Sherry Anderson: We hope we can really reach a lot of people, because we feel the information that there are 50 million people - that's one in every four adults - who have these values of caring about life, caring about the planet, caring deeply about nature, having it be really important to be authentic in their life, [is extraordinarily meaningful]. But the numbers are a big secret. Not only the larger mainstream culture, but Cultural Creatives themselves have no idea how enormous this new, growing subculture is.

TMA: What are the visions that you and Paul have uncovered with your research?

SA: Ever since the '60s, people have been saying, "There must be a time coming when there's going to be a whole lot of us who really care, and it's going to make a difference in the world." There have been books like The Third Wave, Future Shock, Aquarian Conspiracy . . . George Leonard was one of the early people . . . but all of those books were based on "It ought to be happening." The anecdotal evidence and what some intellectuals were writing were there, but nobody had evidence that there really are the numbers of people there would have to be to make this kind of change in our society. In fact, the numbers weren't there until now.

What we have is thirteen years of survey research data on over a hundred twenty thousand people and about 500 focus groups. For the book, we did sixty in-depth interviews so we could hear the texture of people's lives. This is the first time there is really solid evidence that this transformative potential is already here. It's not just hopeful, it's here. There is solid ground under what we say. I should add that Paul [co-author Paul Ray] is a macro sociologist. He looks at the big picture, and he's been doing these large-scale surveys over the last thirteen years. Thanks to some big grants, the studies were done scientifically very well.

I'm a psychologist, and I go for the personal stories and the in-depth work. We had to put those together, because the story of who this new subculture is, is really a personal journey, a personal journey of fifty million people. And it's also an enormous cultural change.

I think one of the big advantages of what we've been able to do in this book is to provide the map for the journey. The way you provide a map is that you have not only large-scale research but you have to have a 40-50 year perspective. Stuff doesn't make sense if you only look at it over one year or five years. It seems like if we look over that 40 year perspective and the large overview of who these 50 million people are now, a lot of things that didn't make sense at all personally or culturally start to fall into place. I think that's why we're getting a big response to the book. That's what makes something meaningful: when you have your own deep questions and then you see an account or stories that resonate for you, and you feel like, "Oh yeah, that makes sense for me." Then you can move on to what the next perspective is.

Let me drop that back a bit. One of the things that happens when people start to hear about the Cultural Creatives is that they think, "Oh, this is the hippies from the '60s," or "This is only those people who live on the west coast," or "only those people who live in a certain section of town," or "only the Baby Boomers," etc.

TMA: It is all those people, but I can tell you as a Baby Boomer that not all Baby Boomers are Cultural Creatives.

SA: It's much more than that, and that's the fascinating thing. This new subculture is spread out - like peanut butter, Paul likes to say - right across the United States. It's every age group from about 18 to 70. That's as far as he did his research. It's in every single state. The income, the education, the general demographics are about the same as all the rest of the population.

When you talk with young people about the Cultural Creatives and, often, about the Cultural Creatives' values, the first thing they say is, "Oh! That sounds like me!" And then they say, "But where did everybody come from?" We start talking about what's been happening over the last 40 years and say, "Well, it looks like where they came from is the social learning that happened through the new social movement and the consciousness movement over the last 40 years." We say that, and what people in their 20's often reply is something like this: "Oh, come on, I was in diapers then. I wasn't even born then. What does that stuff have to do with me?" I think that's a really fabulous question.

TMA: It's the context that they grew up in.

SA: It's the context, yes. It's interesting to see how this actually played out. How it actually worked.

TMA: Let's describe the three main groups as they exist today.

SA: One way you can look at this is that until the '60s there were two Americas. One America was the Modern subculture - and that was about 50% of the population. If we look at that today, that's the world according to Time magazine and The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, People, Sports Illustrated . . . that making or having a lot of money is the keynote to success and if you don't have or make a lot of money, then, if you're part of the subculture, you feel like there's something wrong with you. You've done something wrong. Looking good is important. The whole machine metaphor is a key: your body is like a machine, organizations are like machines, you can tinker and fix things as if they were machines, parts are interchangeable. Bigger is better, time is money, and it's crucial to stay in control. Take examples of people we think are exemplars of this perspective: Bill Gates, Barbara Walters, George Bush (either one). There have been a lot of good things about Modernism. As we say in the book, there's a whole list of things that have been working. This is the dominant subculture of the United States.

The other subculture, which at the beginning of the '60s was the other 48 or 50% of the population, are the people we call the Traditionals. These are people for whom small town and rural life is seen as more virtuous than modern life. They use moral categories drawn from the Bible that are like psychological categories to understand why people do things. They still maintain community, which is really fragmented in Modernism, and they do a lot to take care of their own people. They feel it's important to regulate sex. They're religious conservatives of any stripe. You can have traditional Jews, traditional Christians, traditional Muslims, and so on. Feminism is a swear word, and men and women should stay in their traditional roles. Here are some people we think qualify as Traditional: Jesse Helms, Dolly Parton, Billy Graham, Phyllis Schlafley, probably Norman Rockwell and probably Pope John Paul. That's how things looked in the '50s.

From the '60s on, there started to be the emergence of a new subculture that at the beginning of the '60s was too small to measure by surveys. It was about 4% of the adults in the U.S. And it's been growing at about a half a percent a year. Now it's up to about 26% of the adults in the U.S., and that's the subculture we're describing - which we feel is quite a massive movement — that we call the Cultural Creatives. The reason we call them this is that they are having to and actually are finding ways to create a new kind of culture according to what they value and the way they see the world. It doesn't look like Modernism and it doesn't look like Traditionalism. It's different.

TMA: They're going ahead and living their lives that way.

SA: Yes. I'll name just a couple of those characteristics so you can kind of fit them with what we've said about the Moderns and the Traditionals. Let me say just one thing: each of the values that the Cultural Creatives have are shared in general with a whole lot more people in the population, Moderns and Traditionals as well. But the complex of values identifies the subculture. People who have all these values together are what looks like the subculture. So for example, the Cultural Creatives love nature and are concerned about its destruction. In fact, about 80% of the whole population of the U.S. has that value. But put that together with other values. Cultural Creatives strongly support feminist issues. Authenticity is a keynote for them. They value relationships, and a lot of them care about doing inner work and spiritual development.

TMA: Apart from just following mainstream religious teachings.

SA: Yes. However, there's a lot of them that if you said, "What is your religion?" would put down Christian, Jewish, whatever the mainstream religions are. If you say, 'Do you have a direct experience of the sacred in your life?" the Cultural Creatives would say yes. That's the difference between spirituality and religion. You can be spiritual and still consider yourself part of religion. What spiritual means is that what's most important to you is a direct experience of the sacred, not depending on what it says in a sacred book. You want to answer your own questions and you want to be open to hearing the answers that come from something beyond a book.

TMA: A lot of Traditionals would tell you that they have a personal relationship with God or Jesus.

SA: One of the very interesting things about the Cultural Creatives is that they often describe themselves as bridge people. There are commonalities with Traditionals along some values and some perspectives, and there are commonalities with Moderns. In fact, if you closely examine your own conscience, what you usually find is yeah, there's a lot of Cultural Creative in me and I still have some Modern values and I still have some Traditional values that I got from when I grew up or from my grandparents or somewhere. The important thing that's often confusing to people when they first hear about these categories is that we try to do the psychological thing. We try to think of it in terms of "this is what a person is like." But what we're really talking about is a culture, and a culture is a whole way of life priorities, a worldview and a lifestyle.

Let's not forget to talk about the lifestyle because one of the things that is often really funny to Cultural Creatives is that it's possible to describe what the inside of their houses look like and how they live their lives even though they usually feel that they have developed this entirely by themselves without reference to anybody else. And it's true, they have, but it's also true that 50 million other people have evolved a very similar way of living.

TMA: In the late '50s to early '60s when the population was more or less divided evenly between Moderns and Traditionals, we still have the same number of Moderns. But now we have half the Traditionals, and the other quarter of the population is the Cultural Creatives. But I don't think that all of the Cultural Creatives came out of the Traditional camp.

SA: Right. So what's been going on? First answer is, the Traditionals are dying off. Their mean age is about ten years older than the Moderns and the Cultural Creatives. What's also been happening is that the children of the Traditionals are generally becoming Moderns and the children of the Moderns are becoming Cultural Creatives. It's not totally the case. Somebody interviewed us the other day who was from a traditional family. His story was quite moving. He was from a very strict Baptist family. When he was 21, he said, he had a crisis of faith and was sure that God was going to get him and he was a terrible sinner because he started to have all these questions and doubts. He was working part time at a Renaissance Fair and met a guy who said, "You know what? It's okay to have questions. It's a normal, good thing for a human being to ask questions." He said that cracked open this whole rigidity he had been living in and he began to find his way toward a new way of life and he became a Cultural Creative. There are cases where that's true, but the large movement has been from the rural, restrictive life of the Traditionals to become Moderns and then large numbers of the Moderns become Cultural Creatives. This has all been happening unconsciously. People haven't seen that there's this enormous subculture growing. We think that once it becomes conscious, there's another 20 million or so Moderns who are very close to Cultural Creative values. If they thought that it would be successful and that there were a lot of other people, they would probably become Cultural Creatives. Our guess is that within ten years, half the population is going to become Cultural Creatives.

TMA: That's a bold prediction.

SA: Well, here's a population that's been growing half a percent a year since the '60s and it hasn't had any mirrors held up to it. Every time it looks in the national media, what it hears is, You don't exist or if you do, you're weird or strange.

TMA: There's such diversity among Cultural Creatives that I think the different subgroups tend to see themselves as alone.

SA: That's a very interesting point. I want to come back to something you said earlier about how things were in the '60s and in a way, how separate the different groups were. I remember being part of the anti-war movement and then I left that to be part of the women's movement and then I left that to go live in a Zen center. That was pretty much people's experience. If you went from one cause, one movement, to another, you left a group of friends and a whole set of causes to join something else. Then if you went into something spiritual or depth psychological or alternative health, you often left again, and if you went into gay and lesbian liberation, you left again. People who were part of this enormously growing subculture had the up-close experience of losing and leaving. But what we can see today is something very different. And this is where the sense of a map for the journey is so valuable.

What we're seeing today is that all of those social justice and consciousness movements have an enormous overlap in their main constituency, in the people who were their members. The people who were in the peace movement and then in the women's movement, who were in the Black Freedom movement and so on, at the core there is a large proportion who are the same people who are supporting, giving money to, listening to the arguments of the various movements. Those overlapping constituencies are the Cultural Creatives. What we're seeing today - I think we saw it quite vividly at the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle and a lot of other things - is that there is a convergence of those movements. What looked like it was separate in the '60s and the '70s now is looking like it was part of the great current of change.

TMA: I think part of holding up the mirror to the group will be to show the commonalities.

SA: Yes, and to say, "It felt like you were leaving," but in a large sense, you were just elaborating what you had already learned and taking it to a new aspect of our social life, our societal life. If you go to a meeting of, say, the Rainforest Action Network - and most of the people there are under 30 - and you say to them, "Of course your spiritual life should have some relationship to your activism," they look at you as if you're crazy and they say, "Of course! Your spiritual life and what you do for the planet, and your activism and what you do with your garbage and where waste goes when you flush, and all that - of course, it's all one thing, isn't it?"

TMA: What's funny is that if you go back to the '70s, remember the bitterness you would be met with if you changed from a political to a spiritual seeker?

SA: I remember it really well. We actually tell stories in our book from a woman named Joan Tollifson who was a lesbian activist. She had been living in Guatemala in a house full of social activists and she felt horribly guilty. That was typical. That was how we felt. Not today. That convergence is a part of who the Cultural Creatives are and what their promise is. Once you describe a Cultural Creative and you say they exist, there's evidence they live their values, the next question pretty much has to be, "So what?" You know, what is this, one more identity politic thing so people are going to feel good about how many other people there are like them? The real "So what?" is "Oh look, look at the time we're living in! We're living in a tipping point time, a very dangerous, urgent time for our planet. People say maybe we have twenty years to turn things around in terms of what's happening to the planet and what's happening to our health, or it's going to be a horrible world for our children and their children.

TMA: Of course, we said the same thing twenty years ago.

SA: In our book we have a list of the urgency of changing our culture that has consumed so much. The power and the promise that the Cultural Creatives have is that they care and that they're paying attention to what's happening to the planet and what's happening for the future, and that they're creating changes now. They're creating changes in our culture. What makes them so interesting is that if they get their act together, and if they realize how many of them there are and how creative they are, they can really be the leading edge of a massive cultural change. Not just in the United States but worldwide. As I say that, I should mention that when the European Commission in Brussels heard about this work with Cultural Creatives, they took a set of our questions and around 1998 asked them of 500 people in each of fifteen countries. It looked like from the data that they got back that there are more Cultural Creatives in Europe than there are here. And it looks like - now this is just anecdotal from what people are telling us - that in Asia...Japan, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, there is something like the Cultural Creatives phenomenon going on. It's not quite the same because they are reaching back not just 200 years like American Traditional people, more like a thousand years - to a deep tradition before Westernization.

TMA: It's definitely happening all over the world and it's fascinating to watch. One of the greatest manifestations I think I've seen recently was the way the whole world participated in the millennium celebrations.

SA: Yes, wasn't that moving?

TMA: What I find most encouraging about it is that it was a coming together of Moderns and Cultural Creatives. The whole world was watching, not just the Cultural Creatives but the Moderns as well.

SA: Absolutely. I think one thing that's also very hopeful about the Cultural Creatives is something I mentioned earlier about them being bridge people. They're not trying to be in conflict with Moderns or Traditionals, and they're not trying to choose one over the other. In a way, it's like children from a bad marriage that say, "I'm not going to choose either one. I want to create a new way that has some love and some caring and some real intelligence to it."

TMA: I think it starts with people fixing themselves.

SA: It does, a lot. You know, the core group of the Cultural Creatives, about half of them, have a very deep concern for inner work. The ones more on the periphery are not so concerned with that. They're about the same as the rest of the population.

TMA: I guess I must be in a pretty hard-core core group because it seems to me that it all starts with taking responsibility for the self and proceeding from there.

SA: I think that's true, and I think a lot of people would agree with that, Moderns and, I think, Traditionals too, in a way.

TMA: I've always thought that the way to reach out to the Moderns, although I didn't put it in that context, is that everybody's interested in improving the quality of their life. But what we need to teach people is that the quality of life goes up in direct proportion to the quality of being. So if you want to improve the quality of your life, you'll improve the quality of your being.

SA: That won't make sense to a lot of Moderns.

TMA: Not to a lot of them, but increasingly.

SA: That's the question about communication. I want to end with one thought. An image that came to us a lot in the course of writing the book was an image of mirrors. How Cultural Creatives think they're almost alone because the mirrors that they've had have been distorted mirrors. In the Epilogue to the book, we have two stories about mirrors. One is an ancient Shinto story and the other is about a huge solar reflector in the desert in Arizona. Those two stories next to each other, the ancient and the modern, both showing that if you can hold tens of thousands of mirrors that pivot independently but can work together to bring into focus the creative fire that's available - whether it be the ancient Sun Goddess or sun for the solar mirror in the desert - that's what's needed now. We feel that if Cultural Creatives get the news of how many there are and how great their promise is, they will be like those mirrors for each other and focus the creative fire to really create a new kind of culture, a wiser and more integrated culture for all of us.

TMA: It seems to me that if the numbers are really as high as your research indicates, then critical mass is right around the corner.

SA: That's exactly what we feel.

TMA: I've found, even before this, that there's a lot to be optimistic about.

SA: That's what Cultural Creatives say. There's a lot to be optimistic about. Sometimes they say, "Now it's alright to have hope." I think it's really more than to have hope. I think it's already here and all we need to do is tell each other about it.

Sherry Ruth Anderson, Ph.D., was educated at Goucher College and the University of Toronto, where she was an associate professor and head of psychological research at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry. She is the author of numerous articles in psychology and coauthor of the best-selling Feminine Face of God.

Paul H. Ray, Ph.D., was educated at Yale and the University of Michigan, where he was also an associate professor. Currently he is executive vice president of American LIVES, Inc., a market research and opinion polling firm doing research on the lifestyles and values of Americans. He has headed more than 100 major research and consulting projects and has published numerous articles on values and social change.