 |
|
|
|
Sample
Sections
|
| Section
2: A CREATION STORY Every child wants to know where he or she came from, and every culture has creation stories to answer those questions, giving sense and meaning to the lives of its people. Cultural Creatives think they know their creation story. An important reason for this is that all of us who lived through the early years of the new social and consciousness movements think that we know that story perfectly well. We've seen the events and the famous people on television dozens of times. We know that in 1955, a Montgomery seamstress was pulled off a city bus for refusing to surrender her seat to a white bus rider, igniting one of the greatest mass movements in American history. In 1961, a biologist and popular science writer pointed out that pesticides and pollution were potentially the death of nature, and a stodgy conservation movement was soon transformed into a planetary environmental movement. In 1962, a journalist described "the problem that has no name" and set off an intimate earthquake in homes across America, as women began to actively pull apart the social values that have crippled them. In 1964, Big Sur Hot Springs changed its name to Esalen and hosted seminars on human potential, spirituality, sensory awareness, yoga and alternative forms of health and healing, accompanied by soaks in soon-to-be famous hot tubs. And we remember the tens of thousands of marchers and demonstrators with their chants and their sit-ins, and the body bags being unloaded from military planes, and the screaming Vietnamese women and childrenÑwe know it all, don't we? All too well. Because the images and the events are so indelibly etched in our collective memory, we think that we know what happened, and that it's over now, and that we've all pretty much gone on with our lives. But we're wrong. As a nation, we don't know what happened. We only know the first part of the story, but we think that the decades of great dreams went away, because we no longer see dramatic events on television. We don't know what happened next: how those early movements and the ones that followed have shaped the lives of the people who are Cultural Creatives today. And so the Cultural Creatives themselves don't know where they came from. And like any culture that lacks a history, they imagine themselves to be outsiders, strangers, out-of-place pieces in a puzzle that seems to fit together just fine without them. We had a direct confrontation with this fact one night in late October 1999. We had promised a close friend that we would meet with her niece, who had "a question that won't go away." Our friend was sure that we would be able to help. We weren't so sure, but we agreed to listen. An Outsider We're sitting in our living room after dinner. Jan, a compact, intense woman in her early thirties, is curled up on our sofa. "I suppose I could start anywhere," she says. "This isn't a story that has a beginning, a middle, or an end. It's just been going on for years." She looks a little embarrassed. "I suppose it's just a psychological problem. Mine, my family'sÑI don't know. I'll just tell you about what happened last month. That ought to be enough." Fine, we say. Tell us. "It was my mother's sixtieth birthday, and her dearest wish was that we all spend the weekend as a family with her somewhere other than Cleveland, our family home. My father was willing to foot the bill for my brothers and sister and me to fly in from various parts of the country and spend a weekend somewhere. We wrangled for weeks. My brothers and sister insisted on a big golf course, elegant meals, top notch service, and a huge swimming pool. It had to be someplace that would be warm in April and in the continental United States. They all agreed. I was the problem." "What did you want?" "Well, I'm the weirdo in the family. I wanted yoga, organic food, simple surroundings, and, hopefully, easy access to hiking trails or the ocean. Because I knew it wasn't going to be easy, you know? So we tried to find a place that had all those things." "Is there such a place?" She laughed and shook her head. "We compromised. We found a spa in Southern California with a big golf course, a swimming pool, and a view of the ocean. But even after we got thereÉ" She sighed. "It wasn't one or two things. At every turn, I felt like the odd one. The one who didn't drink. The one who sneezed at all the perfume and cologne they wore. And when I complained, they were incensed. I was the only one who wanted to swim in the ocean instead of sit by the pool. Every time, it seemed like what they were doing was the norm, a norm that fit the spa perfectly. I was the marble rattling around out of place." The cumulative effect, she said, was overwhelming. "It sounds so petty, but all the differences kept piling up, until I felt invisible. We might as well be from different planets. Nothing I care about makes sense to them, and so there was nothing for me to talk about. The men talked about the family business, and my sister and mother talked about shopping. I didn't say much of anything, even though there's a lot I wished I could tell them. My passion for yoga. The Creation Spirituality courses I'm taking at Holy Names College. The way I live, the kind of friends I have, the kind of marriage I want. They didn't want to hear it, and frankly, I've given up." She reflected for a few minutes, then said, "I have to admit, though, that a lot of what they love turns me off. I'd like to think it's just about lifestyles, but down deep it really hurts. What I respect, what I build my life around, is something they make jokes about. And what they value, quite honestly, is something I have no respect for. My brothers measure everything in dollars. So long as the resort was really expensive, it must be elegant. My Mom and my sister adore shopping. Shoes! My mother's in rapture in a shoe store." She went on, a little amused at how this must sound to strangers, the aggravating details of a family vacation, but at the same time, she seemed perplexed. "My family was so happy on the golf course, and gossiping around the pool, but I felt like I was in some kind of plastic prison. I finally took my dad's rental car and spent all of Sunday at the ocean. Sitting on the cliffs watching the white pelicans soar over the Pacific, I felt like I was finally crawling back inside my own skin, breathing the fresh air, at home." She looked at us dubiously. We murmured sympathetically, hoping she'd tell the rest of her story. She went on. When the weekend was finally over, she returned home ready to scream and rant to her friends about how awful it had all been. But how could she? Her father had been so generous, paying for all of them. And her mother had been so happy that everyone was together. How could she be such a brat at thirty, so ungrateful and difficult? She felt guilty, and furious, and frustrated. Because it wasn't just this special occasion in California, she explained. It was every time the whole family came together for big weddings and Thanksgiving and other ritual occasions. Where Did You Come From? After she returned, Jan asked her friends for advice. Her dilemma, they agreed, was really about maintaining her own integrity without throwing the family relationship away. They gave Jan a lot of advice about what was wrong with her family and what she needed to do to take care of herself. But what helped most was when her friend Eve, sincerely puzzled, asked, "Where did you come from, Jan? How could somebody like you come from a family like this?" Jan looked at us. "That's really my question. Why don't I belong to this family? I've been in therapy, and this is something my therapist can't answer either. Nothing about this family of mine seems to fit me." At this point, we understood why Jan was sitting in our living room. Her question was one that Cultural Creatives had answered for us, in great detail, over the past dozen years. We began to lay out the the answer to Jan's question, as we understood it. It a psychological explanation of what happened in her family when she was young, or what ethnic group she came from. It was about pieces that fall into place later, when a person is more mature and part of a new subculture that's just beginning to take form. You can indeed feel like a stranger in your own family. The shapes of these missing pieces are so particular and personalÑyour priorities, the way you make sense of the world, the kind of life you leadÑ that it's hard to imagine that they have anything to do with culture. But they do. We began to describe Cultural Creatives to Jan, especially their values and the choices they are making. "Sounds a lot like me," she said, her eyes filling with tears. "I never dreamed there could be so many people like me. But what about my family? Why are they so damned Ñ arrogant? So damned sure that the way they do things is the only way?" They sound like Moderns, we told her, so that makes them members of the dominant culture. But your situation is not just about the personalities of your relatives (although they could be a lot more considerate). If you belong to a dominant cultureÑany dominant culture, not just ModernismÑ you think that your way is the norm, the standard, the obvious way to do things, the truth. And as for those who are differentÑwell, they're the outsiders, the ones who need to get with the program or be left behind. It's not exactly personal, we explained. In fact, your family is probably just as mystified as you are by the scratchy, constant skirmishes. They probably wonder: What is JanÕs problem? Why can't she be like the rest of us, so we can all relax and have a good time? Jan sat quite still, not saying anything, letting the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle move themselves around. Finally she said, "Okay. I can see the culture clash. It's starting to make some sense. But you still haven't answered my original question. Where did I come from? How did I get to be the way I am from a family who's so different?" Hidden In Plain Sight The answer is like Edgar Allan Poe's purloined letter, so familiar that everyone walks right past it. We walked right past it, until Cultural Creatives told us, again and again, that we had to look for what was hidden in plain sight. Practically everyone we interviewed for this book told us that they had been involved in the new social movements and the consciousness movements that began in the 1960s and continue today. Not just one or two, they said, more like three or six of them. Almost everyone said that their own convictions and life priorities had been strongly affected, even shaped, by engagement with these movements. At first we were afraid that we had interviewed a biased sample, some special group of activists who were not like the rest of the Cultural Creatives. But when we checked back in the survey data, we saw that there was no mistake. When we told this to Jan, she looked irritated. "So what? What does that have to do with me? I'm no activist. When those movements were big, I was in diapers. That stuff is history." A whiff of disdain floated in the room. Tell me something usefulÑplease! "Okay, hold on a minute. It wasn't just activists who were changed by these movements. It was the immense ring of supporters around themÑmany times more numerous than the activists themselves. And when you start adding up the social movementsÑcivil rights, women's, anti-war, gay rights, ecologyÑand the consciousness movementsÑhumanistic psychology, new spirituality, holistic healthÑyou get a giant overlap of people in those support circles. So it's not just activists and it's not just one or two movements we're talking about. It's millions of people in many movements over the space of almost two generations." "Oh." She perked up. "So let me follow this through a bit. My women's group in college, my passion for yoga, going to the Gay Pride parade last month (even if I just watched from the sidelines), the kind of transpersonal therapy I likeÑthat's all part of it?" "That's right." "And I'm a real nut about natureÑhiking, biking, river rafting, and just getting out in the big spaces as much as I possibly can. And oh, my vision quest in the High Desert Sierras! Like all that, you mean?" "That's it." Jan uncrossed her arms and sighed. We talked for another hour or so, and she began to put her own pieces into place. Sometimes, she said, she had learned new things. More often, what she already cared about was supported or elaborated by the groups she joined or the books she read or the late-night discussions she carried on with friends. It was a lot to think about, this question of how she grew to be who she is now. Toward the end of the evening, Jan remembered something that made her brighten. It was about her father. He had gone to college in Chicago, she told us, and smoked dope and was fascinated by the Beat poets. When he went to law school, he volunteered for civil rights defense work. "If it weren't for him, I probably wouldn't have started out with my sense of justice and race consciousness," she reflected. "If he hadn't come home to run the family business, maybe he would have been more like the person that I've become." She sat quietly for a few minutes. "Maybe," she said softly, " I'm not as much an outsider as I thought." Our explanation to Jan that evening covered just the smallest part of where she, and the other Cultural Creatives, have "come from." In Part II, we take up her questionÑ Where did I come from?Ñ on behalf of this new subculture. To answer it, we take a a closer look at the new social movements and the consciouness movements. Once we realize that these movements were not a jumble of seemingly endless demonstrations and high dramas, we'll have a powerful new key to understanding the changes taking place beneath the surface of our collective life. The new movements were, and are, a massive social learning process, not simply for activists but for most Americans and especially for the Cultural Creatives. Once we uncover the fundamental patterns of the new subculture's creation, we can better understand where they, and perhaps our greater civilization, are heading. Only against a wide screen background can we begin to make sense of the headlines and TV images, the mass of seemingly unrelated events that describe the approximately twenty kinds of cultural movements that have given rise to the Cultural Creatives. It is not the individual events that we need to bring into focus but something much more basic: the culture-making itself. To discern the shape of these social change processes, we need to step back about fifty years. It takes that much time to catch sight of a whole civilization changing. WeÕll understand that the Cultural Creatives are not an incoherent mess of bleeding hearts and do-gooders and me-firsters, but a slowly growing convergence of what were once discrete movements into a great current of cultural change. At the very least, it is a change of mind for a quarter of the American population. And it could turn out to be a change of mind for the culture at large, the making of a new American integration. |
| home
| the book | speaking
schedule | thoughts along the way | the
big picture | an invitation | connections
| FAQ Catalyst Conversations |
|
Website
Problems : webmaster@culturalcreatives.org |
