State of the World Forum will convene a major international conference in Washington, D.C. November 9-14, 2009. The conference will be open to the interested public and influence leaders from around the world and will profile those innovators whose social and technical developments, if implemented, could effectively deal with many of our global crises. At the heart of the Forum will be a global solutions wiki being developed in partnership with scientists worldwide.
The combination of new research findings, a documentary film, a book and an international conference will allow for a statement to the world public concerning both the critical nature of the crises confronting the world, exemplified most urgently by global warming, and the extraordinary hope for the future, represented by the emergence of millions of people and organizations worldwide embracing a new value proposition supportive of a positive vision of the future. They are the heart of the new global coalition that must be built.
The central theme of all these inter-related initiatives is that we have only a few years left before a major calamity will befall us, most if not all of the social and technical innovations needed to solve our problems are already available, and there is now a burgeoning population of people around the world who embrace a value system capable of supporting these innovations and designing a better world.
Background
Dr. Ray has been studying the values and lifestyles of Americans for several decades and is credited with the identification of the “Cultural Creatives” -- a group that only began to emerge in world culture fifty years ago but which now number over fifty million adults in the United States, substantially outnumbering social and financial conservatives. Cultural Creatives are even more numerous in Europe, and are growing in numbers around the world. A study of the Cultural Creatives has just been completed in Italy, France, Hungary, Holland, Germany, and Japan. One is underway in Sri Lanka, the first non-G8 country to do so.
Cultural Creatives are essentially comprised of people who have participated in the social and consciousness movements that have emerged since World War II: the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the women’s movement, the jobs and social justice movements, the peace movement, the organic food and alternative health care movements, the new spirituality and self growth movements, etc. Integral to the emergence of the Cultural Creatives is the emergence of women’s issues in the public domain.
Two thirds of Cultural Creatives are women, and in many ways the new value system the Cultural Creatives represent is inextricably related with the fact that this is the first time in history that women’s values have been widely and publicly articulated. They are spiritually motivated and committed to personal growth but are not dogmatically religious. They embrace technology and economic development but only within a deep affirmation of the environment and community. They tend to view the world from the perspective of holistic systems. They are the people paying attention to world events and global trends.
What characterizes the Cultural Creatives is that they are both inner-directed and socially concerned. Cultural Creatives thus have spiritual and psychological depth as well as the maturity needed for a new culture. They are also intensely entrepreneurial and creative. For example, Cultural Creatives are the founders and leaders of most of the green and socially responsible businesses. They are involved in many of the most socially active NGOs and non profit organizations.
The emergence of the Cultural Creatives is a crucially important development in world historical terms because this is the first time in over 600 years -- since the Renaissance -- that a new value system has arisen in western civilization, and it marks the first time in recorded history when a value proposition has emerged at a global level simultaneously. Values are like the climate as opposed to weather. Climate, like people’s underlying values, remains relatively constant over time. Weather, on the other hand, like people’s opinions, changes from day to day. For values to change, therefore, fundamental factors have come into play and significant consequences will accrue. When we speak of the emergence of the Cultural Creatives, we are pointing to a rare historical occurrence, the implications of which will probably be as profound on American and world culture as the emergence of the Renaissance in sixteenth century had upon Italy and the whole of Europe.
What makes this phenomenon doubly significant is that new research shows that this value system is embraced by the Millennium Generation, those young people aged fifteen to twenty five. While fifty years ago, the generation of the sixties experienced what sociologists called a “generation gap” with their elders, the children of the Baby Boomers seem to agree with their parents on many basic values. If further research bears this tentative conclusion out, this means that the Cultural Creative phenomenon is not only growing among adults worldwide but is being embraced by many of their children.
No baseline surveys have been done in the United States since Ray’s 1999 study, which means before the events of September 11, 2001 and before the Iraq war. The purpose of conducting the new survey now is to determine just how numerous the Cultural Creatives have become and how recent events might have affected their underlying values. Dr. Ray believes that the new study will show that Cultural Creatives now comprise closer to 30% of the U.S. adult population, with the Conservatives dropping to around 20%. The new study will indicate the movements with which the Cultural Creatives identify, what products they buy, how they define their politics in the post-9/11 and post-Iraq war world, and how their values affect their lifestyles.
This data has the potential to positively affect how we will shape the future because as the emerging new moral majority, the Cultural Creatives, if mobilized, could wield enormous social, moral and political influence. They are the Americans who can create the most possibilities for constructive change during the next decade and are the part of the population most capable of exerting a positive social and political influence. This is equally true for their counterparts in Europe and Japan.
At a time when most of our collective attention is focused on the potentially catastrophic nature of our time, a concern underscored each day in the news with reports on global warming, water shortages, depletion of fisheries, overpopulation, environmental degradation, conflict in the Middle East, and an almost endless series of other chronic and acute needs facing the human community, it is important that we also focus on those aspects of our reality that point to constructive outcomes. This work on the Cultural Creatives does that. It is a scientifically verifiable phenomenon emerging all around us that will have staggering implications for our civilization, even as the Renaissance did. It is a reason for great hope about the future, not only for America but also for the world. A value system is emerging which, if we listen to and implement it, will carry us through our current time of turbulence and help shape a better world.
Often times when the dandelion shoots up through the concrete, we worry overmuch about the breaking concrete, for that is our world. It is true – it is breaking up. It is breaking up fundamentally because it is a calcified way of perceiving the very dynamic state in which we find ourselves and is therefore incapable of dealing with current challenges. It is equally true that the concrete is also breaking up because the dandelion is pushing up through it. It is not just breaking up on its own. It is the new that is forcing the present to break up so that it can emerge. This is the guidance of time. Our future is already powerfully present within and amongst us and can thus serve as a very wise counselor to shape our vision and guide our actions. This is the case because deeper than fear, more powerful than shadow, we humans are motivated by hope.
What the documentary film and the book will focus on is the simple fact that even as various global crises bear down upon us, literally all the technical and social innovations needed to solve our problems have already been developed and are staring us in the face. We are not embracing them, not because they are not available, but because we do not recognize them and do not have the political will to implement them. We are not noticing the solutions because we are so mired in the problems that we cannot see the world another way. As Einstein said, you cannot solve a problem with the same consciousness that created the problem. Thus the importance of the Cultural Creatives. They represent a new emerging consciousness that if made aware and mobilized, could provide a critical mass of influence and pressure in the economic, cultural and political domains to shift the balance.
If you would like to be kept informed of developments of this historic work, please click here.
The Opportunity
When Paul Ray started doing values and lifestyles research in 1986, it was because this was a good predictor for what people actually did. No one expected that a new subculture had appeared in America. Experts in consumer research expected that different values would turn out to be about psychological differences. Instead, different values turned out to reflect completely different subcultures, all competing to shape American life. The conventional wisdom at the time was that the American public was roughly evenly divided between Traditionalists – social and financial conservatives – and the Modernists – those embracing a scientific worldview and the free market. What no one guessed was that a third subculture had appeared.
When the Cultural Creatives first began to emerge in the 1960s, they counted for less than 3% of the American public. At that time the conventional wisdom was true -- roughly half of the adult population were “Traditionalists “ – people whose values were derived from a person or event in the past; and the other half were “Modernists” – people who embraced the scientific method and human reason to determine their values. By 1999, the number of Cultural Creatives in the US had risen to 26% of the adult U.S. population (roughly 50 million). During this time, the Traditionalists had fallen from 50% to 24%, and the Moderns had remained roughly the same at 50%. Cultural Creatives have been slowly growing at about 1-2% a year for five decades.
Dr. Ray’s hypothesis is that by 2008 the Cultural Creatives will have moved up to roughly 30% of the American adult population. In a survey completed in the spring of 2006 in Italy, Cultural Creatives constituted 35% of the Italian population, and most of Western Europe looks comparable, yielding estimations of eighty to ninety million Cultural Creatives throughout Europe. Japanese demographers believe that they have comparable numbers, and in Canada similar numbers are predicted.
As mentioned, people seldom change their fundamental values overnight, and Cultural Creatives are no exception. They emerge slowly, over time, generally taking ten to fifteen years to come to their new value system. The Cultural Creatives are the people paying the most attention to the floods of new information about planetary concerns, the environment and about new possibilities in technology and entrepreneurship. Cultural Creatives are thus multi-issue people rather than single-issue people. They care about a panoply of issues ranging from personal growth to global warming.
We expect that in this decade, we are going to see their emergence as a real force in American politics and in public life. We would predict the same is potentially true in Europe and Japan.Thus it is imperative to find out as much as we can about them and about the predictability of their cultural influence.
The Critical Focus of Research
The emergence of the Cultural Creatives in Europe, Japan and the United States is proof that something new and radically different really is emerging to replace the old failing culture of Traditionalism and Modernism. This large and growing constituency is beginning to awaken to its own potential, and its rise offers opportunities for new kinds of business, new kinds of politics and new roles for civil society organizations.
Wisdom University and its partners intend to leverage these research results to build the case that the Cultural Creatives are emerging as the new moral majority. This is a tipping point time, a time of change where there is enormous leverage for a creative minority to really make a difference. In the next few years, the concerns of the Cultural Creatives will be ever more important, as we come to rethink and reinvent practically every institution of American life and as the world as a whole tackles complex global challenges.
This makes the completion of the new study much more than an academic exercise. It is a matter of urgent historical necessity. Cultural Creatives are potentially capable of bringing a major set of new values and rules, and some important new players, to the table precisely at the time when both political parties, the corporate sector, and the government are facing their lowest ebb in public credibility and trustworthiness. It is a critical time because we do not have very long to put new solutions into place before the chaos of global warming, global instability and violence start to take their toll. This is the time of maximum leverage for positive change.
This new survey will give precisely the insights that are needed concerning potential support for fundamental change in the current system. Once the results are known, Wisdom University and its Institute for the Emerging Wisdom Culture will follow through with a sustained program to disseminate the information as extensively as possible and link actors across a spectrum of disciplines to reinforce their commitment to constructive change. The focus will be on building a new vision of what is possible in a positive way. To get the creative response we need for our times, we need to get people out of their prison of fear that has been shaped by 9/11, the war on terrorism and global warming—and start focusing them on what they can create constructively together. The solutions are already here. What remains is to change our capacities of perception sufficient to embrace them and create a better world.
The Emerging Power of the Cultural Creatives in the Marketplace and in Politics
The power of the Cultural Creatives is already being felt in the marketplace. In 1999, building on Paul Ray's data, the Gaiam Corporation established LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability), an association of companies focused on health and fitness, the environment, personal development, sustainable living, and social justice. LOHAS companies practice "responsible capitalism" by providing goods and services using economic and environmentally sustainable business practices. LOHAS consumers are primarily Cultural Creatives and are interested in products covering a range of market sectors and sub-sectors, including: Green building supplies, socially responsible investing and "green stocks", alternative healthcare, organic clothing and food, personal development media, yoga and other fitness products, and eco-tourism. See the following link for more information: http://www.lohas.com/about.htm
In 2006 LOHAS companies earned $230 billion in the United States and over $500 billion worldwide. The market has been growing by about 10% - 15% per year since 2000. Every indication is that this market and this buying power will only increase in the future.
Cultural Creatives also represent a new value basis for politics. The new polling conducted by Dr. Ray shows that new fourth voter constituency has emerged that is transforming politics beyond the antiquated "left-right" political paradigm. Ray calls this new fourth group New Progressives, or Political North. It is immense (70 million adults, or 36% of the population, of whom 55 million are voters, or 26.2% of the electorate). Their core is Cultural Creatives, but it is a wider population. They constitute the single largest voter group in the country, so they can potentially dominate any election outcome. This makes them the largest untapped political resource in the United States. Their emergence has transformed politics in MAerica and produced what Ray calls A New Political Compass.
The central fact about the new constituency from a political perspective is that, like the cultural creatives as a whole, the political north is a population and not yet a group. It is comprised of individuals who hold progressive values, but 5 out of 6 of them don’t identify with the Left or liberalism, or with the Right or conservatism, and they are not mobilized into a coherent political force. They represent the largest single values group in the country but they have virtually no presence in the current political dialogue or debate.
The key questions, therefore, are: how can we identify, mobilize, and turn this emerging cultural group into an effective moral, economic and political presence? What are the possibilities of linking cultural creatives globally? How do we focus social and political attention on the innovations already here that could solve our problems? This is the ultimate goal of undertaking the new study and developing the film, book and conference at this crucial time of both challenge and opportunity.
Survey Field Work Contractor
Our professional partner in executing the survey fieldwork is National Family Opinion (NFO). NFO established its first consumer panel in 1946 to help businesses and industries develop products that people wanted and needed. At that time, the postal service and telephone were the main avenues to reach panelists. Since 1995, with the growing number of online individuals and households, NFO began to poll consumers for their opinions via the Internet and email. In 2003, NFO joined forces with major market research company Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS). The combined new company, called TNS, is now the largest custom market research firm in the world with a presence in over seventy countries worldwide. Dr. Ray has used NFO for his surveys for years and has established an ongoing professional relationship with them.
The Study
The study commenced on March 1, 2008. Over 2,000 questionnaires were sent out nationwide with the responses were returned by late April. Dr. Paul and his staff are now analyzing the data. Wisdom University will disseminate the findings in July to several thousand influence leaders in the domains of media, politics, economics, religion and culture and also to the interested public both in the United States, Europe and Japan.
The Documentary Film
Taylor Thomsom is producing a documentary film based on the worldwide studies on the emerging wisdom culture and related information about the social and technical innovations required to address rapidly changing global events. The theme of the documentary is very simple and straightforward:
There is a profound and rapidly accumulating global crisis, epitomized most powerfully by global warming;
Most if not all of the social and technical solutions we need to solve these challenges are currently available;
There is an emerging value proposition represented by the Cultural Creatives and the emerging wisdom culture that if mobilized could turn the tide.
The Book
Paul Ray and Dr. Jim Garrison are preparing a book that will examine the phenomenon of the emerging wisdom culture from a historical and cultural point of view. It is being written independently of yet closely aligned with the documentary film and will include interviews with major personalities who epitomize the Cultural Creatives and who have developed many of the major social and technical innovations the world needs to know about and implement.
The International Conference - The 2009 State of the World Forum
Working in partnership with Wisdom University, State of the World Forum will convene an international conference November 9-14, 2009 in Washington, D.C. The Forum will feature the international studies on the Cultural Creatives, a global solutions wiki, a Social Artistry Summit, and an aggregation of innovators doing cutting edge work on in a broad cross section of domains. Invited will be scientists and technologists working on the global solutions wiki, representatives of all the groups conducting the various international studies, individuals who have developed the social and technical innovations needed to solve our global crises, representatives of supportive corporations, NGOs, and governmental institutions, influence leaders across a wide spectrum of scientific, economic, political, religious and technical disciplines, and the interested public.
For more on the conference, click here.
The conference will be similar in size and scope as the State of the World Forum convened by Dr. Jim Garrison in September 2000, timed to coincide with the UN Millennium Summit of Heads of State. The conference lasted seven days, drew over 2,500 participants, included dozens of heads of state and other dignitaries, featured two live global broadcasts on BBC World TV, and was streamed live on the Internet.
The 2009 State of the World Forum will build on this record and capacity and seek to establish a global coalition of groups and interested parties committed to alerting the world public that major crises confront us, the solutions we seek are already here, and that the people of good must come together and embrace a vision of the future based on the values they already hold. If we can do this, we might be able weather the approaching storms and create a world worth leaving to our children.
The 2009 State of the World Forum is being designed not simply as a one off conference but as a catalyst and launching of a multi year global effort to establish a global coalition of groups and interested parties committed to alerting the world public that major crises confront us, the solutions we seek are already here, and that the people of good must come together and embrace a vision of the future based on the values they already hold. If we can do this, we might be able weather the approaching storms and create a world worth leaving to our children.
If you would like to help develop the work with the cultural creatives and promote dissemination of the study to influence leaders and the interested public, please donate to:
Wisdom University
Cultural Creative Study
1111 S. Orchard, Ste 205 Boise, ID 83705
Thanks to David Bryce / EVOLVEFEST on Twitter
If you would like to be kept informed of developments of this historic work via future communications, please click here.
Executive Summary
We live in a moment in history when as we look ahead most of us have the deepening intuition that time may be running out to make the necessary decisions that could save civilization as we know it from the threat of global warming. Now, more than ever before, we must catalyze a renaissance of the human spirit to ensure human survival and shape a future based on technical and social innovations in alignment with natural systems infused by a vision of hope.
Dr. James Hansen, Chief Scientist for NASA, has stated in Science magazine that "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm." Dr. Hansen details six irreversible tipping points that we will soon cause to happen if we do not get our carbon emissions back down to 350 ppm very soon. These include massive sea level rises and dramatic increases in extreme weather events.
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian scientist who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, puts the matter even more forcefully: "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment." He said this in December 2007.
Nothing is more urgent than a mass mobilization of people and ideas that can compel our governments and international institutions to confront head on the challenge of global warming and the reformation of politics this implies. It is this challenge to which we all must address ourselves. We must become a potent social and political force at a crucial moment in our history when only a strong and global public demand will suffice to wake our politicians up. What we must know is that after building ourselves up through all the social movements that have shaped our social landscapes since the Second World War, we are now at critical mass. We can make a significant difference. We only need become self aware and organized.
It is in the spirit of contributing to this movement of people and ideas that Wisdom University's Institute for the Emerging Wisdom Culture, directed by sociologist Dr. Paul H. Ray, is conducting a major new study on America’s Cultural Creatives. The findings of the study will be released in the Summer of 2008. This work is being done in conjunction with similar studies in France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, and Japan on the Cultural Creatives, who are emerging as a global social, economic and political phenomenon. The implications of this emerging wave of cultural creativity are as profound as the consequences of global warming are imminent. What we will discover in this emerging cultural group are the values that we need to undergird our next phase of human development as we move into an intensely ecological phase of our history.
The findings of these studies will support a documentary film produced by Taylor Thomson, a Canadian film producer, on how this emerging group supports our capacity to deal creatively with the global challenges confronting us, especially global warming. Paul Ray and Dr. Jim Garrison are writing a book designed to summarize the current research, support the themes of the documentary film, and explore the historical and cultural implications of the new values represented by the Cultural Creatives.
Finally, in partnership with Wisdom University, the State of the World Forum will convene a major international conference in Washington, D.C. November 9-14, 2009. The conference will be open to the interested public and influence leaders from around the world and will profile those innovators whose social and technical developments, if implemented, could effectively deal with many of our global crises. At the heart of the Forum will be a global solutions wiki being developed in partnership with scientists worldwide.
The combination of new research findings, a documentary film, a book and an international conference will allow for a statement to the world public concerning both the critical nature of the crises confronting the world, exemplified most urgently by global warming, and the extraordinary hope for the future, represented by the emergence of millions of people and organizations worldwide embracing a new value proposition supportive of a positive vision of the future. They are the heart of the new global coalition that must be built.
The central theme of all these inter-related initiatives is that we have only a few years left before a major calamity will befall us, most if not all of the social and technical innovations needed to solve our problems are already available, and there is now a burgeoning population of people around the world who embrace a value system capable of supporting these innovations and designing a better world.
Background
Dr. Ray has been studying the values and lifestyles of Americans for several decades and is credited with the identification of the “Cultural Creatives” -- a group that only began to emerge in world culture fifty years ago but which now number over fifty million adults in the United States, substantially outnumbering social and financial conservatives. Cultural Creatives are even more numerous in Europe, and are growing in numbers around the world. A study of the Cultural Creatives has just been completed in Italy, France, Hungary, Holland, Germany, and Japan. One is underway in Sri Lanka, the first non-G8 country to do so.
Cultural Creatives are essentially comprised of people who have participated in the social and consciousness movements that have emerged since World War II: the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the women’s movement, the jobs and social justice movements, the peace movement, the organic food and alternative health care movements, the new spirituality and self growth movements, etc. Integral to the emergence of the Cultural Creatives is the emergence of women’s issues in the public domain.
Two thirds of Cultural Creatives are women, and in many ways the new value system the Cultural Creatives represent is inextricably related with the fact that this is the first time in history that women’s values have been widely and publicly articulated. They are spiritually motivated and committed to personal growth but are not dogmatically religious. They embrace technology and economic development but only within a deep affirmation of the environment and community. They tend to view the world from the perspective of holistic systems. They are the people paying attention to world events and global trends.
What characterizes the Cultural Creatives is that they are both inner-directed and socially concerned. Cultural Creatives thus have spiritual and psychological depth as well as the maturity needed for a new culture. They are also intensely entrepreneurial and creative. For example, Cultural Creatives are the founders and leaders of most of the green and socially responsible businesses. They are involved in many of the most socially active NGOs and non profit organizations.
The emergence of the Cultural Creatives is a crucially important development in world historical terms because this is the first time in over 600 years -- since the Renaissance -- that a new value system has arisen in western civilization, and it marks the first time in recorded history when a value proposition has emerged at a global level simultaneously. Values are like the climate as opposed to weather. Climate, like people’s underlying values, remains relatively constant over time. Weather, on the other hand, like people’s opinions, changes from day to day. For values to change, therefore, fundamental factors have come into play and significant consequences will accrue. When we speak of the emergence of the Cultural Creatives, we are pointing to a rare historical occurrence, the implications of which will probably be as profound on American and world culture as the emergence of the Renaissance in sixteenth century had upon Italy and the whole of Europe.
What makes this phenomenon doubly significant is that new research shows that this value system is embraced by the Millennium Generation, those young people aged fifteen to twenty five. While fifty years ago, the generation of the sixties experienced what sociologists called a “generation gap” with their elders, the children of the Baby Boomers seem to agree with their parents on many basic values. If further research bears this tentative conclusion out, this means that the Cultural Creative phenomenon is not only growing among adults worldwide but is being embraced by many of their children.
No baseline surveys have been done in the United States since Ray’s 1999 study, which means before the events of September 11, 2001 and before the Iraq war. The purpose of conducting the new survey now is to determine just how numerous the Cultural Creatives have become and how recent events might have affected their underlying values. Dr. Ray believes that the new study will show that Cultural Creatives now comprise closer to 30% of the U.S. adult population, with the Conservatives dropping to around 20%. The new study will indicate the movements with which the Cultural Creatives identify, what products they buy, how they define their politics in the post-9/11 and post-Iraq war world, and how their values affect their lifestyles.
This data has the potential to positively affect how we will shape the future because as the emerging new moral majority, the Cultural Creatives, if mobilized, could wield enormous social, moral and political influence. They are the Americans who can create the most possibilities for constructive change during the next decade and are the part of the population most capable of exerting a positive social and political influence. This is equally true for their counterparts in Europe and Japan.
At a time when most of our collective attention is focused on the potentially catastrophic nature of our time, a concern underscored each day in the news with reports on global warming, water shortages, depletion of fisheries, overpopulation, environmental degradation, conflict in the Middle East, and an almost endless series of other chronic and acute needs facing the human community, it is important that we also focus on those aspects of our reality that point to constructive outcomes. This work on the Cultural Creatives does that. It is a scientifically verifiable phenomenon emerging all around us that will have staggering implications for our civilization, even as the Renaissance did. It is a reason for great hope about the future, not only for America but also for the world. A value system is emerging which, if we listen to and implement it, will carry us through our current time of turbulence and help shape a better world.
Often times when the dandelion shoots up through the concrete, we worry overmuch about the breaking concrete, for that is our world. It is true – it is breaking up. It is breaking up fundamentally because it is a calcified way of perceiving the very dynamic state in which we find ourselves and is therefore incapable of dealing with current challenges. It is equally true that the concrete is also breaking up because the dandelion is pushing up through it. It is not just breaking up on its own. It is the new that is forcing the present to break up so that it can emerge. This is the guidance of time. Our future is already powerfully present within and amongst us and can thus serve as a very wise counselor to shape our vision and guide our actions. This is the case because deeper than fear, more powerful than shadow, we humans are motivated by hope.
What the documentary film and the book will focus on is the simple fact that even as various global crises bear down upon us, literally all the technical and social innovations needed to solve our problems have already been developed and are staring us in the face. We are not embracing them, not because they are not available, but because we do not recognize them and do not have the political will to implement them. We are not noticing the solutions because we are so mired in the problems that we cannot see the world another way. As Einstein said, you cannot solve a problem with the same consciousness that created the problem. Thus the importance of the Cultural Creatives. They represent a new emerging consciousness that if made aware and mobilized, could provide a critical mass of influence and pressure in the economic, cultural and political domains to shift the balance.
If you would like to be kept informed of developments of this historic work, please click here.
The Opportunity
When Paul Ray started doing values and lifestyles research in 1986, it was because this was a good predictor for what people actually did. No one expected that a new subculture had appeared in America. Experts in consumer research expected that different values would turn out to be about psychological differences. Instead, different values turned out to reflect completely different subcultures, all competing to shape American life. The conventional wisdom at the time was that the American public was roughly evenly divided between Traditionalists – social and financial conservatives – and the Modernists – those embracing a scientific worldview and the free market. What no one guessed was that a third subculture had appeared.
When the Cultural Creatives first began to emerge in the 1960s, they counted for less than 3% of the American public. At that time the conventional wisdom was true -- roughly half of the adult population were “Traditionalists “ – people whose values were derived from a person or event in the past; and the other half were “Modernists” – people who embraced the scientific method and human reason to determine their values. By 1999, the number of Cultural Creatives in the US had risen to 26% of the adult U.S. population (roughly 50 million). During this time, the Traditionalists had fallen from 50% to 24%, and the Moderns had remained roughly the same at 50%. Cultural Creatives have been slowly growing at about 1-2% a year for five decades.
Dr. Ray’s hypothesis is that by 2008 the Cultural Creatives will have moved up to roughly 30% of the American adult population. In a survey completed in the spring of 2006 in Italy, Cultural Creatives constituted 35% of the Italian population, and most of Western Europe looks comparable, yielding estimations of eighty to ninety million Cultural Creatives throughout Europe. Japanese demographers believe that they have comparable numbers, and in Canada similar numbers are predicted.
As mentioned, people seldom change their fundamental values overnight, and Cultural Creatives are no exception. They emerge slowly, over time, generally taking ten to fifteen years to come to their new value system. The Cultural Creatives are the people paying the most attention to the floods of new information about planetary concerns, the environment and about new possibilities in technology and entrepreneurship. Cultural Creatives are thus multi-issue people rather than single-issue people. They care about a panoply of issues ranging from personal growth to global warming.
We expect that in this decade, we are going to see their emergence as a real force in American politics and in public life. We would predict the same is potentially true in Europe and Japan.Thus it is imperative to find out as much as we can about them and about the predictability of their cultural influence.
The Critical Focus of Research
The emergence of the Cultural Creatives in Europe, Japan and the United States is proof that something new and radically different really is emerging to replace the old failing culture of Traditionalism and Modernism. This large and growing constituency is beginning to awaken to its own potential, and its rise offers opportunities for new kinds of business, new kinds of politics and new roles for civil society organizations.
Wisdom University and its partners intend to leverage these research results to build the case that the Cultural Creatives are emerging as the new moral majority. This is a tipping point time, a time of change where there is enormous leverage for a creative minority to really make a difference. In the next few years, the concerns of the Cultural Creatives will be ever more important, as we come to rethink and reinvent practically every institution of American life and as the world as a whole tackles complex global challenges.
This makes the completion of the new study much more than an academic exercise. It is a matter of urgent historical necessity. Cultural Creatives are potentially capable of bringing a major set of new values and rules, and some important new players, to the table precisely at the time when both political parties, the corporate sector, and the government are facing their lowest ebb in public credibility and trustworthiness. It is a critical time because we do not have very long to put new solutions into place before the chaos of global warming, global instability and violence start to take their toll. This is the time of maximum leverage for positive change.
This new survey will give precisely the insights that are needed concerning potential support for fundamental change in the current system. Once the results are known, Wisdom University and its Institute for the Emerging Wisdom Culture will follow through with a sustained program to disseminate the information as extensively as possible and link actors across a spectrum of disciplines to reinforce their commitment to constructive change. The focus will be on building a new vision of what is possible in a positive way. To get the creative response we need for our times, we need to get people out of their prison of fear that has been shaped by 9/11, the war on terrorism and global warming—and start focusing them on what they can create constructively together. The solutions are already here. What remains is to change our capacities of perception sufficient to embrace them and create a better world.
The Emerging Power of the Cultural Creatives in the Marketplace and in Politics
The power of the Cultural Creatives is already being felt in the marketplace. In 1999, building on Paul Ray's data, the Gaiam Corporation established LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability), an association of companies focused on health and fitness, the environment, personal development, sustainable living, and social justice. LOHAS companies practice "responsible capitalism" by providing goods and services using economic and environmentally sustainable business practices. LOHAS consumers are primarily Cultural Creatives and are interested in products covering a range of market sectors and sub-sectors, including: Green building supplies, socially responsible investing and "green stocks", alternative healthcare, organic clothing and food, personal development media, yoga and other fitness products, and eco-tourism. See the following link for more information: http://www.lohas.com/about.htm
In 2006 LOHAS companies earned $230 billion in the United States and over $500 billion worldwide. The market has been growing by about 10% - 15% per year since 2000. Every indication is that this market and this buying power will only increase in the future.
Cultural Creatives also represent a new value basis for politics. The new polling conducted by Dr. Ray shows that new fourth voter constituency has emerged that is transforming politics beyond the antiquated "left-right" political paradigm. Ray calls this new fourth group New Progressives, or Political North. It is immense (70 million adults, or 36% of the population, of whom 55 million are voters, or 26.2% of the electorate). Their core is Cultural Creatives, but it is a wider population. They constitute the single largest voter group in the country, so they can potentially dominate any election outcome. This makes them the largest untapped political resource in the United States. Their emergence has transformed politics in MAerica and produced what Ray calls A New Political Compass.
The central fact about the new constituency from a political perspective is that, like the cultural creatives as a whole, the political north is a population and not yet a group. It is comprised of individuals who hold progressive values, but 5 out of 6 of them don’t identify with the Left or liberalism, or with the Right or conservatism, and they are not mobilized into a coherent political force. They represent the largest single values group in the country but they have virtually no presence in the current political dialogue or debate.
The key questions, therefore, are: how can we identify, mobilize, and turn this emerging cultural group into an effective moral, economic and political presence? What are the possibilities of linking cultural creatives globally? How do we focus social and political attention on the innovations already here that could solve our problems? This is the ultimate goal of undertaking the new study and developing the film, book and conference at this crucial time of both challenge and opportunity.
Survey Field Work Contractor
Our professional partner in executing the survey fieldwork is National Family Opinion (NFO). NFO established its first consumer panel in 1946 to help businesses and industries develop products that people wanted and needed. At that time, the postal service and telephone were the main avenues to reach panelists. Since 1995, with the growing number of online individuals and households, NFO began to poll consumers for their opinions via the Internet and email. In 2003, NFO joined forces with major market research company Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS). The combined new company, called TNS, is now the largest custom market research firm in the world with a presence in over seventy countries worldwide. Dr. Ray has used NFO for his surveys for years and has established an ongoing professional relationship with them.
The Study
The study commenced on March 1, 2008. Over 2,000 questionnaires were sent out nationwide with the responses were returned by late April. Dr. Paul and his staff are now analyzing the data. Wisdom University will disseminate the findings in July to several thousand influence leaders in the domains of media, politics, economics, religion and culture and also to the interested public both in the United States, Europe and Japan.
The Documentary Film
Taylor Thomsom is producing a documentary film based on the worldwide studies on the emerging wisdom culture and related information about the social and technical innovations required to address rapidly changing global events. The theme of the documentary is very simple and straightforward:
There is a profound and rapidly accumulating global crisis, epitomized most powerfully by global warming;
Most if not all of the social and technical solutions we need to solve these challenges are currently available;
There is an emerging value proposition represented by the Cultural Creatives and the emerging wisdom culture that if mobilized could turn the tide.
The Book
Paul Ray and Dr. Jim Garrison are preparing a book that will examine the phenomenon of the emerging wisdom culture from a historical and cultural point of view. It is being written independently of yet closely aligned with the documentary film and will include interviews with major personalities who epitomize the Cultural Creatives and who have developed many of the major social and technical innovations the world needs to know about and implement.
The International Conference - The 2009 State of the World Forum
Working in partnership with Wisdom University, State of the World Forum will convene an international conference November 9-14, 2009 in Washington, D.C. The Forum will feature the international studies on the Cultural Creatives, a global solutions wiki, a Social Artistry Summit, and an aggregation of innovators doing cutting edge work on in a broad cross section of domains. Invited will be scientists and technologists working on the global solutions wiki, representatives of all the groups conducting the various international studies, individuals who have developed the social and technical innovations needed to solve our global crises, representatives of supportive corporations, NGOs, and governmental institutions, influence leaders across a wide spectrum of scientific, economic, political, religious and technical disciplines, and the interested public.
For more on the conference, click here.
The conference will be similar in size and scope as the State of the World Forum convened by Dr. Jim Garrison in September 2000, timed to coincide with the UN Millennium Summit of Heads of State. The conference lasted seven days, drew over 2,500 participants, included dozens of heads of state and other dignitaries, featured two live global broadcasts on BBC World TV, and was streamed live on the Internet.
The 2009 State of the World Forum will build on this record and capacity and seek to establish a global coalition of groups and interested parties committed to alerting the world public that major crises confront us, the solutions we seek are already here, and that the people of good must come together and embrace a vision of the future based on the values they already hold. If we can do this, we might be able weather the approaching storms and create a world worth leaving to our children.
The 2009 State of the World Forum is being designed not simply as a one off conference but as a catalyst and launching of a multi year global effort to establish a global coalition of groups and interested parties committed to alerting the world public that major crises confront us, the solutions we seek are already here, and that the people of good must come together and embrace a vision of the future based on the values they already hold. If we can do this, we might be able weather the approaching storms and create a world worth leaving to our children.
If you would like to help develop the work with the cultural creatives and promote dissemination of the study to influence leaders and the interested public, please donate to:
Wisdom University
Cultural Creative Study
1111 S. Orchard, Ste 205 Boise, ID 83705
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