The Emerging Integral Culture


Diversity / Multi-cultural Community-Building Wary of Corporate Power Nonviolence Spirituality Womens Issues Family and Human Relationships Sacredness of Nature Voluntary Simplicity Altruism and Public Service Self Actualization and Psychological Growth Ecological Sustainability Values of the Integral Culture

The distinctive values, commitments, and beliefs of members of the emerging Integral Culture ("Cultural Creatives"), may be summarized as follows:
  • Ecological Sustainability, Beyond Environmentalism: We are emphatically for any aspect of ecology and sustainability you can name, and we are leading the way. Our values include wanting to rebuild neighborhoods and communities, achieving ecological sustainability, supporting limits to growth, seeing nature as sacred, wanting voluntary simplicity, and being willing to pay for cleaning up the environment and stopping global warming.
  • Globalism: Among our top values are xenophilism (love of foreigners, the exotic, and travel to foreign places), and ecological sustainability, which includes concern for planetary stewardship and global ecology, and concern for population problems.
  • Feminism, Women's Issues, Relationships, Family: The Integral Culture is made up of 60 percent women and many of the values come from them, including concerns about violence and abuse of women and children, the desire to rebuild neighborhoods and communities, the desire to create caring relationships, and concerns about family.
  • Altruism, Self-actualization, Alternative Health Care, Spirituality, and Spiritual Psychology: We maintain a set of beliefs and values centered on the inner life. This represents a new sense of the sacred that sees a unity between personal growth psychology, the spiritual, and service to others. It also includes a stronger trend toward holistic health and alternative health care.
  • Well-developed Social Conscience and Social Optimism: An emphasis on the personal does not exclude a social conscience or political concern. We are as engaged in the world as we are in personal and spiritual issues. Rebuilding and healing society are related to healing oneself, physically and spiritually. With that goes a guarded social optimism: we think there is a more meaningful and healthy way to live our lives than the current culture supports.
    "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has."
    --Margaret Mead
(Adapted from New Age Journal, January/February 1997 edition)

"The Cultural Creatives have grown in numbers to a quarter of the population without any mutual awareness of one another. Most CCs tend to think they are pretty much alone. If Cultural Creatives become aware of themselves as an alternative to the mainstream modernist culture, and also as 44 million people, a quarter of Americans then a big result follows: Any device that lets them communicate to one another will accelerate the change in society. Use of online services could be such a communication device. Wonderful changes are possible once the synergies become obvious, and we start co-creating a viable and positive image of the future, and even more so if we stop acting like an audience, and start acting like a community." [Paul Ray, ONN Interview]

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