Feature Story – September 2007
The Wisdom of Our Times:
A Conversation with Paul Ray
by Sydney L. Murray
“Perception of the Need is open to anyone who will undertake the inner discipline of holding a steady awareness, and who has some ability to envision the future. It also helps to be well-informed about the planetary problematique from a viewpoint cutting across specialist areas of knowledge, and to have a wider, more generous view of humanity.” — Paul Ray, The Need of Our Time
We live in an information age, but to deal with the real needs of our time requires solutions. Thinking beyond what we are currently doing and creating a new way of approaching planetary issues using the technology and solutions we humans have already created was the subject of a recent conversation between Vision Magazine and sociologist and best-selling author Paul Ray.
Vision Magazine: What shift do you see in creating solutions to the planet’s problems?
Paul Ray: Because of the fears of the collapse of the ecology, positive things are happening and can happen. More to the point, there are things such as positive avalanches of networks coming together. The Cultural Creatives (see Cultural Creatives by Paul Ray Ph.D. and Sheri Ruth Anderson, Ph.D.) are a part of that. That’s part of the evidence that a new kind of civilization is in the process of emerging.
VM: The renowned architect William McDonough observed that the future was a “design problem.” What would new design aspects of the future look like?
PR: An example of being willing to think big is Step It Up 2007. Bill McKibben is an environmental writer and journalist at a college in Vermont who started this movement. If you look online at www.stepitup2007.org you will see how he has created a large movement with college students to put pressure worldwide on all the “powers that be.” With a lot more positive action around global warming. They send out regular notices for citizen mobilization; they’ve had big demonstrations and community meetings for what people can positively do. McKibben has a new book called Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future that is quite good. He’s trying to solve the planet’s problem. If every person starts off with that perspective, he or she will turn out to find a mass of interesting solutions staring them in the face. That’s the important part.Some of you may have heard of Wangari Maathai of Kenya who received a Nobel Peace Prize for her work in mobilizing people to plant trees all over Kenya. Most people don’t think of Kenya as a forested place but before the British got there, there was a large amount of forest. A large part of the climate has dried out because of the cutting down of trees. Some of the cutting was for firewood but most of it was for farms. What happens in this situation is demonstrated by a New York Times’ photograph of the rabbit fence which runs across a big chunk of Western Australia. On the left side of the fence are clouds and trees and rain; on the right-hand side where the farms are it’s dry; there’s 20 percent less rainfall. That’s a big regional problem, because I think the rabbit fence is hundreds of miles long. Incidentally it didn’t keep the rabbits out either. Another kind of approach, which is solving much bigger problems than people are used to, is in Curitiba in Brazil (in the state of Paraná). It started out as just another big city with huge numbers of poor people flooding into it from the countryside. Back in the days when they had a military government, the dictator said to one of the leading urban planners, “You take Curitiba and fix it.” So they decided to have a bus system where poor people picked up trash and for every two bags of trash you would get two bus tickets. They also have a school system where you get school vouchers for books for helping clean up the city and rebuild it. They have shifted Curitiba from being [place] where 80 percent of transportation was by cars — it had congested streets and people were dying of bad air pollution — to where it’s now 80 percent bus travel. This has been very effective. And they have gorgeous bus stops.
They’ve redesigned the city to move shops off of the streets and on to pedestrian-only walkways. Of course, the shop owners screamed until they found out they were making vastly more money (this way). Curitiba is advertised worldwide as the poor city that works. And it works extremely well. The point is when you set out to solve the whole problem with a whole design vision — and that’s what it was, what the city needs — it is immediately solvable. When I had a company doing research in the ‘90s, I did a series of studies for the Urban Land Institute and the National Association of Home Builders. Even then, in ‘96 and ‘98, we found that something like 70 percent of all homebuyers and indeed 70 percent of all Americans were fed up with the suburbs as they are today. People couldn’t stand the landscapes, parking lots, the sprawl-—and they wanted to go back to a town that had a central green spot with little shops around it and with more densely built up neighborhoods. At that point, the 100 largest builders in the country said, “Oh, we can do that. Land prices are going up anyway. If that’s what they want, we can give it to them.” The nutty part of this is that everything we see around us that’s really bad about cities is frozen in concrete at low densities. You live in the middle of it right there [In San Diego]. The stuff that’s frozen in concrete will kill us when peak oil gets worse. With sprawl like you’ve got there in the desert southwest you can’t really afford to have the infrastructure of bus lines or streetcars. You’re too spread out. So the difficulty is we need to redesign our cities to have dense little clusters of people, and you need to have public transit between these clusters. When Americans go to Italy, they’ll say, “Oh, look at these wonderful places. Why can’t we have something like this at home?” I told that to a big developer in Dallas, and then he started to put up in the downtown art gallery district 4-story apartments just like in Tuscany. It’s been highly successful as part of the redevelopment of downtown Dallas.
VM: In your opinion, are we slowly getting to the point where we can use some of the options you have mentioned so that humanity and the planet can see the benefits?
PR: All it takes is people saying we want to subsidize [green industries] the way we have historically subsidized the auto industry, the oil industry, and the steel industry. We have lived with market distortions in the big smoke stack industries that have become our sunset industries. And the guys who are still being subsidized and shouldn’t be, the people in Texas and Oklahoma, are still getting oil depletion allowances. We have a history since the 1800s of subsidizing the next industrial development. Part of the next development is solar, wind, and cleaning up industrial brown field’s waste with mushrooms, cleaning up water pollution with water plants. What could be more straightforward? Every time we set out with a willingness to design big on major issues, it turns out there are social inventions that are easily imaginable. Sometimes in the case of cities it’s imitating what works elsewhere.
VM: It seems that we are making some headway towared a Wisdom Culture, how is this transition happening?
PR: And the whole point with Cultural Creatives is that we are finding that there are more [of them] in Western Europe than the United States.
The key issue here is: How do you know wisdom culture [the future of the Cultural Creatives] is possible? And the answer is you’ve already got a huge carrier population. The Japanese incidentally are doing Cultural Creative surveys right now. They are convinced it’s a big deal there in Japan. American and Western European’s Cultural Creatives are remarkably similar, incidentally. You can’t tell the difference between the ones in Amsterdam or the ones in the United States. They have just done an imagery study across Western Europe and found that Cultural Creatives in every single country were more like each other than like they their fellow countrymen when responding to visual imagery. Basically you couldn’t tell them apart. This isn’t just about European integration. We’re talking about Cultural Creatives in the United States and Europe looking more like each other and the Japanese looking more like the Cultural Creatives elsewhere. We have another tier below the top tier of technocrats and financial people and engineers, which is where all the people responding to the planetary issues reside. That’s the context of all this. So a Wisdom Culture is perfectly reasonable to talk about if you’ve got a quarter to a third of all the advanced countries having Cultural Creatives, and probably big numbers in every big city in the world. The Cultural Creatives can be the carrier population for our Wisdom Culture. Not only do they have the right values and worldview, but they also are the core constituencies of all the new social movements, all the new consciousness movements across Europe, North America, the big cities and the planet. One question you have to answer is this: “Where the hell did all these people come from?” The first thing is we have a flood of information. We live in an information-saturated world, and these are the people who are paying attention. There is a part of the population who always wants more and better information. I can’t tell you how many advertising agencies have complained to me that these [Cultural Creatives] are extremely difficult because, “They never like any of our ads and they always want more and better information.” I said “Of course.” It’s also about women’s values and concerns really coming out in public. Remember — it’s two to one women here [within the Cultural Creatives population]. And it’s the importance of the new social movement and consciousness movement itself because Cultural Creatives typically belong to half a dozen movements. The rest of the country: one or two (social movements). Do you know about Paul Hawkins new book, Blessed Unrest? [In it,] he’s arguing that there are 1–2 million social movement organizations worldwide concerned with planetary problems. That’s another part of the puzzle. We know that when people get involved in social movement organizations they move toward the worldview of Cultural Creatives. That’s the key thing. And so if you have that many social movement organizations in the world, guess what’s happening? The whole planet is moving in this direction. You’re looking at a worldwide movement toward change. That’s really the context. This is passing through the entire developed world, and it’s in every big city of the rest of the world. One of the things we can confidently predict is that people 50 years from now will be living outwardly simpler lives and we hope inwardly richer. If they make a virtue out of necessity, we probably will.
VM: They have to.
PR: The reason I think this is we’re looking at so many consciousness movements. I remember Willis Harmon, when he was president of the Institute of Noetic Science, talking about when he was a young man in the early 50s. He was saying that there was exactly one bookstore that carried spiritual books when he went out looking for them in the entire United States. That was Samuel Wisers, Inc. in New York. Now walk into any mall and any bookstore and you’ll see shelves and shelves of books that are not only about spiritual psychology and self-help but also in fact about spiritual traditions from everywhere else in the world. And that’s normal. This is information that only the initiates could gain access to 100 years ago. We have no idea what riches we take advantage of and take for granted. What we’re looking at is a movement toward practical wisdom with aging and emotional intelligence, and my claim is people won’t settle for less. Everywhere that you see Cultural Creatives, you see that pattern merging with the ones who are most active and invariably who lead the way.
VM: We do have so much; we just have to apply it. Could you describe a little from your paper The Needs of Our Times?
PR: One way to look at this is like a rubber band; the need is like a rubber band. On the one hand you have something entering the north’s sphere — the sphere of ideas and spiritual development and what we’re aware of as possibility coming into our collective awareness. This is partly conscious and partly unconscious. It pulls us along, but if we don’t stay grounded, we get this googly-eyed new-age kind of response. If you have your feet on the ground, then there is a certain elasticity of this rubber band and that keeps pulling you along. There is a real advantage to that sense of a need. It is a gap of where you know you need to be and where you actually are. If you only have your feet on the ground, you’re going to stay stuck in an old way that has [already] died. The whole point of the need of our time is to say, “Listen, this has happened before.” The idea of a collective expression of a need of our time was first described by the book The Image of the Future by Fred Polack. He did a massive piece of historical research and it was a two volume [series]. The Council of Europe paid for it right after WWII, even before the European common market existed. One of the very first things they did was say we have to think about the future of Europe. How can we think about this? By the early 1960s [the series] was translated into English. The Image of the Future argument is that everywhere in human history, people have had a numinous sense of possibility of the future. And it tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Polack went to great lengths to point out that a lot of it was prophecy, only it was tamed by the religious establishment to make it okay for the political elites. The fact is that we’re looking at an era in which we’re going to have huge numbers of people collectively inventing a new image of possibility rather than something that’s reserved for a few prophets or the elite. That’s what is different. We have a massively large, educated population instead of a tiny two percent that could read. The possibility is to come back to the image of the future that Fred Polack has talked about which has this kind of numinous quality. That’s what the need of our times is really about.
Paul Ray will be a keynote speaker at the Wisdom Festival in San Francisco Sept. 15-16. For more information please visit www.wisdomfestival.com. For more information on the Wisdom University, please visit www.wisdomuniversity.org. Visit Paul Ray’s own site at www.culturalcreatives.org.