| Interview with Paul Ray by Tim Miejan First of a two-part interview It was time. After years of exploring spirituality and metaphysics in The EDGE Newspaper, it became clear that momentum was shifting away from merely chatting about ideas toward a more practical application of the wisdom we have gleaned. It was happening all around us, through the model of conscious evolution led by Barbara Marx Hubbard to the process of "evolution revolution" currently headed by Neale Donald Walsch. It became clear that it was time to create the world that we dream about, not just talk about it. Four years ago, a husband-wife research team collaborated on a book that gave us a glimpse of why this has been happening all around us. The book by Paul H. Ray, Ph.D., and his wife, Sherry Ruth Anderson, Ph.D. -- The Cultural Creatives (Harmony Books, 2000) -- was described as the "defining study of American Culture at the turn of the Millennium." I interviewed Dr. Ray not long after the book's release, and he revealed to us the implications of the discovery of an awakening subculture that includes up to a quarter of all American adults, and probably a higher percentage of children. Not all New Age, liberal, white Baby Boomers, Cultural Creatives represent all spectrums of ethnicity, age, political ideology and religion. They are very grounded, practical people who are committed to re-framing how we view ourselves in context with each other -- and the planet. They thrive on authenticity, spirituality and bringing women's issues into public life. The Cultural Creative model made so much sense to us at The EDGE that we proceeded to reframe our publication to serve this population, thus the debut of Edge Life magazine. In light of our new focus, we returned to Dr. Ray to learn more about how this subculture representing more than 50 million people on the planet is getting along. He spoke with us about global acceptance of the Cultural Creative label, green business and Election 2004. When we last spoke, The Cultural Creatives had just been published and there was a lot of excitement about it. Can you give us an overview of what changes you had seen since then, as a result of the creation of the term "Cultural Creatives"? Paul Ray: I guess you have to look at it in different layers. We have very large numbers of communities in the Unites States who may not talk to each other. Such an idea can spread through particular communities of people, while others are totally untouched. It's not like a broadcast on one of the national news shows on TV or on the radio where all of the people are reached. In the green business circles, it's the term of choice. Period. They now know who it is they're trying to reach. The same for organic food, same for alternative health care, although not necessarily down to individual practitioners, but manufacturers and suppliers. They're seriously into it. For certain kinds of green politics and progressive issues, such as the environment, it's very, very strong. It's very strong in areas where people are trying to think about new approaches to society. A lot of civil society organizations use the term. It's very strong in all the areas around new spirituality, new consciousness, new kinds of psychotherapies, bodywork, and so on. To make a long story short, the people who need to reach the Cultural Creatives because of business or because they want them as a constituency have picked up on it very strongly. A lot of the opinion leaders within the Cultural Creative subculture who have given their lives over to doing the kind of work that Cultural Creatives do tend to use the term. It's quite striking, actually. "Oh, God, yes! Cultural Creatives! Everybody I know talks about Cultural Creatives." And because everybody in their personal network talks about Cultural Creatives, it must be a generic term across the country and every human being is using it. Not quite. It hasn't been on the nightly news as a news bulletin. Ray: No. "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference" [2002, by Malcolm Gladwell] is a good example of a much more widely publicized popular book. It started from the East Coast, basically the Bos-Wash Corridor. The Cultural Creative is essentially a West Coast phenomenon. You find that from Vancouver to San Francisco, you've got in a general population an intensely common use of the term Cultural Creatives in sort of eco-topia land. In Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco Bay area, it's just absolutely as common as can be. Much less so in Southern California, but more in Southern California than in the Midwest or the East Coast. And, part of that has to do with the extent to which the media, including the alternative media, has picked it up. For mainstream media on the East Coast and the Midwest, it's like it never happened. It never happened. You've got a curtain of denial about it and, in a quite striking contrast, the mainstream media on the West Coast covers it more or less continuously. They actually use the term in mainstream media? Ray: Yeah. As if everybody ought to know what it is. And note that there are pockets of Cultural Creative usage in every college town in the country. So in Boulder, Champagne, Urbana, Ann Arbor, people know about it. Now, are there groups on the East Coast, in New York City, who have heard the term but are denying that it's even relevant? Ray: Sure. There are business people, moderns [the dominant subculture in America, to be eventually replaced by a majority of Cultural Creatives, according to The Cultural Creatives] who reflect an allegiance or a vested interest in the smokestack industries -- cars and oil and utilities -- and in finance, who want it not to be true. This is not just a passive denial. It's an active "this better not be true" kind of response, because this is very bad for business. From their viewpoint, what's bad about it is all the new growth is going to come from Cultural Creatives and they are utterly unprepared to do anything about it. For example, a number of people told the marketing folks at Saturn that Cultural Creatives was where they had to go, so they had me come and talk to them. The reaction was, "Oh, this is poison." At the GM Tech Center, they don't want to hear from Cultural Creatives. By contrast, Saab, Volvo, and all the Japanese car companies have picked up on it. And it's quite stunning. Probably the German ones, too. Ray: The German ones really love the environmental aspect of it, but they are totally uninterested in anything else. I go to Europe maybe once or twice a year to do green business talks, because I'm doing a lot of work with green businesses. Green business is a big deal in northern Europe. It is a really big deal. Businesses there have basically decided that's where it's going, that the rules of the game have changed, that this is not a particularly difficult game to play, we're happy to do it, no problem, let's go. And, for them, marketing for Cultural Creatives is obvious. Except for England. For them, it's still a hard idea to take in, but the Scandinavian, Germanic countries, the Benelux countries [Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg], to some extent France, and the Japanese have no problem with it. I've been over to Japan now three times to do various presentations and discussions with various kinds of groups. Matsushita Corp., which owns Panasonic, has done a major reengineering of all their manufacturing to be ecologically sustainable, because the boss declared, "Make it so." They've put in 10, 15 years now on it and they're making scads of money around things like new kinds of solder that are ecologically sustainable with no lead in it. They own a company besides Panasonic called National, which is a brand, and it puts out appliances. Every last appliance is manufactured and works as a sustainable product. I spent a day with their managers going over how you have to rethink what's going on in the marketplace. The engineers were operating with the theory of the defective consumer, of people not accepting the product the way it is given to them. And then they listen and say, "Oh! Got it! I see what this is." If you ask, "Why is the Prius coming out and why did Nisson do a technology deal with Toyota around the Prius, and was Honda in there ahead of Nisson?" the answer is that they are real clear that there is a green car market that's going to have Cultural Creatives in it. The first study I ever did around this issue was in 1989 for Nisson. At that time, we showed that out of the 14 million U.S. cars that were sold that year, two million of them could have been a green car -- at that time, one in seven, 15 percent. That many would be purchased on the spot. How many people want that without even having seen one? Generally in the Midwest, people in business are much slower to pick up on this entire idea. There are people who are left behind and people who will move to where there's a new opportunity. People left behind tend to be slower on the uptake than those who are migrants, people who will move from one place to another. What you find with a lot of businesses in the Midwest are people who have been there or stayed somewhere in the Midwest for their whole lives. People who move to the West Coast are much more likely to be innovators. A reporter from L.A. was asking me recently, "Is it the case that California is the home of Cultural Creative invention?" And I said, "I don't think so. I think what's really going on is that the proportion of inventors, people who come up with really new ideas socially, technologically or anything else, is actually no higher in California than in any place else. But the proportion of people who are willing to examine and try a new idea, the early adopters and innovators in the sense of accepting it, is way higher on the West Coast, because of its high immigrant population. People who are hitting their heads against a wall somewhere else in the U.S. finally decide to come to California and then they get a good response to their idea. Cultural Creatives are early to pick up on new things. They're not necessarily going to be the ones who invent the new things, but they'll pick up on them. Now, there are other people who are technology innovators who are typically not Cultural Creatives who are also early to pick up on things, and they also tend to be concentrated on the West Coast. You'd have to say that the fastest rate of innovation is on the West Coast followed by the East Coast, followed by the Midwest, and lagging way the hell behind is the South and the desert Southwest. You would think Arizona and New Mexico might be more like California. Ray: Well, that's true to the extent that they have a lot of migrants. Especially in the last five to 10 years, they've had an enormous influx of immigrants -- and that's why Bush probably won't hold either of those states in the election. Since the book came out, can you share some examples of big moments you've seen by Cultural Creatives in our society? Ray: Well, if you look at the Democratic primaries, what you find, now, of course, is that we're shifting to the new political compass. Let's define that first. Ray: If I take survey data on cultural change and look at it through a political filter, what I'm picking up on is only a small slice of most people's lives, a very narrow slice. If I'm looking at the Cultural Creative's pictures, I'm looking at something that's mostly about consumer behavior, volunteer behavior, giving money to good causes, which is basically about their lives as householders and as citizens. So if I ask people to put on their voter hat and look at their interest in politics, I'm actually looking at an aspect that represents a narrow part of who they actually are. It's a hat they don't pick up very often. Ray: Exactly right. Looking at statistics on people's behavior as volunteers, as givers, as consumers, as householders, a study on cultural shift shows that Cultural Creatives represent roughly a quarter of the population, 26 to 28 percent. Now, if you say, on the other hand, I want to talk about only a narrow slice of their lives, then the best picture of what's going on is the political compass. It leaves out a lot of purchase behavior information and adds a lot of political attitudes and willingness to get involved politically. Once you've done that -- and you're really doing it for the whole society and not just for Cultural Creatives -- you begin to see this two-dimensional picture of right versus left fall apart. The part of the population that wants a new politics is 36 percent of the people -- and because of the low voter turnout -- 45 percent of likely voters. And that's the part that's been ignored for all these years. Looking at the regular liberal left, you get about 15 percent of likely voters, 12 percent of people are on the left. You can put them on the compass in the west. Statistically what you see is a very interesting. They are primarily opposed to the social conservatives, and what you end up with is conventional liberalism against the social conservatives. They're very polarized. Ray: Yes, and business conservatives are both similar to and different from liberalism on the one hand and social conservatism on the other. In reality, business conservatives have only a little more in common with the social conservatives than with the liberals. Now, it happens that for reasons of history, what we've got is a huge alliance papering over differences between the business and social conservatives because of the Republican party, but the number of people who actually agree with the Tom DeLay's of the world, who are simultaneously business and social conservatives, is really small. It's a fairly elite group. It's sort of middle class on up to the rich. It's a tiny group. It's 7 percent of the population. One person in 16. When you look at who Bush represents, it's this little tiny group who are both business and social conservatives. So, these two groups are making alliances. Does it mean they agree on everything? Hell, no. On the political compass, you put those folks in the political southeast. You've got people in the political northeast who are simultaneously cultural conservative in some respects but liberal in other respects, say, ethnic Catholics and union people. You see this in the industrial Midwest all the time. Go to Chicago and you'll see a lot of people in the political northeast who are not fundamentalists, but they're fairly conservative Catholics. Or, in Minnesota, it would be Lutherans. It's important to say that Cultural Creatives are spread fairly uniformly across the northern half of that political compass. The new progressives include a hell of a lot of Cultural Creatives; maybe half the new progressives are Cultural Creatives. The other half includes people who are marginal to the Cultural Creatives in some way. They've changed some aspect of their lives. It's important to remember that within the Moderns, which represent 47 to 48 percent of the population, there's a group that's 20 percent of the total population -- about 35 to 40 percent of the Moderns -- who are clearly in transition toward being Cultural Creatives. At this time, they do not see it as something that would be successful in their lives if they changed over much more. Perhaps it's not good for their promotion at work, it doesn't fit with their neighbors and doesn't fit with the people they go to church with -- but they're in transition. But that could change pretty quickly. Ray: It could change quite quickly, and a lot of those people in transition are the swing voters in the swing states. Get this: The voters in swing states are 60 percent new progressives in the political north. Can you imagine that? It's a high, high proportion. What do you see happening in this election? Ray: Oh, I see Kerry winning by about 5 percent. Last time we talked in 2001 it was right after the last election and you were not surprised at all about the result, the fact that a lot of people did not even have an interest in voting. Do you see that changing in 2004? Ray: Oh, totally. More involvement? Ray: Bush has united the country -- united the liberals against him, to be precise. Now, we've got a severely polarized electorate because of the war, to a large extent. But, not just the war. You've got a lot of people who are very upset about the civil liberties issues, who are talking in terms of creeping fascism and so on, and you've got a lot of folks upset about the destruction of environmental programs, the destruction of education programs, the plutocracy aspects of where just money's being shoveled into corrupt companies and campaign supporters of the Bushites. So, all of that combined is really upsetting a very large number of people, and it's going to make a difference in this election. Voter turnout should bump up quite significantly this time. It's not that Kerry is so terribly attractive, it's that he looks like a very sane and sensible alternative to people who are not at all sane and sensible and he looks like an honest guy compared to a corrupt guy. The perception of the Bush people as being quite corrupt is growing very rapidly, so that's an important thing to know. It's not something that's played up in the papers, because they get penalized by the Bushites whenever they talk about it. Any paper that starts talking about the corruption of the Bushites is denied access to the White House and they are not willing to pay that penalty. It's a cowardice. As how politics is shifting, we're looking at a gigantic opportunity for the Democrats to mobilize people around the overlap among all the new social movements. The same people who support labor are very likely to support environmental issues in most states, so you get a blue-green alliance like the Apollo Alliance [www.apolloalliance.org]. It's a gigantic idea being put forth that's supported by all the industrial labor unions and all the environmental groups. It says the United States needs to put many billions of dollars a year for ten years into developing all the alternative energy sources as a major initiative, sort of industrial initiative of the United States that will generate good jobs at home, remove us from energy dependence abroad, and on and on. The blue collar workers are open to this idea. They want new kinds of jobs and new kinds of industrial technology. There was a lot of enthusiasm among the actual workers. The big union guys were fairly slow to pick up on it, but when they saw how much support they were getting from the rank and file, they were happy to go along with it. That's a classic example of taking advantage of what you see with the political compass. You can reframe politics to say, right versus left is not nearly as important as the media makes it out to be. What's really important is the north versus south. All of the emerging issues are tied to the overlapping new social movements against big business conservatives. That's where all the politics is going to be fought out, and we're starting to see that emerge as people pick up on the idea that that's where the opportunities are. And that blue-green alliance Apollo initiative is a classic example of that. Is it likely that we could see like a four-party political system? Ray: It's hard to tell if that's possible, because the two parties have collaborated in each of the 50 states to throw all sorts of roadblocks in the way of third and fourth parties. The institutional obstacles are enormous. But the reality is that after this election, the losing party is likely to break up. A break-up process will start. If the Democrats lose, they're going to be so seriously out of power that they will have to change, and if the Republicans lose there's going to be a bloodletting against the Neocons. I gave a talk to national security people who want to do alternative national security programs. They represented not just United States, but Western Europe and South Africa, and South America and Asia. I told them, "You heard it here first. Within 10 years, one or both American political parties is going to break up." Neither party is in tune with the electorate and both of them run the risk of not being able to withstand the internal strains on them. It's partly because the parties don't have the ability to give money to candidates the way they used to. But, in the bigger picture we're looking at just one more of our institutions that need to be reorganized. Ray: Yes, that's exactly it. Every major institutional sector in American life is under strain and stress, because it's obsolete in terms of all the emerging issues. They're also obsolete in terms of the converging lines of social invention that are going on. We're looking at a time of a great deal of social and cultural invention, much of which is not being covered in the press because they consider it to be not news, or very soft news. When they do cover those inventions, they often misinterpret what they're looking at, because they don't have a Cultural Creative kind of vision. It comes as a surprise to practically every social innovator that they've got so much company out there. Usually they're busy, busy, busy doing whatever they're doing. We're looking at a time when social inventions are all converging toward a new, emerging culture, and that new, emerging culture has the chance of being much more adaptive, much wiser than the Modern culture that's kind of starting to fall apart. The institutional stress and strain is what's typical of cultures that are starting to fail. Modernism as a kind of culture is long in the tooth. What you often see is snatching and grabbing for who can get the most as things start falling apart -- and that's exactly what we're looking at with the Bushites, and everybody else is really pissed off about it. Next month: Learn about Paul Ray's future books stemming from his research on Cultural Creatives. For more on The Cultural Creatives, go to www.culturalcreatives.org. Tim Miejan is editor of Edge Life. Contact him at (651) 578-8969, toll-free 1 (888) 776-5687 or e-mail editor@edgelife.net Copyright © 2004 Tim Miejan, all rights reserved. |
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