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of the Key Points About The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World These are just talking points that we use for interviews. Journalists who want to quote these as "what Sherry and Paul are saying" should feel free to do so. However, the book is full of stories and examples of how the world is changing, and what the Cultural Creatives are doing. To read those, you'll just have to get the book! 1. What This Book Is About It's about the appearance of the Cultural Creatives in American life: Who they are, Where they came from, and Why they are important at this time in history. The Cultural Creatives book combines three things: it gives the latest research findings, tells personal stories about real life experiences, and it traces the path of historical developments that have led us to this time · It shows a major development in our civilization, a powerful new subculture is emerging in the U.S. and Europe, and they are carriers of a whole new way of life. · It gives a whole new perspective on who American are becoming as a people · It gives a whole new perspective on the last 40 years of American history: - how the social and consciousness movements have changed our values and changed the eyeglasses we see the world through - how important the consciousness movements were - where the Cultural Creatives came from as a people, it's their origin story - as a result, it gives a very different, much more hopeful picture of where we are going · It tells the story of the Cultural Creatives, both their personal life stories, and the big picture history of how they got to be that way. · It says to those 50 million Cultural Creatives, You are not alone. You have lots of company on way to making a better future. That's important because most of them believe they are pretty much alone. Our hope is that once they know they're not alone, they'll be more willing to speak out about the creative new ventures they're already involved in. They need to speak the joy, juiciness and richness of creating new solutions that can take us toward the kind of world we long for. Maybe they'll share their ideas and visions of the future, and they'll create new places and occasions to meet each other. This is already happening. 2. The Big News: Cultural Creatives Are Here! Does the religious right have a hammerlock on values in America? Is the new American dream really about getting and spending, and being the first zillionaire on the block? At the turn of the millennium, fifty million ordinary Americans emphatically disagree. They are the Cultural Creatives - the leading edge creators of a new culture in America. One in four Americans, 50 million adults, have changed their values, lifestyles and world views (literally, what they think is real) and it's going to make a big impact on all our lives. In many ways, it already is, but few of the new developments are treated as news by the conventional media. So, who are the Cultural Creatives? The Cultural Creatives are 50 million Americans who care deeply about ecology and saving the planet, about relationships, peace, social justice, and about authenticity, self actualization, spirituality and self-expression. Surprisingly, they are both inner-directed and socially concerned, they're activists, volunteers and contributors to good causes more than other Americans. However, because they've been so invisible in American life, Cultural Creatives themselves are astonished to find out how many share both their values and their way of life. They have no idea how big a group they are, a quarter of the adults in America, and how important they can be to American life. If you ask them, "how many people share your values, what you see as most important in life?" they will tell you that it's just them and a few of their friends. Press them on this point and they'll say, "Oh maybe 1% or 5% of Americans" But with that 5% they're ready to pull back, sure that they've exaggerated their numbers. Once they realize their numbers, their impact on American life promises to be enormous, shaping a new agenda for the twenty-first century. This book tells how people departed from Modern or Traditional cultures to weave new ways of life, and let go of the culture wars. There are now Three Americas are struggling to define what the country should be: Traditionals, Moderns and Cultural Creatives. The book shows how each one emerged historically, and how the Cultural Creatives in particular grew out of the social movements of the Sixties right up to Seattle's WTO demonstrations, and from the consciousness movements in spirituality, psychology and alternative health. It concludes that all the different kinds of movements are converging now, and the Cultural Creatives are right at the center of it all. This book shows most Americans have grown in the range and intelligence of their moral convictions over the last 40 years. If anything our moral standards have gone up. FAQ: You mean we're not in a moral sewer after all? Why is there such unhappiness in American life when we are in a time of such prosperity? A: Actually, our discontent has to do with the gap between what we want, or aspire to, and what we see around us, or what we've got. People are paying attention to a much wider range of values than our parents and grandparents did: We're no longer just paying attention to whether we've got a job, a house, a car. We're adding in a concern for the future of our own children and grandchildren, for the ecology of the planet, for women's rights, for the condition of minority people here and around the world, for the healthiness of our lives and our environment, and for our spiritual growth and development. Many of these new values are about our future and our quality of life, and most of them are moral. Furthermore, not only are we paying attention to more values, but we've raised the bar on what's good enough. Our standards have gone up! We won't stand for a lot of the stuff our parents generation put up with. Remember all the put-down jokes people used to do: drunkenness was supposed to be funny, all sorts of minorities - Chinese, Polish, Irish, Blacks, women, old people, gays, whoever was different - were supposed to be ridiculous or stupid. Well, as a society we've decided that's no longer acceptable 3. Real Evidence We have immense amounts of survey research - from over 100,000 people over 13 years, and 500 focus groups, and sixty depth interviews to give personal stories of how people's lives are changing. This is the first book on social transformation to offer lots of hard data to show it's really true. What it shows is that it's here right now, and it's much bigger than we thought. If you look at the other currently talked about books, like Habits of the Heart, One Nation After All, or Bobos in Paradise, they're all based on much less data than what we're drawing on, and a much less complete picture of how values are changing in America. 4. The Importance of Women 60% of Cultural Creatives are women, and in the Core, it's two to one women. This is about women's values and concerns coming into the public sphere. If you name something women care deeply about, you'll find it has been changed by Cultural Creatives values over the last years: o Is there going to be a world worth living in for our children and grandchildren? The big business destruction of the environment affects our kids, and so does the lousy quality of our public schools. o Wanting to work locally in our communities to make things better where we can see them, and have some direct impact on them. o Wanting better quality relationships at home and work, including a more egalitarian and cooperative style o Wanting children around the world to be properly cared for: hunger, health, o Concern for stopping violence, at home and around the world There's a well-known gender gap between what men and women care about, spend their time on, and who they'll vote for in the elections. Guess what, it's not there for the Cultural Creatives. The men and women care about the same things, and use the same language to talk about what they want to do. There's just one big problem: Our name for it is "Where are all the good men?" There's a real shortage of CC men from the viewpoint of the women Cultural Creatives. They want those men who will have the same values and viewpoints that they do, but there's often twice as many CC women in a given town as CC men. One way to know if you're a CC is you're likely to hear your women friends endlessly discussing the problem. 5. A Special Time in History We're living at a special time in history. Modernism is ending, and we're going into a whole new era, one that we don't know very much about. Our biggest challenges are to preserve life on the planet and to find a way past the overwhelming spiritual and psychological emptiness of modern life. And this is what makes the Cultural Creatives so important at this time. 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. You can only understand the phenomenon of the Cultural Creatives by taking a longer time perspective than we're used to: First you have to think back to how different the U.S. is today than it was 40 years ago, and see how much the new social and consciousness movements have changed how we see the world. And you can't see where we're going in the future unless you notice that the urban industrial culture of Modern life is already morphing into something new. It's being replaced by an information age, and a biotechnology age, and a more spiritual and ecological age, and the Cultural Creatives are right at the center of the soft innovations that go with the hard technologies. A Great Current of Change 1. All the movements of consciousness and social concern are converging on one new world view, that has both planetary and consciousness concerns at its center. 2. The Cultural Creatives are emerging as a substantial new force in American life, and they are at the center of this convergence. 3. Whole new movements are developing that have the convergence built in from the beginning. The environmental health movement is a good example, combining a concern for one's own health, own family's health with a concern for the health of the environment, realizing that many diseases are being caused by industrial toxins in the envt and by new disease spread by our growing global interconnections. 4. The information age, the internet, global commerce and finance, and growing world travel are all contributing to a global learning process that is coming to look our own societal learning process over the last 40 years. People of every country are learning from one another, but also they're becoming involved in each other's problems rather than ignoring them. 6. We Need a New Story for Our Time This book gives a context for understanding what is happening to our civilization at a time of fundamental change. "The old story of who we are doesn't work any more, and we need to discover new guiding stories, new maps for the territory ahead in our immediate future." The book says we're starting out on a new journey as a civilization and we need maps and guides to help us on our way. How can you have maps when you're going to a brand new place? "If you understand the process you can make the commitment." Once you get that this is not just ramping up to the next new level of prosperity and consumer goods, you can respond to a time of danger and opportunity, at a tipping point in our civilization. We're going to be at a rite of passage in our whole civilization, leaving an old way of life and entering a transition time on the way to something really new. We have to take care not to be caught by exaggerated fears or ungrounded dreams. It's a time when wisdom is needed, because we're living in an anarchy of information. This book gives us a big picture and a new way of telling our own story, in preparation for big changes in our lives. The convergence of all the movements means that there is now a lot of momentum in civil society for fundamental change, and with the Cultural Creatives at the center of it, there's going to be a positive force for creating a whole new civilization. We live in a time of cynicism and of resignation about our big problems and the lack of leadership in the West. Too many of us think this is realistic. Actually, the risk is that our negative image of an inevitable future will lead us to fail to invest in our children and in building a better world. But if we've got a positive image of the future, we'll realize that the future is open and is there to be invented. Redefining Fulfillment and Wholeness Cultural Creatives say it's not just a matter of personal fulfillment or social engagement, it's both/and. They're moving away from materialism and toward spirituality in their personal lives. They are also moving toward relationships and connection, and toward a concern for the whole planet. The emergence of the Cultural Creatives is not about yuppies and self-indulgence, it's about the people who care, and who are taking steps to make it practical and real. |
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