signup
for email updates
Edge
Life Directory
Our
Archive: 2001-2004
Cover
Art Archive
Search
|
Society must be sustainable,
with focus on planetary needs
Last of a two-part interview with Paul H. Ray, Ph.D.
by Tim Miejan
Paul H. Ray, Ph.D., who with his wife, Sherry Ruth Anderson, Ph.D., wrote The Cultural
Creatives (Harmony Books, 2000), talked with Edge Life last month about Cultural
Creatives, that 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.
This month, Dr. Ray shares with us his insights on the growth of sustainable products,
on being a Cultural Creative and on his future projects.
In terms of a timeline on the growth of green business, including sustainable
energy, where do you see America at right now? In 25 years, do you see it being more
mainstream?
Paul Ray: Green business is catching on and alternative energy is catching on
at quite a good rate in terms of business people who want to do something. The last
LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) Conference was in L.A. with movie
stars and the whole scene, and being in L.A. totally shifted the whole idea of the
LOHAS industries. Suddenly it was no longer just a collection of people who all had
known each other forever, meeting in Boulder. It was very much of a more mainstream
thing. Ford Motor Company was one of the sponsors. What was immediately obvious was
this enormous, latent, pent-up demand among leading-edge consumers and people who
wanted to be leading-edge businesses to do the LOHAS stuff. Give them an idea and
a fair number of people will just take it and run with it.
Right now what we've seen is the preparing of the ground on many different levels.
One of the standard objections to the Cultural Creatives idea in business was, in
effect, that they didn't know how to market. Now that they know how to market, now
that they know what to do and what not to do, it's become a lot more straightforward.
Their attitude was, "Well, you can invent the product, but people won't come."
Now they're saying, "Oh, whoops, not true, they will come, and now my problem
is I've got to deal with an ad agency that's completely incompetent to put the word
out." And the businesses are not happy about that, incidentally. They feel that
they're wasting their money with the ad agencies whenever they try to do anything
innovative, because ad agencies are basically set up to hype products that are very
conventional, Modernist kinds of things -- and hype doesn't sell worth a damn with
Cultural Creatives. It's inauthentic. They're not particularly honest about what
they're doing.
So, the issue of people dismissing the idea of Cultural Creatives and dismissing
the idea of green products or healthy lifestyle products was true in big, mainstream
businesses five years ago. Since then, we've gone through a period in which big food
companies have been acquiring very successful, rapid growth, smaller food companies
that are green, organic, healthy lifestyle. They've acquired them because they realized
they couldn't compete. It was drastically easier to simply pick up a whole business,
let it be a relatively autonomous part and let it keep running itself. The amount
of denial among big corporations has gone way, way down. The auto companies, for
example General Motors, doesn't want this to be true, but they know damn well they've
got to deal with it.
Chrysler, the same. Ford has already made the changeover because of Bill Ford. The
Japanese companies are five to 10 years ahead of the likes of General Motors. They
may be three years ahead of Ford, but Ford's catching up fairly rapidly. And the
European auto companies are moving along quite nicely, thank you, insofar as being
environmentally oriented.
In terms of the culture-lifestyle-worldview change stuff, that's something European
companies will not accept any more than General Motors will. It's quite fascinating.
You can really see the difference between Japanese culture and American culture in
that respect. The Japanese expect social responsibility -- period. The European companies
give lip service to it, but they don't expect an effective demand to come from the
consumers for social responsibility.
If somebody is just hearing about the Cultural Creative for the first time and
they believe that they are one, how do they begin to be one?
Ray: The fact is, that there's no formula for it. One of the things we found
was that there wasn't any single path to becoming a Cultural Creative. We're looking
at something like climbing a mountain. People start in all sorts of different places
and come to roughly the same spot. They are all converging on a particular way of
looking at the world, and they're converging from different angles of background
on different, but slightly overlapping, lifestyles. The longer people stay with it
and the more they associate with other people like themselves, the more they become
alike, but they don't necessarily have the same path into what they're doing.
These folks typically are looking to take more responsibility, and more control,
over their own health care. Those who care about spirituality, and again, it's only
about half of the Cultural Creatives, are also having beliefs and spiritual experiences
that are very different than the dead stuff that happens in regular churches. The
people who are changing their jobs and looking for something that's more fulfilling
are typically starting their own businesses or going to work for folks who are doing
more green, more organic, more alternative this and that. What you get is a lot of
partial overlap and partial differences in what people are doing.
The change toward a green lifestyle is difficult, but more and more people are doing
it. The change toward new kinds of diet is difficult, but more and more people are
doing it. What they're looking for is mutual support and they're looking for a media
that can give them insights into what works. There are a lot of just practical needs
that people have, and they need to know where to go to find out what it is.
To what degree do you plan to devote the remainder of your professional work on
the Cultural Creative?
Ray: The answer is probably about 100 percent, but then let me put in a couple
of qualifiers. I am writing a book called The Authenticity Factor that rose out of
the Cultural Creative's research, because it turns out that there's a huge, unfulfilled
demand for authenticity in our society. That shows up at the consumer behavior level,
it shows up as voters, it shows up in civil society matters. People want to see more
honesty, more authenticity, more real stuff, more genuineness, less hype, less lying
and less misleading.
Authenticity is going to make an enormous difference in the way green and socially
responsible businesses behave, but also it makes an enormous difference to the politics.
A lot of the battles in the media over politics are going to hinge more and more
on issues of authenticity: "Is this person for real?" But, it's also the
case that people want a lot of transparency from organizations -- they want to see
how it behaved, what its processes are, how they treat their people, how they treat
their constituents or customers, how they treat their allies. That demand for transparency
in society turns out to be fairly important.
In The Authenticity Factor, I describe four levels, and each gets more complex than
the one before it leading to authenticity:
• The lowest level is simple honesty -- just telling the truth.
• The next level is personal authenticity, which is not only about telling the truth,
but being self-revealing.
• At the level of social authenticity -- which is for organizations like Sierra Club
or Green Peace, or businesses, or political parties -- it's not only about telling
the truth and having the people who represent the company in the media being personally
authentic, but it's about being transparent, showing what your processes are, where
your stuff came from, how you do it, why you do it that way, what you're up to. There
are fewer deals made in smoke-filled rooms. And there's some sense of genuineness
about what you're promoting, whether it's a product of a government program or whatever.
• The last level of authenticity, which is emerging on a planetary scale, is systemic
authenticity. As we move towards an information society, and information becomes
a more critical component of everything we're doing, it turns out that you cannot
afford systematic distortion. Systematic distortion is what brought down the Soviet
Union, and systematic distortion is what the Bushites are introducing into politics.
It makes people very upset. Systematic distortion is bad for business, bad for government
and bad for the survival of society, because it destabilizes markets, destabilizes
ecologies, destabilizes politics and can cause crashes.
The other thing I'm doing is I'm writing a book on creating a wisdom culture. All
the trends are converging on a wiser, more sustainable, long-term oriented culture
-- one that's not only more sustainable, but more stable. I'm pointing out all the
different social inventions that are going involving complementary currencies, for
example. Economists talk as if money were totally neutral, just a way of keeping
score, when in fact financial analysts say that money's anything but neutral. The
way you develop and use money can distort society enormously.
I'm also involved in an initiative to take solar to a much larger scale. What would
be true of solar if it were manufactured at a monstrously large scale the ways cars
are manufactured? The answer is, you'd drop the cost of solar panels down to a fraction
of what they are today.
The Cultural Creatives book was the opening volume of a series of things that I want
to do around how do we invent the alternatives that can make us a stable, sane society
into the next century or two. That stable, sane society has to be sustainable, it
has to have financial stability across markets, it's got to start dealing with the
long-term issues of the planet and it's got to start dealing with the personal development
needs of people. It's got to start taking into account that a planetary culture,
a single-world civilization, is in the process of emerging. That doesn't mean a world
government, but a more unified layer of culture on top of our local identity and
our national culture identity.
Cooperative global relationship.
Ray: Yes, much more planetary focus. What I'm saying is that it's not that we
own nature and the planet, but we belong to the planet. We're imbedded in nature.
The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of nature. That kind of perspective is getting
to be extremely common and talked about a lot outside the United States -- all over
Latin America, Asian, Europe. It's not talked about very much in the American media,
and I fault the American media for being very myopic.
Look at papers or magazines from other cultures and you immediately see it. More
people have come to terms with planetary integration, not just financial globalization,
everywhere in the world besides the United States. I think this is a really big deal.
We're moving into a global or planetary age.
Let me give you a simple, concrete illustration: three million people demonstrated
against the Iraq war all over the world, none of whom had anything to do with Iraq
and nothing to do with the United States. They just were saying, "This war is
wrong." It was none of their business. They didn't have a direct stake in it.
It didn't matter to them in any personal kind of way. What mattered was they were
objecting that this was an immoral, unjustified war. Not only was war being delegitimized
in general, but we were looking at people identifying with the situation of the Iraqi
people, saying these Iraqi people are going to be harmed very seriously by what's
coming next, that the destruction of the Saddam regime was not a sufficient justification
to cause harm to the Iraqi people.
The tendency to identify with the situation of the Iraqi people was the motivation
of the demonstrators. A basic rule of thumb is that for every one demonstrator you
see, there's a thousand people behind them who believe in the basic idea, who nod
their heads and say, "Yes, that's right." It's literally true that if you
do planetwide surveys across a large number of areas on environmental issues or on
peace issues, you get about three billion people who will say, "Yeah, I see
this coming. It's totally objectionable to me that we're not dealing with the problems
of the planet, totally objectionable that we have big military powers leaning on
people, and so on." The other three billion out of the six billion are basically
illiterate and struggling for survival.
It's the United States that's lacking and myopic on this. We're not in the lead at
all.
Incidentally, have you seen that new book by David Ray Griffin, a retiring professor
of theology at Claremont College, about 9/11? It's called The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing
Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11. David Ray Griffin is a very famous
theologian who has written 20 very respected professional books. He's just retiring
right now from Claremont College. What he did was sum up all the contradictions of
what the media has said, here and abroad, and everything that is known about 9/11.
He's got about 50 or 60 points in the book. It's very dispassionate, objective in
a lot of ways, and it just shows that we've got this monstrous distortion by the
Bush administration and the media about what actually went on. Nothing holds together
around the official story. Now that the 9/11 Commission's come out, I gather he's
either going to update this book or come out with a new one on omissions of the Commission.
The New Pearl Harbor is taken from the idea that a lot of historians have come to
believe that Pearl Harbor was just allowed to happen because of Roosevelt's need
to get into the war. One of Griffin's big points is that governments normally create
a pretext for a war. That the Bush guys tried to create a pretext for war was not
exactly a new idea. Remember the Maine, from the Spanish-American War. The Maine
was a ship that clearly was not attacked in any way. Look at Tonkin Gulf. Look at
April Glassby, the ambassador to Iraq telling Saddam, "Oh, we have no objection
to whatever you might want to do," with respect to Kuwait and suckering him
into attacking Kuwait so that they could have an Iraq war in 1992.
If you look at how World War I and World War II started, there were a lot of pretexts
for war being used by most countries. So, you know, raison de'être is a very
common kind of thing in a world where you're supposed to have democratic politics.
You have to expect them to come up with excuses.
The thing that's lovely about this book is is how respectable and balanced and judicious
it is, and still the guy is outraged. You can feel his outrage coming through, that
they have lied to us, systematically through and through, and the media has not done
one damn thing to pick up on it.
The media's another institution that has to go through a reform.
Ray: Well, it does, because we're looking at an enormous concentration of corporate
power. I think we're coming to a crisis of lack of confidence in the media by practically
everybody, because of uncontrolled power. Once upon a time when presses were small
and threatened in their existence, we said, "Well, you know, you can't interfere
with the freedom of the press." That's now become a license to make money and
to distort things, and so you've got a position of privilege that's going to have
to be matched with some serious responsibilities or the privilege is going to have
to be given up.
In reference to your new books, do you have a timeline on when you'd like to get
those out to the public?
Ray: The Authenticity Factor should be out next year. I've been working on the
stuff on the wisdom culture now for 10 years, and I don't know how long it's going
to take. It will probably be several years before that one's done. The Authenticity
Factor will be almost immediate.
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. |
| Dec 2004 |
|
|
