Cultural Creatives - Overview

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State of the World Forum is collaborating with Wisdom University around the results of its recent study focusing on an emerging group of people who in the last half century have grown in numbers to hundreds of millions around the world. What connects and identifies this group of people, who transcend nationality, race, and culture, is their espousing of similar values.

What is a Cultural Creative?

Cultural Creatives are an emerging consitutuency comprised of people who have participated in the social and consciousness movements that have emerged since World War II: the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the women’s movement, the jobs and social justice movements, the peace movement, the organic food and alternative health care movements, the new spirituality and self growth movements, etc.

Integral to the emergence of the Cultural Creatives is the emergence of women’s issues in the public domain. Two thirds of Cultural Creatives are women, and in many ways the new value system the Cultural Creatives represent is inextricably related with the fact that this is the first time in history when women’s values have been widely and publicly articulated.

Through decades of studying the values and lifestyles of Americans, Dr. Paul Ray began to notice a steady rise in the number of Americans who:

· are spiritually motivated and committed to personal growth but are not dogmatically religious;
· embrace technology and economic development but only within a deep affirmation of the environment and community;
· tend to view the world from the perspective of holistic systems’
· pay attention to world events and global trends;
· can be characterized as both inner-directed and socially concerned;
· have spiritual and psychological depth as well as the maturity needed for a new culture;
· are also intensely entrepreneurial and creative: founders and leaders of most of the green and socially responsible businesses; involved in many of the most socially active NGOs and non profit organizations; etc.

Even though Cultural Creatives only began to emerge in world culture fifty years ago, they now number over fifty million adults in the United States, alone, and substantially outnumbering social and financial conservatives. Cultural Creatives are even more numerous in Europe, and are growing in numbers around the world. A study of the Cultural Creatives has just been completed in Italy, France, Hungary, Holland, Germany, and Japan. One is underway in Sri Lanka, the first non-G8 country to do so.

Historical Significance

The emergence of the Cultural Creatives is a crucially important development in world historical terms because this is the first time in over 600 years -- since the Renaissance -- that a new value system has arisen in western civilization, and it marks the first time in recorded history when a value shift has emerged at a global level simultaneously.

This shift is a rare historical occurrence, the implications of which will probably be as profound on American and world culture as the emergence of the Renaissance in sixteenth century had upon Italy and the whole of Europe. What makes this phenomenon doubly significant is that new research shows that this value shift is embraced by the Millennium Generation, those young people aged fifteen to twenty five. While fifty years ago, the generation of the sixties experienced what sociologists called a “generation gap” with their elders, the children of the Baby Boomers seem to agree with their parents on many basic values. If further research bears this tentative conclusion out, this means that the Cultural Creative phenomenon is not only growing among adults worldwide but is being embraced by many of their children.

The data from the recent Wisdom University study has the potential to positively affect how we will shape the future, because as the emerging new moral majority, the Cultural Creatives, if mobilized, could wield enormous social, moral and political influence.
They are the Americans who can create the most possibilities for constructive change during the next decade and are the part of the population most capable of exerting a positive social and political influence. This is equally true for their counterparts in Europe and Japan.

At a time when most of our collective attention is focused on the potentially catastrophic nature of our time, a concern underscored each day in the news with reports on global warming, water shortages, depletion of fisheries, overpopulation, environmental degradation, conflict in the Middle East, and an almost endless series of other chronic and acute needs facing the human community, it is important that we also focus on those aspects of our reality that point to constructive outcomes.

This gives us a reason for great hope about the future, not only for America but also for the world. A value system is emerging which, if we listen to and implement it, will carry us through our current time of turbulence and help shape a better world. Often times when the dandelion shoots up through the concrete, we worry overmuch about the breaking concrete, for that is our world. It is true – it is breaking up. It is breaking up fundamentally because it is a calcified way of perceiving the very dynamic state in which we find ourselves and is therefore incapable of dealing with current challenges. It is equally true that the concrete is also breaking up because the dandelion is pushing up through it. It is not just breaking up on its own. It is the new that is forcing the present to break up so that it can emerge. This is the guidance of time. Our future is already powerfully present within and amongst us and can thus serve as a very wise counselor to shape our vision and guide our actions. This is the case because deeper than fear, more powerful than shadow, we humans are motivated by hope.

Background History of Cultural Creatives

Through Paul Ray’s research, he found that different values turned out to reflect completely different subcultures, all competing to shape American life. The conventional wisdom over 50 years ago was that the American public was roughly evenly divided between two groups:

· Traditionalists – social and financial conservatives whose values were derived from a person or event in the past
· Modernists – those embracing a scientific worldview and the free market and whose values were determined by scientific method and human reason

By 1999, the number of Cultural Creatives in the US had risen to 26% of the adult U.S. population (roughly 50 million). During this time, the Traditionalists had fallen from 50% to 24%, and the Moderns had remained roughly the same at 50%.

Cultural Creatives have been slowly growing at about 1-2% a year for the past five decades, estimating their numbers in 2008 at roughly 30% of the American adult population. In a survey completed in the spring of 2006 in Italy, Cultural Creatives constituted 35% of the Italian population, and most of Western Europe looks comparable, yielding estimations of eighty to ninety million Cultural Creatives throughout Europe. Japanese demographers believe that they have comparable numbers, and in Canada similar numbers are predicted.

The Critical Focus of Research

Because research shows that Cultural Creatives pay the most attention to the floods of new information about planetary concerns, the environment and about new possibilities in technology and entrepreneurship; and care about a panoply of issues ranging from personal growth to global warming, we expect that in this decade, we are going to see their emergence as a real force in American politics and in public life. We would predict the same is potentially true in Europe and Japan. Thus it is imperative to find out as much as we can about them and about the predictability of their cultural influence.

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