The Rise of Integral Culture By Paul H. Ray

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.'

So begins Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, set in 1789 in Revolutionary Paris at the upsurge of modern politics. We could say the same as we begin our own story of whatever is welling up to replace modernity at the end of the twentieth century. Looking at the decline in incomes for North Americans, or at the perilous state of the environment around the planet, many of us quite reasonably feel that this time in our history is one of unparalleled danger. It is not hard to see how a series of disasters superimposed on each other could lead to a decline in civilization. It is just as easy to find doom-sayers among today's pundits as it was in 1789. Does that mean we're still looking through distorting eyeglasses supplied by our own ancien regime-eyeglasses that reflect anachronistic interests that are not necessarily our own? I think so.

Instead, let's consider an alternative point of view that runs against everything we read in the daily papers. The alternative is this: The opportunities before us are just as real as the dangers. Our future is not an inevitable slide into poverty and despair. But this does not mean celebrating our inevitable progress into a golden future of endless consumption as described by ad agency flacks. Life is harder and more upsetting than that.

At the threshold of a "Great Divide" in history such as this, the worst upset may be to know you are at a watershed where the given world diverges sharply from everything you have known, and have been, into the unknown. Changes from one kind of civilization to another do not happen often in history: the invention of agriculture, the rise and fall of conquest states and empires, the coming of industrialism and urbanism. An earlier generation may have been perfectly justified in discounting any further such radical changes. We cannot.

In the next two decades our world will either be dramatically better or dramatically worse. The one thing that cannot happen is just "more of the same". Most trends of the past are simply not sustainable. The era of obvious steps to progress is gone, and we face the Great Divide. It really could go either way: Our future is not foreordained.

We are at a tipping point in civilization. This means we have to be ready to choose a good path. The quality of our "image of the future", and the quality of our creative efforts based on it, will determine which way our future develops over the next generation or two. All that is certain is that the stakes have been raised.

Three Worldviews

On a centuries-long time scale, we have seen the rise of modern cultural forms; and also, as many have recently argued, the decline of the Modernist paradigm. The central thesis of my research is that we are seeing the emergence of a new cultural form, Integral Culture-a new, constructive synthesis of Modernism and its antithesis, Traditionalism-a synthesis which moves beyond both while not rejecting either. A defining characteristic of Integral Culture is that in synthesizing these other two value systems it simultaneously legitimizes the Western world's deepest, common past and aims toward a transformative future. As a result, in its transcendence of the dichotomy of Traditionalism and Modernism, Integral Culture manifests a distinctive toleration for ambiguity-beyond either/or.

Compared to the rest of society, the bearers of Integral Culture have values that are more idealistic and spiritual, have more concern for relationships and psychological development, are more environmentally concerned, and are more open to creating a positive future. According to my research, this group comprises about 24 percent of the adults in the US, or about 44 million people. If indeed an Integral Culture is emerging, we are experiencing a very unusual time in history-for change in the dominant cultural pattern happens only once or twice a millennium.

There are three different streams of cultural meanings and worldviews that lead to what we can measure at this point in time: Traditional, Modern, and Transmodern. (See Chart Below) Each gives rise to present-day observations of three different subcultures of values. I have called the bearers of these subcultures of values Heartlanders, Modernists, and Cultural Creative.

My research findings show that values and worldviews differ systematically by subcultures. In this article, I argue that these differences depend on the cultural era in which they were formed. Typically, cross-sectional surveys yield data that describe isolated moments in time. However, in a survey about culture, the data are measures of a trajectory that reaches back centuries. For example, the results of the "American Lives" survey reveal that today three different worldviews are "out there", whereas just a generation ago social researchers could find only two: Traditional and Modern. Because of the perceptual lag that is common in our public discourse, we still talk publicly as if there were only these two.

This new perspective on worldviews, values and subcultures is not just an analytical distinction: Where our culture is today is very much a function of where it has been. This is shown in the chart above, which suggests that the dominant imagery of each current worldview in this survey was formed in a fairly recent historical period in the US.

However, each of these three worldviews reflects a stream of meanings and cultural concerns that predates the dates shown.

• The roots of today's Traditional stream can be traced to Medieval Europe, through traditional Catholics and Protestants reacting to the rise of secular Modernism after the Enlightenment, up to the anti-democratic Right that persists today. In more recent times in the US, Traditionalism can be traced also to rural and nativist (racist, anti-foreign) movements from which nineteenth century fundamentalism arose in reaction to Modernism in its North American form. Today's Heartlanders believe in a nostalgic image of return to small town, religious America, corresponding to the period 1890 to 1930. It is a mythical image, vociferously held for all that, and defines what they believe are the good old "traditional" American ways.
  
  
• The beginning of Modernism dates from around 500 years ago in Europe at the end of the Renaissance, and continued to spread beyond Europe to its colonies throughout the period. While Modernism may in part be seen as an overthrow of authoritarian political and religious controls, it has important roots in the urban merchant classes and in other creators of the modern economy, in the rise of the modern state and armies, and in the rise of scientists, technologists, and intellectuals. The imagery and worldview of today's North American Modernism of post-1920s is already late-Modernism, with nineteenth century roots in European intellectualism and in US urbanism and industrialism. Conservatives tend to idealize the 1920s or 1950s version, while liberals-to-moderates tend to a set of idealized 1950s and 1960s images, and are more open to new ideas.
  
  
• The roots of today's Transmodernism appear to be in part in the esoteric spiritual movements that grew out of the Renaissance and continue to today in the rise of new religions, and also in the transcendental movement of the early to mid-nineteenth century with Emerson and the Transcendentalists. They are also found worldwide in the writings of various intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, in the New Age movement, in the humanistic psychology and transpersonal psychology movements, in the ecology movement, and in the women's movement, which all date from the 1960s on. All find major elements of the Modern worldview unacceptable, with a growing loss of faith in it. This worldview is "leading edge and subject to change", and incorporates the personal into the social and political: They reinvented themselves, so why could society not be reinvented too?
  
  
• The report, from which this article is adapted, argues that members of this new subculture are the bearers of a new worldview that may be characterized as "Transmodern"-offering hope that we are seeing the emergence of a successor to Modernism. I am calling this successor "Integral Culture".

What the Survey Shows

Today, bearers of the culture of Traditionalism, the Heartlanders, are 29 percent of the population, or 56 million adults. Bearers of Modernism are 47 percent of the population, or 88 million adults. And Cultural Creatives comprise 24 percent of the adult population, or 44 million.

Cultural Creatives (CCs) are called that because they are coming up with most new ideas in US culture, operating on the leading edge of cultural change. They tend to be middle to upper-middle class. A few more CCs are on the West Coast than elsewhere, but they are in all regions of the country. The overall male-female ratio is 40:60, or 50 percent more women than men.

CCs have two wings: Core Cultural Creatives and Green Cultural Creatives. Core CCs (10.6 percent, or 20 million) have both person-centered and green values: seriously concerned with psychology, spiritual life, self-actualization, self-expression; like the foreign and exotic (are xenophiles); enjoy mastering new ideas; are socially concerned; advocate "women's issues"; and are strong advocates of ecological sustainability. They tend to be "leading edge" thinkers and creators. They tend to be upper-middle class, and their male-female ratio is 33:67, twice as many women as men. Green CCs (13 percent, or 24 million) have values centered on the environment and social concerns from a secular view, with average interest in spirituality, psychology, or person-centered values. They appear to take their cues from the Core CCs and tend to be middle class.

The CCs subculture represents the appearance of new values and worldviews that were rare before World War II and were scarcely noticeable even a generation ago. That new subculture includes people who perceive all too clearly the systemic problems of today, all the way from the local level to the national and to the planetary. It also includes people who have higher standards for spirituality, personal development, authenticity, relationships, and toleration for the views of other people than the members of either Traditional or Modern cultures. Faced with those other two cultural forms, the CCs' response is also a withdrawal of belief in the old forms. But unlike the alienated Moderns, the CCs are well on their way to creating something new.

It is not merely that we see a new population appearing. In addition to its transcendence of old antithetical values and beliefs, we also see that this new subculture is busily constructing a new approach to the world. It is synthesizing a new set of concepts for viewing the world: an ecological and spiritual worldview; a whole new literature of social concerns; a new problematique for the planet in place of the old set of problems that Modernism set out to solve; a new set of psychological development techniques; a return in spiritual practices and understandings to the perennial psychology and philosophy; and an elevation of the feminine to a new place in recent human history. In short, it is a good beginning for a new cultural era.

Cultural Creatives are a very large pool of people-44 million-bigger than any comparable group seen at the birth of any previous societal renaissance. The empirical data of my "American Lives" survey show that the appearance of the Cultural Creatives since the 1970s heralds a transition to Transmodernism and what may well be the birth of the new and distinctive social force that I am calling Integral Culture. But, to emphasize a point made earlier, the realization of Integral Culture is by no means foreordained. Like all cultures, an emerging new culture (whether Integral Culture or some other major social force) is a response to the problems of the day.

All cultures exist to solve the problems that people perceive. Modernism did solve some of the problems it confronted, but it is no longer an appropriate response to the nature and complexity of the problematique facing today's society. Much of the old problematique persists, and, in fact, many of the "solutions" of Modernism have contributed to the new problematique. Something different is needed now, something which we may hope will be along the lines of the values of Integral Culture.

Can we do it? I believe we can for a number of reasons. For instance, the requisite population base (of Cultural Creatives) is in place; global communications and transportation systems are in place and developing rapidly; advances in the "new sciences" of quantum physics, holistic biology, and complexity theory (with their discoveries of nonlocality, ecological interdependence, and self-organizing systems) are already dismantling the old Modernist paradigm; in addition, a host of new developments in humanistic-transpersonal psychology, eco-sciences, and feminism, as well as a burgeoning psychospiritual consciousness revolution, are all broad social movements contributing to a Transmodern culture and a new kind of world. The transformation is happening right in front of our eyes, right now in the last decade of the twentieth century. In short, all the ingredients required to make a truly Integral Culture are already with us.

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The Legacy of Modernism

As Integral Culture comes upon the world scene, it will succeed precisely to the extent that it solves the problems of a whole planet that is starting to be "one world" for the very first time. Many of the problems it solves will be inherited from Modernism, either as still-unsolved, or as produced by earlier attempts to solve problems as seen by people of an earlier era. Modernism can be seen as an impressive set of cultural inventions that have been focused on solving what were the generic set of human problems for most of human history, but which have been particularly important since the Renaissance, over the last 500 years. These classic problems of humanity include:

• diminishing toil;
  
  
• distributing plenty;
  
  
• reducing plagues and illnesses;
  
  
• housing and feeding an exploding population;
  
  
• creating effective and productive organizations;
  
  
• building a more universalist morality;
  
  
• coming to terms with increasing social complexity.

This dominant agenda was inherited from the ancient world, and even the early modern world. Modernism has solved these problems, often brilliantly. The United States has often led those solutions, and it has often celebrated that fact. But many of these victories were at the expense of the traditional ways of life and of the peoples who still believed in them and clung to them. The Third World is in despair not only because their own cultures have not solved those ancient problems, but because they are also at risk from our solutions. Increasingly, the solutions offered by Modernism seem

to trail ever-graver problems in their wake for the modern West as well. Hence, part of the present-day delegitimation of Modernism is that it no longer delivers what it promised, or that it also delivers a host of problems that may in the long run outweigh the short-term benefits. Consider the following:

• In the name of creating plenty and defending it, modern corporations, governments, and militaries have used ever more powerful technologies to magnify their search for wealth and power, and for more ignoble purposes. This might have been ecologically tolerable so long as greedy and power-obsessed organizations were not too effective. But whoever reads this article knows the planet is in dire peril on a hundred fronts, and there is no point in belaboring it here. The point is that many people are now making the connection between the modern way of life and this peril.

• In the name of making viable civil societies, and reducing the kinds of ethnic feuds and religious wars that have infested the last millennium up to Bosnia and Rwanda today, Modernism has created the expectation that there will be more than one valid kind of religious belief and more than one kind of lifestyle and worldview. This rejects ideas central to Traditionalism outright, as bigoted and/or superstitious. By introducing shades of gray into what was previously perceived as black or white beliefs about culture and religion, Modernism also makes them all relative: None can successfully claim to be the only way any more. This is a key to the appearance of fundamentalism and cultural conservatism, a reactionary rejection of modern relativism and complexity.
  
  
• The secularism of Modernism rejects all traditional worldviews and their truths as false, or at best unproven. But it is not merely that there are sore losers to a debate about cosmology and the natural world. The impressive successes of science and technology in explaining the world, and in changing it, lead to an ever-changing standard of truth, and a further tendency to "think apart", to destructively analyze all holistic ideas and deconstruct all competing worldviews. But then the Modern worldview feels incoherent and disorienting, for most people require a foundation in unchanging truths about humanity, nature, the universe and god(s). Today both Traditional and Transmodern people regard this noisy, incoherent, fragmentation as a central failing of Modernism.
  
  
• The fragmentation of analysis is paralleled by the fragmentation of market economies, fragmentation of communities, fragmentation of families, and the fragmentation of the programming of mass media. In fragmentation, many people find anomie and despair.
  
  
• Modernism has created a number of institutional and organizational forms that have no effective competitors, and are crowding out old forms such as the small farm, neighborhood, community and family. These new forms include bureaucracy, the nation-state, corporations, research universities, factories, mass transportation, institutions of science, mass market systems, hugely dispersed urban fields, the perpetual reinvention of technologies, and the massive and diverse installation of electronic "smart chips" in everything to make an information society that may be networked to a point of universal and impersonal connectivity never seen before. Since humanity has evolved from pre-civilized times with those old personalized and particularistic forms of the farm, neighborhood and family, many commentators believe we are in deep trouble from all this. Their argument is that we are "hard-wired" for other ways of life.
  
  
• The moral consensus of Modernist society has been unraveling for some time. For most North Americans of my parents' generation there had been a standard bourgeois moral consensus on what was right and good, and then some time after World War II it seemed to fall apart. Many Moderns and Traditionals agree substantially about what is wrong. Many of them also agree, in principle, on the solution, though they have not the slightest idea how to implement it. Both the bad consequences and their inability to "see" what is new demonstrate the exhaustion of Modernism as a cultural system.
  
  
• The standard individualistic model of climbing a career ladder, plus consumer status display and strong differentiation by social class and lifestyle, defines winners and losers in modern life.
  
  
• It is often taken for granted that the only way to be is US Modernist because of its contribution to capitalism. Hence it helps define a worldview built on winning in life, which dominates the attention of middle to upper class Moderns in America.
  
  
• At the same time, massive layoffs in the name of "downsizing", "right-sizing", and other euphemisms are scaring US workers into silence about working conditions in the hope of holding a job. Steady jobs and ladders of career success as we have known them may be disappearing. Furthermore, many futurists say the ability of multinationals to hire labor, or to buy parts of products, anywhere in the world may create a single worldwide unskilled working class, made miserable under these conditions. Hence, there are other Moderns who are alienated from the culture of winning, because it is now obvious they will always lose at that game. This is true both of the working class exposed to worldwide competition, and to middle class "sliders". Many are caught between the Modern and Traditional worlds, more comfortable with customary lifeways, but not believing in tradition. Most cannot yet "see" the values of the Cultural Creatives. Yet they have nowhere else to go, and seem to reject most positive values. Many may be low-hanging fruit, just ripe for demagogues to pluck.

Our greatest error could be to take seriously the pessimistic temper of our times, and to give in to the fear and cynicism that pervade the media. For then we will come to believe something truly catastrophic: "Things are bad and getting worse, and nothing can be done about it."

There is an alternative point of view. As sociologist Fred Polak showed in his study of 1,500 years of European history, The Image of the Future,¹ if a whole culture holds a very pessimistic image of the future, that image will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The actual predictions about decline don't have to be right or to come true: The pathological behaviors released may be quite sufficient to bring about decline. It's a disease of belief. And the contrary is also true. When a culture holds positive images of the future, they may not be right, but investment in new opportunities, and willingness to build a good society, are sufficient to make a decent way of life, if not the best of all worlds.

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Transition to Transmodernism

Modernism has failed, and prescient thinkers have seen it coming for some time-for example, social historians such as Pitirim Sorokin in The Crisis of Our Age,² Fred Polak in The Image of the Future,¹ Harrison Brown in The Challenge of Man's Future,³ and, later, Lester Brown in the Worldwatch Institute's annual reports. Some theorists approached the issue more positively, as when Willis Harman referred to our crisis of belief as a transition from one worldview to another in Global Mind Change.⁴

Consequently, as a growing common effort, and on behalf of the larger culture, leading edge thinkers in the West are generating a large variety of potential successor ideas, imagery and rationales to replace the "Modernism" we have known for the last several centuries. The beginning of the Transmodern is a time of messy, contradictory confusions of ideas and images. Rather than bemoan the messiness, we need to acknowledge that in the face of what is genuinely new this may be a good thing, because it leads to unfolding and expression of many creative possibilities that might otherwise never be seen.

Interestingly enough, the vision of "Integral Culture" as a positive way of transcending Modernism has been around for more than 50 years, first given voice by the great Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin in The Crisis of Our Age.² I use the word "transcending" deliberately, to suggest incorporating what has occurred in the past, and its antitheses as well, to make a new, richer synthesis. Three major thinkers each embraced the same broad concept with analogous spiritual ideas in the same period (1930s and 1940s), apparently independently of one another: Sri Aurobindo in A Practical Guide to Integral Yoga and The Life Divine,⁵ Sorokin, who wrote about Idealist (later Integral) culture in his Social and Cultural Dynamics,⁶ and Jean Gebser, who developed a model of integral structures of consciousness in The Ever-Present Origin.⁷ Sorokin, at least, later became aware of Aurobindo's work, and greatly admired it.

Numerous contemporary writers also return to those same basic themes without necessarily being conscious of their predecessors. This is not just a matter of independent reinvention, but rather is an example of the ongoing effects of what Gebser called "the ever-present origin" and of the persistent stream of the perennial philosophy. For it is a spiritualization of Modernity that most enlivens and fertilizes a postmodern synthesis, rather than a sterile postmodernism. In effect, many of these writers draw from the same well of inspiration, hinting, intimating, and even predicting the "fall of Modernism" and the rise of a new culture.

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Cultural Revitalization

But the change to Integral Culture (if or when it happens) will not mean a complete and radical rupture with previous social modalities. The cultures of large civilizations don't disappear, they change to new forms. Clearly, Modernist institutions-currently embodied in our Western network of cities, jobs, workplaces, markets, businesses, universities and governments-will not simply disappear overnight in a massive systems collapse. Rather, in the Transmodern world they will change to forms our parents wouldn't have recognized. While we may grieve for the loss of the familiar, we may also thrill to the new: the prospect of an Integral Culture.

Essentially, being "Transmodern" means being for something. The possibility of a new culture centers on reintegration of what has been fragmented by Modernism: self-integration and authenticity; integration with community and connection with others around the globe, not just at home; connection with nature and learning to integrate ecology and economy; and a synthesis of diverse views and traditions, including philosophies of East and West. Thus, Integral Culture.

The results of the Integral Culture Survey suggest that we should "Take heart!" Unknown to most of us, we're traveling in the midst of an enormous company of allies: a larger population of creative people, who are the carriers of more positive ideas, values, and trends than any previous renaissance period has ever seen. And they can probably be mobilized to act altruistically on behalf of our future.

The social fact of an imminent millennium is also significant. While change in date itself cannot cause anything, belief in it has real consequences. One of the most important is that it may liberate people to try something really new at the societal level. Linking transformation to the year 2000-or 2001-may depend on potent symbolism which, in psychological terms, would be nothing but magical thinking if we took it literally. But symbolism counts: It gives people a new viewpoint, and the vision it launches impels them to do something different.

The lurch to the new is what anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace called cultural revitalization movements.⁸ That is what a whole culture does when it is willing to face the fact that the old ways don't work, and then asks, "What comes next?" As Passionist priest Thomas Berry says, "It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story."⁹ Not only is necessity the mother of invention, but we will probably make a virtue of the solutions we must invent to cope with it. Yes, something very different is coming, and yes, we can do something about it.

The cultural revitalization response is to invent a new way of seeing ourselves, and to use old ideas and technologies in new ways. It is a hopeful and creative period in the life of a culture, usually following a period of defeat and despair which had resulted not just from misfortune, but precisely because the old stories no longer worked.

Based on the results of the survey, the 44 million Cultural Creatives now have an opportunity to form themselves into a cultural revitalization movement, one that seeks to create an Integral Culture. As already noted, cultural revitalization movements often emphasize that "the old story doesn't work", and say they will invent a new story. Such movements create new images of "who we are", play with new symbolism and archetypal imagery, try to invent new ways of life to replace others that don't work, and are hopeful about the future. In a very real sense, they may contribute to creating that future.

My central thesis is that the new is Transmodernism-or what lies beyond Modernism. This is neither declinism nor utopianism, but points to important new developments, right here and right now. It can be a positive development in Western life. My survey shows there is a population of 44 million US citizens who believe in many of the values of an Integral Culture. This is not a fringe phenomenon, but part of the mainstream of US life. It is the rise of the Cultural Creatives, the people who are doing well in the new information economy, and who have more new ideas about what to do and try in US life.

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-RETURN TO SIDEBAR 2 "Values of Cultural Creatives"-

-RETURN TO SIDEBAR 3 " Lifestyle Preferences of Cultural Creatives"-