Dec '00 / Jan 2001

A Gift Given, A Gift Received: Water
to Iraq
By Edilith Eckart

Election Analysis Progressive
Directions?
By Bill Thomson

Modernizing Our Electoral Rules &
Practices
By Rob Richie

Democracy 101
By Blair Bobier

Clean Money: Campaign Finance
Reform
By John Moyers

Book Review: The Cultural Creatives
Paul H. Ray & Sherry Ruth
Anderson Reviewed by
Peter Montague

Remembrance: Robert Theobald
By Bob Stilger

Transforming Our Dreaming
By JosŽ Stevens

Democracy and the Airwaves
By Suzi Aufderheide

StarLink: More Bad News for Biotech
by Ronnie Cummins

The US Is Warned "Wake Up To Global Warming Threat"
By Environmental News Service

U.S. Position Threatens to Derail Climate Change Negotiations
By Cat Lazaroff

Martin Luther King, Jr: Global and
Social Shaman
By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.

Sexual Union, Inside and Out
By Peter Moore

A Pagan Speak to Jesus
By John Darling

Cosmic Calendar
By Salina Rain

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(continued) The Cultural Creatives
Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson
New York: Harmony Books, 2000
ISBN 0-609-60467-8
www.culturalcreatives.org

Reviewed by Peter Montague

Cultural Creatives are not defined by particular demographic characteristics-they are accountants and social workers waitresses and computer programmers, hair stylists and lawyers and chiropractors and truck drivers, photographers and gardeners. The large majority of them are very mainstream in their religious beliefs. They are no more liberal or conservative than the U.S. mainstream, though they tend to reject "left-right" labels. Really, their one distinguishing demographic characteristic is that 60% of them are women, and most Cultural Creatives tend to hold values and beliefs that women have traditionally held about issues of caring, family life, children, education, relationships, and responsibility. In their personal lives, they seek authenticity-meaning they want their actions to be consistent with what they believe and say. They are also intent on finding wholeness, integration, and community. Cultural Creatives are quite clear that they do not want to live in an alienated, disconnected world. Their approach to health is preventive and holistic, though they do not reject modern medicine. In their work, they may try to go beyond earning a living to having "right livelihood" or a vocation.

Ray and Anderson summarize the forces that have given rise to Cultural Creatives: "In the twenty-first century, a new era is taking hold. The biggest challenges are to preserve and sustain life on the planet and find a new way past the overwhelming spiritual and psychological emptiness of modern life. Though these issues have been building for a century, only now can the Western world bring itself to publicly consider them. The Cultural Creatives are responding to these overwhelming challenges by creating a new culture." New businesses, new management styles, new technologies, new forms of social organization (for example, leasing products, such as carpets and refrigerators, to consumers instead of selling them, to make sure they are recycled), and new decision-making techniques (the precautionary principle, for example) -- the Cultural Creatives are constructing a new world in our midst, largely ignored by the media.

By different paths, fifty million Cultural Creatives emerged from (or were influenced by) social movements of the '60s and '70s. Ray and Anderson describe 20 such movements that have spawned Cultural Creatives who, in turn, have begun to put a positive spin on movements that have been mainly oppositional. "Slowly a lesson has been drifting in on one movement organization after another. At some point, opposing something bad ceases to be enough, and they must stand for positive values, or produce a service that is important to their constituency," Ray and Anderson note.

Ray and Anderson see this shift occurring in the environmental movement, and we see it too. "Cultural Creatives are urging the environmental movement into a new phase. Having educated us through protests and information, some are moving beyond that now, to develop new kinds of businesses, technologies, and cooperative ventures." To put labels on these innovations, they are the Natural Step, clean production, and zero waste. Together, they are beginning to rebuild the industrial infrastructrure of the Western world. There's a long way to go, but it's a start.

A major impediment to further innovation is the fact that Cultural Creatives all think there are very few of them when in fact there are very many of them. Therefore, "They do not know that they have the potential to shape the life of twenty-first century America," say Ray and Anderson. "Like an audience in a theater, Cultural Creatives all look in the same direction. They read the same books and share the same values and come to similar conclusions-but rarely do they turn toward one another. They have not yet formed a sense of 'us' as a collective identity; nor do they have a collective image of themselves."

Again and again, Ray and Anderson stress that the Cultural Creatives are hampered by their own lack of self-awareness. They don't yet see themselves in their diverse totality, and so they fail to recognize their own potential for creating a new world. "Since they are part of a subculture that cannot yet see itself, these millions of Cultural Creatives do not know what a potential they carry for our common future." Until we recognize each other's existence, we cannot work together.

This is a rich, thought-provoking book. If you are interested in influencing our future, you will definitely benefit from reading it.

From Rachel's Environment & Health Biweekly #711, November 9, 2000 provided by the Environmental Research Foundation PO Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403; erf@rachel.org. To start your own free subscription, send E-mail to listserv@rachel.org with the words Subscribe Rachel-Weekly Your Name in the message.

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