Sustaining Motivation

Among the issues raised in the series of posts on the Cultural Creatives, an important one concerns how to sustain motivation for action over very long periods of time – something absolutely essential if we are to engage in the civilisation building processes under discussion there.

Previously I tackled the challenges of overcoming inertia. One of the issues there, that is also relevant here, was becoming able to see that what you could do would lead to what you wanted if you kept at it, in spite of how incredible that might seem. But, to be honest, the problems of getting started pale into virtual insignificance when compared with those connected with persisting in the implementation of a plan over decades or even generations.

Concerning one movement examined in the book The Cultural Creatives the authors put this bluntly:

In the consciousness movement, the people who can persevere for ten, twenty, and thirty years are the ones who can have a dramatic impact on the culture – because that is the true time horizon of effective action.

(The Cultural Creatives: page 203)

Within the Bahá’í community the issue is the same. A currently serving member on the most senior institution of the Faith wrote recently:

Generation after generation of believers will strive to translate the teachings into a new social reality. . . . . . . .

(Paul Lample: Revelation and Social Reality – page 48)

It therefore seemed worthwhile having a look from a psychological perspective at what that challenge might involve. It should complement the spiritual one. I am only just beginning the process of stretching my mind to encompass at least some of the implications of the most recent message from our sovereign body, the Universal House of Justice, whose rich, subtly textured and multi-layered analysis unfolds in detail what such complex work stretching over many decades demands of us. They have clearly taken into account the factors I am about to discuss and many more besides. I am not yet in a position where I can even hope to integrate the two kinds of discourse into a clear explanation. Some aspects of the psychological point of view will have to suffice for now, and maybe that is enough as it does help me (and hopefully others) get to better grips with at least some of what the world centre of our Faith is saying.

When I was working as a member of a rehabilitation team in a mental health context, I had reason to adapt into a simpler form Fishbein and Bandura’s ‘s model as a way of assisting people who were stuck in a kind of learned helplessness to free themselves from the unrelenting grip of that quicksand.

The first step was to help the trapped person define the ultimate destination (s)he wished to attain if at all possible. Once that had been defined, whether it was a return to work, completion of a college course, creating a pleasant place to live, finding friends, developing interests, preventing relapse or some combination of several of them, there was another question to be answered:  was the goal as defined highly enough valued to be intensely desired, particularly when ego boosting immediate rewards might be in short supply?

If the answer to that question was a resounding ‘yes’ we could move onto the next stage. If not, we had to work at making the vision clearer, more positive and more intensely desirable and, above all else, easier to hold on to. It is easy to see how this stage of the process can be applied to creating a motivating vision of civilisation building such as cultural creatives, Bahá’ís, and other people who care about the state of the world, need to develop. Because the next steps will take some explaining I won’t dwell on the obvious at this point.

The next few questions are of critical importance. Obviously, once the vision was clear and sufficiently compelling, we had to look at what steps needed to be taken to get from where the person was to where (s)he wanted to be.

This inevitably led fairly rapidly to considering  two other interconnected questions which had to be answered before these ideas consolidated into a plan: did the steps as defined relate convincingly to the achievement of this goal and did they seem within the person’s power to execute?

We need to look at those one at a time.

Sometimes people don’t make a forwards move because they feel external demands are requiring them to do something that they can’t see is relevant to what they really want to do or they don’t believe that the step they can make at this point really will lead to where they want to get to. Such doubts have to be dealt with sympathetically and not discounted out of hand. There is often more than a grain of truth in them, and even if they are largely irrational, it does no good simply to say with a wave of the hand, ‘It’ll work out, don’t you worry.’ Often, the act of surfacing them in a supportive and sympathetic conversation with someone else dispels their paralysing power. It can cut them down to size and allow the person to see for themselves how it all might work.

Sometimes people can see that the step would work, but don’t believe they can perform it. It feels beyond them. Either they lack the skill or the courage or both. There may be material or other objective obstacles such as lack of money that may have to be addressed, but in the absence of those, what has to be tackled is making action possible by reducing the size of the step, increasing the level of support, practising and acquiring the missing skill or possibly all three.

Accompaniment and encouragement play a huge part in helping us embark on challenging adventures of this kind, and this is well recognised within the Baha’i community as well as outside it. Without those two supports many of us might well never move an inch.

There are some useful thoughts from another tradition of psychology that also have a bearing here.

Our society sells a very disabling illusion: a good life is a life without pain and discomfort. Even though it is fairly easy to prick this bubble – you only have to look carefully at how much painful effort and determination generally has to go into even the most apparently straightforward achievements – the lie slides back into our minds and tells us we shouldn’t have to exert ourselves to make something of our lives. We deserve it just for being here. Buying the lie is completely paralysing.

This lie relates also to the fixed mindset that the book Bounce deals with so vividly, its author Syed drawing heavily on the work of Dweck and others:  ’If I’m talented I should succeed without trying: if I have to try I’m not talented.’ There are countless other insidious variations.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) gives this kind of life lie short shrift from a slightly different angle than the one Dweck, Syed and others are speaking from. Discomfort, pain even, are inevitable concomitants of life, they argue. Building a life around their avoidance is deadly: it paves the way to addiction, escapism, exploitation of others, loss of meaning and ultimately a frozen state of spiritual suicide, a living death that may even lead to someone taking their own life. Pain and discomfort are not to be made excuses for doing nothing on the grounds that they make everything too difficult. You learn to enact your values regardless of the discomfort they bring. The rewards ultimately far outweigh the costs. That is the good life.

There are many other aspects to consider which enrich the picture and reflect the full complexity of life more effectively, but I feel I will be in a better position to look at those when I have moved forward a bit more in my own thinking and developed a deeper understanding of what the House of Justice has so recently explained. So, these will have to wait for another time.

For now it is probably enough for me to repeat that there is more to healing a wounded world than recognising the tasks and making a start. Keeping going is the difficult trick to master, and remembering, as dear friend of mine put it, “You can’t sprint a marathon.’ That’s how you get from something like the building site in the first photo to the glory of this one.

Picture by Marco Abrar: BahaiPictures.com

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The Marmite Science of Statistics

If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t have the correct data.

(Paul Hawken: Blessed Unrest, page 4)

Statistics is the marmite science. You either love them or distrust them. They’re either the high road to true understanding or more damnable than lies. Hans Rosling loves them, and sees evidence of humanity’s progress everywhere in the data, unlike Hawken in the quote at the top of this post. (I have taken the quote completely out of context and his position is really more complex taking full and hopeful account of the hosts of people seeking to move civilisation in a positive direction in the manner of the Cultural Creatives, but I’ll come back to that in another post I hope.)

Rosling’s ardour is infectious as his recent programme on the BBC demonstrated. Unfortunately it’s not available anymore for downloading, but the video below, which he did for TED, is on YouTube and makes for a good substitute.

There’s something about lovers of data strings that seems to make them extravagantly optimistic. I’ve been looking at Matt Ridley‘s book, The Rational Optimist, which is riddled (1) with facts on every page I’ve read so far, and to say he wears rose-tinted spectacles would be an understatement. His opening chapter is called ‘A Better Today’ and starts with a quote from Thomas Babbington Macaulay (page 11):

On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?

I wasn’t reassured by this, remembering Matthew Arnold‘s remark that Macaulay wrote in a style in which it was impossible to tell the truth. Maybe this kind of optimism is a left-brain thing as McGilchrist suggests (The Master and his Emissary: page 306), Bolte Taylor‘s euphoric right-brain ‘lala land‘ notwithstanding. I can enjoy it but it doesn’t convince me – too much right-brain melancholy perhaps, in my case, if McGilchrist is correct.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of it all, it’s an enjoyable video that shows how statistics can be used to make presentations more enjoyable and the complexities of difficult issues far more accessible. It’s important not to lose the dark side of these figures though, as the case of China illustrates as one example. A recent article in the Sunday Times (Great Mall of China: 2 January 2011) shines a small torch into the murk of it:

[Randt] pointed out the terrible price [China] had paid for growth – a ruined environment, 656,000 deaths a year from pollution-related diseases and 95,600 deaths from poisoned water.

Note (1): I did notice the accidental pun but thought it worked OK

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Cultural Creatives (3/3): Consolidating Gains

Generation after generation of believers will strive to translate the teachings into a new social reality. . . . . . . . [I]t is not a project in which Bahá’ís engage apart from the rest of humanity.

(Paul Lample: Revelation & Social Reality – page 48)

As we saw in the previous post, Ray and Anderson’s book, The Cultural Creatives, tracks the way that the drops of personal aspiration from millions of separate individuals first combine into several different streams before beginning to converge into a massive river of increasing power.

They quote from many peoples’ diverse stories, illuminating what they have in common. This example is typical of many in its feeling of not belonging (page 101):

‘My family was so happy on the golf course, and gossiping round the pool, but I felt like I was in some plastic prison. I finally took my dad’s rental car and spent all of Sunday at the ocean. Sitting on the cliffs watching the white pelicans soar over the Pacific, I felt like I was finally crawling back inside my own skin, breathing the fresh air, at home.’

When this feeling of isolation eventually gives way to a sense of common purpose with millions of others, an awsome power will be released. The authors retell a version of the myth of Amaterasu Omikami, the Great Mother Sun, who, because of a great hurt, hid herself in a cave and plunged the whole world into darkness until the spirits of all living things each brought a tiny fragment of a mirror with them as they danced and sang outside the cave. When she peeped out to see what was going on, they wanted to be able to lift up all their tiny mirrors at once to reflect back to her in all its glory the brilliance of her light to break her gloomy mood and return her to the heavens. The plan worked (pages 345-346):

The power that can be focused by a compound mirror is vast, while that reflected by uncoordinated individual actions has little effect. . . . [I]solated actions can’t make the kinds of changes that are needed now. . . . Our new story is one that requires ten thousand tellers and ten times more to be inspired by it. Our new face needs ten thousand mirrors, each with a unique angle of vision to catch the creative energy available now.

To achieve this kind of concerted action will not be easy even if we manage to achieve a strong clear sense of our need for it. It has always required great courage and huge sacrifices in the past, for groups of people to combine together to right even a single wrong or lift society to a higher level of understanding about one issue only. People have to do what they are afraid to do. The freedom movement in the States is not alone in providing innumerable examples of this heroism and the power of example is of central importance here (page 124):

You do not ask someone else to do what you aren’t willing to do yourself. But they did the things they feared most – they went to gaol, faced fire hoses and men with clubs, took responsibility for their friends and fellow protesters. It swept them into the deepest fear they  had ever known – but then it lifted them  beyond that fear into a strength and steadfastness they never expected.

The rewards of such courage are beyond price and its long term effects incalculable. Paul Begala testifies to that when he speaks of John Lewis (page 125):

‘I live and work in a place and a time when courage is defined as enduring a subpoena with dignity. So it is humbling to be in the presence of a man who aced down Bull Connor and his attack dogs, armed with nothing more than his courage, his conscience, and his convictions. If that ain’t a hero, I don’t know what is.

A key aspect of this kind of courage is practising what you preach (ibid):

‘Walking your talk.’ In the all-night meetings and councils of the freedom and peace movements, and the consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement, this specific insight about social action evolved into an even more basic conviction about living authentically. What you believe in your heart has to match what you do in your life . . . .

There remain other significant problems which, the authors make clear, have dissipated the painstakingly accumulated rivulets of activity in many isolated places before they ever joined all the other brooks to make a stream. These problems pose key questions.

First of all, how do you build on the experience of others who are engaged in basically the same enterprise but in widely separated places. Networks, whose ability to operate is increasingly facilitated by the internet, are part of the answer (page 128):

Most social movements have two arms: the political and the cultural. . . . . . Contrary to the convictions of the political arm, the cultural arm is at least as important, and sometimes far more so, in its effects on the culture. . . . . But the spell-breaking power of the cultural arms takes place in submerged networks.

Secondly, how do you pass down what you have learned to those who come after you? Part of the answer to this second question lies in the power of persistency (page 203):

In the consciousness movement, the people who can persevere for ten, twenty, and thirty years are the ones who can have a dramatic impact on the culture – because that is the true time horizon of effective action. Those who need fast results and instant gratification had better go into some other line of work. As a number of Cultural Creatives told us, you have to enjoy the people and the process, and you need the maturity to work in a longer time frame.

Anyone involved in working to change the culture in which they live will have to face the intense discouragement that all too frequently comes when results fail to match up to expectations. A choice point torments us: ‘Do I keep faith with my vision or do I break faith with it?’ Keeping faith beyond what feels like its breaking point is often what brings about a break through, healing the testing breach between vision and reality, at least until the next time.

Much of the power of these processes is invisible, which is partly what makes the work so testing, but it can be calculated to some degree once you understand the typical dynamics (page 109):

To understand the true size of a social movement, think of a target with three concentric circles. The centre is the hundreds of visible leaders, demonstrators, and little organisations. Around the centre is a circle of many thousands of active supporters. and around those two active circles is the circle of the sympathetic millions who are touched by the events, and may simply read the arguments, and as a result make different choices in some part of their lives.

Powerful as these processes are, even when political alliances reinforce them, they are almost certainly not enough (page 154):

To change the culture, you cannot depend on the terms and solutions the old culture provides. . . . Leaving the heavy lifting to the political side of the movements, the cultural side started drying up, and the submerged networks began to lose touch with one another.

They pinpoint the missing link (page 187):

No one knew, or even thought about, how to create cultural institutions to support the work that was so important to them. The first generation practitioners  . . . . . could [hardly] manage their way out of a paper bag. . . . There really was a hole in the culture – the old ways didn’t work, and the new ones hadn’t yet been invented.

And why exactly, in their view, wouldn’t the institutions the United States already had do the trick (page 227)?

The three Bigs – big government, big business, and big media – have difficulty dealing with issues that cannot be isolated from other issues and solved with tools at hand.

Even progressive movements themselves could be rendered ineffective by the same tendency to atomise everything (page 229): ‘Activists, too, are Modernism’s children, believing that they must become specialists.’

Too many people pick off parts of the problem unable to see or agree that they are all interconnected. In the end the core issue cannot be evaded (page 246):

Cultural Creatives may be leading the way with responses directed towards healing and integration rather than battle. For these responses to contribute to the creation of a new culture, grassroots activism and social movements will have to evolve into new institutions. . . . [W]hile new social movements are transitory, institutions can turn the energies of these movements into everyday action.

Rainbow Bodhisattva by Vijali Hamilton

They strongly suggest that this might well involve something much more than a merely materialistic approach. They quote Joseph Campbell (page 299):

“You do not have a myth unless you have an opening into transcendence.” . . . If we cannot recognise the universe and the nations and ourselves as manifestations of “the grounding mystery of all being,” he said, we have nothing we can really trust.

And this quote is not in isolation. They also refer to Vijali Hamilton (page 311):

The true story is that there is a luminous, spacious energy that flows through everything all the time. It’s within matter, within things as well as within space, and you can tune in to it at any time . . . . . It is not otherworldly. It is right here, closer than our own flesh.”

This is so close to the idea that the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith describes:

“O My servants!” Bahá’u’lláh Himself testifies, “The one true God is My witness! This most great, this fathomless and surging ocean is near, astonishingly near, unto you. Behold it is closer to you than your life vein! Swift as the twinkling of an eye ye can, if ye but wish it, reach and partake of this imperishable favor, this God-given grace, this incorruptible gift, this most potent and unspeakably glorious bounty.”

(Shoghi Effendi: The Promised Day is Come – page 16)

So it’s not surprising that leaps of faith are required of us if we are to undertake these kinds of transformative processes effectively. To use Will Keepin‘s words (page 279):

“The work I’m doing now,” he told us, “is all based on faith.” . . . The crises he went through “led to a whole new gift that I never would have guessed. It developed a quality of trusting in the unknown.”

From a Bahá’í point of view this all makes complete sense. Bahá’ís believe that we are living on the cusp of massive changes in society and civilisation. We believe that, in the words of Bahá’u’lláh, ’the world’s equilibrium’ has ‘been upset.’ We can sign up to the vision expressed in this book (page 230): ‘When a force for change moves into an inherently unstable time, the potential leverage is very great indeed.’ We believe that science and religion are not at odds. We can see how they could work together for the betterment of all humanity as these authors can (page 318): ‘New technologies may give us solutions to many global problems, if they are brought to life in settings with cooperative, constructive values.’ Our vision is often summarised in the words ‘The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.’ Ray and Anderson appear to resonate to that as well (page 302): ‘The sense of “one planet, our home” is inescapable.’ Their conclusion is (page 314): ‘It’s a matter of moral imagination, a wisdom of the heart.’ (For more on ‘moral imagination’ see an earlier post.)

And the core of that vision, that wisdom, is captured towards the end of their book (ibid):

[Cultural Creatives] say that each of us is a living system within a greater living system, connected to each other in more ways than we can fathom. If we focus on that wholeness, we can begin to imagine a culture that can heal the fragmentation and destructiveness of our time.

I feel that there is the possibility of huge reciprocal benefits here.

In our Writings Bahá’ís are described as ‘catalysts.’

What is called for is a spiritual revival, as a prerequisite to the  successful application of political, economic and technological  instruments. But there is a need for a catalyst. Be assured that,  in  spite  of  your  small  numbers,  you  are  the  channels  through which such a catalyst can be provided.

(Universal House of Justice: Turning Point - page 124)

(For more on what being a catalyst means for us see both links.) I think we could learn much from the Cultural Creatives about how to play that part more effectively. Bahá’ís on the other hand have a model of how a world wide network, possessing a clear vision of the oneness of humanity, can strengthen its influence and consolidate its learning with the help of an appropriate organisational structure. There is therefore something significant that Cultural Creatives can learn from us.

An urge towards unity, like a spiritual springtime, struggles to express itself through countless international congresses that bring together people from a vast array of disciplines. It motivates appeals for international projects involving children and youth. Indeed, it is the real source of the remarkable movement towards ecumenism by which members of historically antagonistic religions and sects seem irresistibly drawn towards one another. Together with the opposing tendency to warfare and self-aggrandize-ment against which it ceaselessly struggles, the drive towards world unity is one of the dominant, pervasive features of life on the planet during the closing years of the twentieth century.

The experience of the Bahá’í community may be seen as an example of this enlarging unity. It is a community . . . drawn from many nations, cultures, classes and creeds, engaged in a wide range of activities serving the spiritual, social and economic needs of the peoples of many lands. It is a single social organism, representative of the diversity of the human family, conducting its affairs through a system of commonly accepted consultative principles, and cherishing equally all the great outpourings of divine guidance in human history. Its existence is yet another convincing proof of the practicality of its Founder’s vision of a united world, another evidence that humanity can live as one global society, equal to whatever challenges its coming of age may entail. If the Bahá’í experience can contribute in whatever measure to reinforcing hope in the unity of the human race, we are happy to offer it as a model for study.

(Universal House of Justice: The Promise of World Peace – 1985)

Just as I have drawn immense encouragement and inspiration from reading this account of the Cultural Creatives, which I wholeheartedly recommend, hopefully increasing numbers of people will draw similar inspiration from the Bahá’í community to which I belong. We have a model which contains a crucial missing dimension in the work of many Cultural Creatives – and I don’t mean a belief in God. Many Cultural Creatives share that perspective in their diverse ways. I mean an institutional framework, centred around a vision of unity in diversity, through which to disseminate and consolidate the gains that have been achieved through effortful experience in different places and at different times.

So, definitely read the book but don’t just stop at that. Come and have a look at what we are doing too. There are, almost certainly, Bahá’ís near where you live. We’ll all be immensely more effective working in synchrony.

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Cultural Creatives (2/3): Movements of Mind & Society

How Models get Muddled according to Transactional Analysis

‘A worldview is to humans as water is to fish.’

(Cultural Creatives by Ray & Anderson: page 93)

Human beings are not passive observers of reality and our personal reality, our thought, is not simply imposed upon us. In a very specific way we may consider ourselves – collectively – as co-creators of reality, for through the power of the human mind and our interactions, the world undergoes continued transformation.

(Paul Lample: Revelation and Social Reality - page 6)

The end of the previous post discussed the need for a new world view. More or less the same points are captured on page 341:

If a culture lacks a positive vision of the future, [Fred] Polak showed, its creative power begins to wither and the culture itself stagnates and eventually dies out. Negative images are even more destructive, leading to hopelessness, helpessness, . . . . [and] “endgame” behaviours, with people snatching and grabbing to secure something for themselves before everything falls apart. This behaviour brings about the very collapse they fear. . . . . . . [Cultural Creatives] say that each of us is a living system within a greater living system, connected to each other in more ways than we can fathom. If we focus on that wholeness, we can begin to imagine a culture that can heal the fragmentation and destructiveness of our time.

The book examines the context in which Cultural Creatives emerged and exactly what they represent in detail.

The Moderns, contrary to how it often seems, constitute the largest of three main groupings at 48% of the U.S. population (page 25) and dominate the media. They have great faith in the ‘technological economy’ (ibid.) and ‘accept the commercialised urban-industrialised world as the obvious right way to live’ (page 27).

On the other hand, Traditionals, who according to the authors can be found almost everywhere and have invented Fundamentalism (page 84), constitute a measly 24.5% of the U.S. population. They can persuade themselves often, and the rest of us sometimes, that they are really the top dogs as a result of their noisy and vociferous responses to all they regard as the moral shortcomings of current society.

Alongside, or rather hidden somewhere behind the spotlights wielded by members of those two highly visible groups, stand the Cultural Creatives at 28% of the U.S. population – something like 50 million people in all. Quite a crowd to be so invisible. There’s about the same number in Europe apparently.

The quickest way to get a handle on what Cultural Creatives stand for is to look at the questionnaire on the Cultural Creatives website. It’s not so much a questionnaire as a list of things that distinguish Cultural Creatives from the other two groups.

The authors’ analysis of the various sub-groups their surveys detected within the Moderns as a cultural group is intriguing as is there account of the Traditionals. However, it would expand this post into an even longer series of posts if I were to attempt to do justice to their explanation. I’m afraid I shall just be focusing for now at least on the Cultural Creatives.

The questionnaire on the authors’ website will cover the basic description of their characteristics. As a Bahá’í I can sign up to all of them, I think. They map onto our social teachings almost down to the last coordinate. The key differences are in what they leave out, but more of that later.

What I found most interesting about the Cultural Creatives, after I had got over the shock of how closely what they stand for mirrors my own position, is the authors’ account how they came from apparently nowhere to become such an invisible but influential force in American society. While opinions about them amongst both Moderns and Traditionals are dismissive – for example, they’re put down as ‘New Age’ by Moderns and as ‘political activists’ by the Traditionals – this misses the point. The authors quote Sarah van Gelder (page 93):

‘The New Age sterotype is that it’s all about changing ourselves internally and the world will take care of itself. The political activists’ stereotype is that we ignore our inner selves to save the world. Neither works! . . . The Cultural Creatives are about leaving that dichotomy behind and integrating the evolution of the self and the work on the whole.’

Perhaps I find all this so compelling because I lived through the same splits myself on my particular fairly undramatic variation of the road to Damascus. After I left the religion of my childhood I drifted until I became, for a time, what the international socialists I mixed with called a ‘fellow traveller.’ I explained some of this in a previous post so I won’t rehearse it all again here but disillusion set in fairly quickly because of the violence and lies that seemed an unavoidable ‘side effect’ of the socialist/communist rhetoric in practice.

Then I launched into self-exploration with gusto, dynamiting myself out of the prison of an habitual emotional deep-freeze by means of an encounter weekend followed by several months living in a commune that practised Reichian Therapy after the school of David Boadella. This was not as barmy as it might sound as we didn’t use an orgone box, though someone I knew had made one that I sat in for a whole afternoon with no discernible effects.

We just did the breathing exercises. Two factors caused me to move on.

One was that, although I had blown out the door of my dissociating cell, I had also blasted a hole right through the floor of my psyche and kept falling into the lake of tears that lay underneath without ever finding, in the commune’s approach, a psycho-Babel fish capable of translating the experience into intelligible terms. I was never helped to reach an understanding of why the lake was there or how I could have related to it differently. I just got drenched from time to time, climbed back out dripping and carried on.

The other reason was that I could see that we were so far beyond the pale of mainstream society that I would never be able to have an impact on all the things in our culture and practice that I still wanted to change. In short, there were no ways to heal my mind or my milieu from where I was standing at the time.

I came back into the mainstream, joined a Transactional Analysis/Gestalt Therapy group, studied psychology, practised Buddhist meditation, and threw myself into Dreamwork Ann Faraday style, until, just after I’d qualified as a Clinical Psychologist, the Bahá’í Faith offered me a way of effectively integrating personal growth, social action and spiritual understanding into a sustainable way of life that offered my best hope of systematically influencing our society to heal itself.

The book Cultural Creatives teems with examples of similar trajectories to an amazing diversity of different targets that somehow in the end come to seem members of the same family.

The authors are well aware that the consciousness movement had more than a touch of self-indulgence. May be it still has.

Eat Pray Love, the book and the film, are linked to consciousness raising and have come in for their share of criticism on this basis. A Sunday Times review (there’s no point in giving a link as they charge for the privilege of reading their material on the web nowadays) of Eat Pray Love states:

Liz is the Carrie Bradshaw of spiritual enlightenment – a selfish new-age narcissist who can think only of her own needs and desires. The film is full of gross national caricatures and trite self-helpy wisdom.

An interview with Margarette Driscoll in the same newspaper (19.09.10) shows a different possibility:

The key to it all lay in connecting with something spiritual inside herself, something we seem to have lost in our secular, materialist age. ‘We feel the lack of the spirit but there’s the idea that if you have faith it’s a little foolish, that you must have shut your brain off at some point; but there must be room in our lives for a brain and a soul,’ she says . . . .

We have to decide for ourselves whether the contempt of the reviewer is all part of modernism’s automatic sneer in the face of what it regards as flaky way-out alternatives or whether it’s a well founded reaction to a genuine element of self-indulgence in the film at least.

Ray and Anderson are well aware that not every cultural creative got to where (s)he is by some kind of religious experience. They write (page 103):

Practically everyone we interviewed for this book told us that they had been involved in the new social movements and the consciousness movements that began in the 1960s and continue today.

They are not unsympathetic to the consciousness movement (page 173):

The premise of the consciousness movements was that the achievements attributed uniquely to saints, poets, and great thinkers are in fact our common inheritance.

But are aware (page 174) that the spiritual quest can be hijacked by the ego:

In the long view, the first generation of the consciousness movement was focused on what might be called personal waking up. Its questions were individual. Often painfully honest and intimate, they appeared from the outside to be astoundingly egocentric.

They quote Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (page 189):

‘[S]piritual materialism’ . . .  means . . ‘deceiving ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques.’

They realise this was out of step with the true purpose of such disciplines as meditation (page 175):

The purpose of inner work, in the East, had never been only for the benefit of the individual. All that effort could not be just for yourself.  [It was] for all beings.

On balance though they feel that the consciousness movement played an honourable part in the combination of social forces that has led us to this point, where 50 million people are working quietly for radical cultural change of an essential and benign form.

They look at the other dimensions to this process, including the movements for peace, for women, for freedom and for the well being of the planet, and examine in depth how they have developed and converged over time mainly since the 60s. All I can do here is give some brief extracts to convey the flavour. They describe (page 210):

.  . . a growing worldwide political convergence: . . . the cultural arms of these movements have been growing more similar for a good twenty years. It’s the political convergence that is the latecomer. . .

Part of this is facilitated by a shift from a negative approach to a more positive one (ibid.):

The old political movement pattern that was evident in the 1960s was built around opposition and conflict, Some observers still talk about protest movements as if what defines a movement is what it’s against. . . . . Gradually, the basis of collective identity has shifted from protest to a positive agenda and a vision of the future. It took a decade or two for the antiwar movement to redefine itself as a peace movement, and for the women’s movement to outgrow blaming, even hating, men and decide what it was for. One of the pivotal influences in this change was the consciousness movements. Spirituality and psychology brought in new ways of thinking . .

This indicates the constructive role of consciousness movements in spite of the reservations about their possible self-centredness.

There are also social structures in the mainstream that are contributing, such as NGOs (page 214):

. . . each group is learning to work with others and to leverage their efforts. This makes NGOs very successful in getting public attention when there’s an outrage. At long last, the moral conscience of the world is slowly being awakened for people who are not one’s own tribe or nation.

Slowly becoming apparent is a core of common value and purpose within all these diverse trends (page 216):

The evidence of convergence is almost everywhere. . . . .[Ralph H.]Turner believes that the conviction underlying all the new movements is that “a sense of worth, of meaning in life, is a fundamental human right that must be protected by our social institutions.”

What is even more fascinating, if that is possible, is the way that these movements interconnect and overlap and the role that Cultural Creatives have in that (page 218):

Each of the five movements we examined shares from 40-80% of its support (both sympathisers and activists) in common with the others. Wherever the movements share a common population, that population contains proportionately far more Cultural Creatives than you’d expect. Cultural Creatives stand at the intersection of these movements. In effect, they provide the cultural glue that hold the movements together. . . . . .What does all this mean? Are the Cultural Creatives shaping the movements, or are the movements shaping the Cultural Creatives? It’s both.

And there is probably a shared realisation that, for each of them, (page 221):

. . . . the interconnecting concerns shaping [a] movement reach even wider, revealing once again that the problems are simply too massive for any narrow solutions to work.

This has brought us to the point at which we can attempt to look at where all this leaves us now. But that must wait for another post.

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Cultural Creatives (1/3): People of the Parenthesis

Metamorphosis

[We are also facing] a breathtakingly dangerous tipping point for our civilisation and our planet. Our need to discover a way through is the most urgent, most central question of our time.

(Cultural Creatives: Page 236)

In the consciousness movement, the people who can persevere for ten, twenty, and thirty years are the ones who can have a dramatic impact on the culture – because that is the true time horizon of effective action.

(Op. cit.: page 203)

Recently I reviewed a book I hadn’t even been looking for before I bought it. It was Where on Earth is Heaven? Towards the end Stedall mentions a couple of books that ignited my interest. The first of these I’ve now finished reading: The Cultural Creatives by Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson. I did a post in November as a taster, promising to follow it up if the book as a whole proved as good as its beginning. It did and here’s the follow up.

It’s a fascinating analysis, based on detailed surveys, of how the balance of American culture, and by implication Europe’s as well probably, has shifted since the 60s. There will be much to say about that later.

When I decided to do a full review of the book I thought I’d do just one post and that would be enough. The more I thought about it, the more impossible that seemed. I felt that its compelling fascination would be conveyed better if I took my time. Of course, that could well be the wrong decision and terminal boredom could have set in for everyone else long before I get to the last post on the subject. It’ll be more of a last post in a different sense in that case.

To convey why the book resonated so much with me it made sense to start, not at the beginning of the book, but nearer to the end. It’s towards the end that the authors convey a sense of the exact nature of the cultural change we are all experiencing but from the point of view of the Cultural Creatives.

A Tipping Point

This group, who constitute 25% of the population of America (i.e. about 50 million people), feel we are in a period of transition. The authors call it the Between.

The Between is the time between worldviews, values and ways of life; a time between stories. The transition period, [John] Naisbitt concluded, “is a great and yeasty time, filled with opportunity.” But it is so, he added, only on two critical conditions: if we can “make uncertainty our friend,” and “if we can only get a clear sense, a clear conception, a clear vision of the road ahead.”

(Page 235)

Ray and Anderson (page 236) are cautious and see this period as a ‘dangerous tipping point.’ They describe the position of Cultural Creatives (page 40) as seeing ‘an antique system that is noisily, chaotically shaking itself to pieces.’

This is not all negative (page 33):

. . . this era is at least as much about cultural innovation as it is about decline and decay of established forms.

This, for Bahá’ís, has echoes of what our Teachings repeatedly emphasise. For example:

“Soon,” Bahá’u’lláh Himself has prophesied, “will the present-day order be rolled up, and a new one spread out in its stead.” And again: “By Myself! The day is approaching when We will have rolled up the world and all that is therein, and spread out a new Order in its stead.”

(Shoghi Effendi: The Promised Day Is Come – page 17)

And the similarities don’t end there. They contend (page 244):

The creative response to today’s Between is going to be one that bridges differences. . . . . .

Building Bridges

They draw support from William Ury’s Getting to Peace, which describes pre-agricultural societies as having worked hard at preventing and resolving conflict.

He feels that in our increasingly interdependent world, we have “the most promising opportunity in 10,000 years to create a co-culture of co-existence, cooperation, and constructive conflict.”

This issue of interdependence is key for Bahá’ís as well:

“The well-being of mankind,” [Bahá’u’lláh] declares, “its peace and security are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established.”

(Shoghi Effendi: The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh – page 203)

Ray and Anderson, thinking along the same lines and quoting Mary Ford, write (page 21) :

You have to have a definition of self that’s bigger than [society's] definitions, that’s grounded in how connected we all are to each other.

The how of course is easier said than done, and we’ll be looking at that in more detail later. They describe at least one of the obstacles very clearly (page 222):

Moderns and Traditionals don’t see themselves as members of an interconnected planetary community, and don’t see their problems as interconnected either.

(We’ll be coming back to Traditionals in the next post.) Whereas Cultural Creatives, and Bahá’ís of course as well, do see themselves very much this way, Cultural Creatives (page 94)

. . .  want to see the big, inclusive picture, and they want to work with the whole system, with all the players. They regard themselves as synthesisers and healers, not just on the personal level but on the planetary level too.

The authors spell out what they feel the fragmentation of the dominant worldview of Modernism means for us all (pages 226-227):

As individuals, we know that we are part of a living system and that what we do to part of that system affects all of us sooner or later. But as a society we don’t know this.

I’m not sure how true the first part is for all individuals but it’s certainly true that our society as a whole has not grasped this holistic view yet. They place much of the blame for this on the fragmented perspective of modernism (page 92), which they see as the dominant worldview in the States, both in terms of the percentage of the population who strongly subscribe to it (48%) and in terms of control of the media:

Cultural Creatives are sick of the fragmentation of Modernism.

Even more damningly they write (page 294):

Modernism lives with a hole where wisdom ought to be.

Cultural Creatives strive for a more integrated perspective.  They think of themselves ‘as an interwoven piece of nature’ (page 9). In ways reminiscent of  Iain McGilchrist’s descriptions (see review on this blog), they have a right-brain feel about them (page 11):

. . . . they want the big picture, and they are powerfully attuned to the importance of whole systems. They are good at synthesing from very disparate, fragmented pieces of information.

The writers quote Parker Palmer approvingly (page 20) when he states:

. . . . that movements begin when people refuse to live divided lives.

But they acknowledge it is hard to see how this can be applied to building a new society (page 64):

. . . we are in the midst of a transition. Mapmakers must be content with seeing the new territory from afar – which means their map will have serious limits.

But we cannot simply leave it there (page 234):

. . . because all of us now are ‘people of the parenthesis,’ as Jean Houston calls us, we must break free of our restricted worldview and make our way into new territory.

And those are the ideas that are developed throughout the book as a whole. Consideration of them must wait till next time.

Bahá’ís share this perspective and these aspirations while recognising that Bahá’ís alone can never bring about such changes:

To say that the process of building a new civilisation is a conscious one does not imply that the outcome depends exclusively on the believers’ initiatives. . . . emphasis on the contributions Bahá’ís are to make to the civilisation-building process is not intended to diminish the significance of efforts being exerted by others.

(Paul Lample: Revelation & Social Reality – page 109: see review)

It is hugely encouraging to feel that there are up to 50 million people in America alone working towards broadly the same ends, manifesting the spirit of the age

working through mankind as a whole, tearing down barriers to world unity and forging humankind into a unified body in the fires of suffering and experience.

(Universal House of Justice Messages : 1963-1986, page 126)

Even at this stage then it should be clear why I was excited to find this book. Whether I have made it as exciting for you as yet remains to be seen.

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Cultural Creatives

Before you start reading this post you might like to complete an easy and interesting questionnaire at this link.

What put me on to this book were the closing pages of Jonathan Stedall’s Where on Earth is Heaven which I reviewed earlier and came back to again later. I am still at a very early stage of reading it but couldn’t resist presenting a taster in this post, so much of it resonates with what I also feel, as a Bahá’í,  is critically important. They comment concerning core values of Cultural Creatives (page 8):

Authenticity means that your actions are consistent with what you believe and what you say.

Bahá’u’lláh emphasises the exact same quality as characteristic of the truly spiritual:

Their outward conduct is but a reflection of their inward life, and their inward life a mirror of their outward conduct.

(Gleanings: XXVI)

But there is more: when they quote one of their first illustrative examples of someone whose life completely changed, what should that change be linked to but silence (page 19):

Your favourite niece leaves a message on your answering machine with the cryptic announcement, “We need to talk.” You invite her to lunch. After a pleasant meal with small talk, she says, “Last week I went on my first silent retreat. Eight days.” . . . . . I feel almost transparent, as if I’ve emerged brand new and rather delicate from a thick cocoon of cotton batting I’ve been wrapped up in all my life. And in the most ordinary moments, joy catches me by surprise.”

Silence is described in powerful terms by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá:

Bahá’u’lláh says there is a sign (from God) in every phenomenon: the sign of the intellect is contemplation and the sign of contemplation is silence, because it is impossible for a man to do two things at one time—he cannot both speak and meditate. It is an axiomatic fact that while you meditate you are speaking with your own spirit. In that state of mind you put certain questions to your spirit and the spirit answers: the light breaks forth and the reality is revealed.  ( ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Paris Talks page 174)

And it was the core of Jill Bolte Taylor‘s experience as described in her YouTube video.

I keep falling over correspondences like this as I keep on reading: I plan to come back to them in more detail later. The questionnaire covers many of the most obvious so, if you passed on that earlier, now might be a good time to give it a go.

Cultural Creatives constitute 25% of the U.S. population but (page 39):

They have little notion there are 50 million of them. They do not know that they have the potential to shape the life of twenty-first century America.

Well, at least the Bahá’ís world-wide are aware of one another and have a blueprint for how they can work together, but just think what 50 million people could do with that level of awareness and co-operation. Whether Cultural Creatives reach that point is left as a question at this stage (page 40):

Once they discover their common values, will they work together to implement them?

Just as it sounds as though we have something to learn from them in terms of the rich diversity of their individual experiences, it looks as though they have something to learn from us as well in terms of working together with a conscious common purpose that encourages diversity within it.

Before I leave this topic for now I’d like to quote the thought with which the authors close the chapter (page 64):

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.

Mariam MacGillis, a Dominican sister who founded Genesis Farm in Caldwell, New Jersey, tells a story that makes clear why this matters. An old woman in the Middle East planted a date: “When you plant a date, you know you’ll never eat from the date tree,” Miriam says, “because it takes about eighty years to grow roots deep enough to go to the scarce water. The date trees get so buffeted in that time by windstorms and droughts that for the most part, the tree looks like it’s dying. If you didn’t understand its process, you could easily cut it down. But if you understand the process, you can make the commitment. You have to have an image of what will happen. Once you do, it makes all the difference.”

I think there’s undoubtedly a lesson in that for all of us. Maybe it’s what Bahá’u’lláh means (Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh: page 156) by observing silence and looking ‘at the end of things.’

In any case, I think I’ll be writing about this fascinating book  again in the not-too-distant future.

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