The Cultural Creatives

One of the more interesting things that happened at the Sacred Activism conference (to me), was to hear Paul Ray talk about the Cultural Creatives, a term I first ran across in this book. This term describes a growing demographic in America (that they estimated at about 50 million people). These people have these hallmarks (among others) according to the Cultural Creatives web site FAQ: they are interested in holistic health, sustainability, and spirituality, and they tend to think in planetary and not just national terms. One of the big revelations for me was that these people fall across the political spectrum, and often have trouble with politics because issues important to them are mostly ignored by both main political parties (I knew something about the Cultural Creatives, but had sort of jumped to the conclusion that they tended to fall more on the lefty side). He also talked about the two other main groups in America: 1) the Traditionals, who tend to be more traditionally religious and also concerned about certain types of moral questions, and 2) the Moderns, who tend to emphasize rationalism and to believe that technology is the answer to difficult questions.

At the conference, Paul Ray talked about the "new political compass" in America, a four-directional compass with the Left to the West, the Religious Right to the East, the Big Business/Globalization people to the South, and the Cultural Creatives to the North. I thought this was fascinating, and explained much of the quandary that the Democrats have found themselves in trying to get elected--something that made sense to me viscerally (since I think I tend to fall into this group), but have not had the words to express. It made me understand more deeply the problem of having to choose between the lesser of two evils--however a person defines this (something that I've been willing, however reluctantly to do, but which I've found has become harder and harder to take). To anyone thinking about the direction of politics in this country, I would much encourage checking this out.