Humanity at a Crossroads

Third Saturday Seminar 2005-2006 – Third Meeting – Saturday, November 19, 2005, 9:30am – 12:00n “Level of Human Existence: Cultural Creatives and Spiritual Dynamics.” (note that we are meeting in the building next door to our usual venue.

“As of the year 2000, there are 50 million adults in the United States who have the worldview, values and lifestyle of the Cultural Creatives. (There are probably about 80-90 million Cultural Creatives in the European Union as well.)”

A little while ago someone loaned me a 24 minute videotaped interview of Paul Ray, a sociologist who surveyed a lot of people and has determined there are three kinds of people.  Traditionalists (The world according to Pat Robertson), Modernists (The world according to Time Magazine), and Cultural Creatives (who don’t quite fit either mold).  He and his wife Sherry wrote a book by that name, and apparently coined the term.

We will watch the video, and discuss it, and a few other, related ideas which are listed in the “Reading Material” below and all can be accessed on the Internet.  Needless to say, nobody has time to cover all that material, but I hope some of you will find some that appeals to you.

I have never felt the “onrush of history” as I do now.  That includes three military tours in Vietnam and the end of the Soviet Union (The end of the “cold war”).  I feel the ideological tension building which is fueled by fear.   We sustained the “cold war” for 40 years by sustaining our fear against what we perceived to be our ideological opposites.  Wecame  very close (see Robert S. McNamara, The Fog of War)on a couple of occasions of making war turning very very hot.  We invented MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction, thinking that no one would see a benefit from ending life as we know it.  We spend an incredible amount of money, and lost many of our people in Korea, Vietnam and other adventures.  Was the investment worth it? (This is an open question and probably has different answers for different individuals at different times.)

Never before have had such power and resources and access as available as they are today to the whims of the few from the most to the least powerful.  Never has foreign policy had such great potential consequences, good and bad.

Bring yourself and your thoughts to share.

Reading Material:

Cultural Creatives
A Culture Gets Creative
by Sarah Ruth van Gelder
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=399

Are you a cultural creative? (a questionnaire)
http://www.culturalcreatives.org/questionnaire.html

An essay about a 4 party system.
http://www.culturalcreatives.org/Library/docs/NewPoliticalCompassV73.pdf

Moral Politics:
Cultural Creatives and Spiral Dynamics speak more to the levels of human existence as experienced by or observed in the individual, Lakoff’s work speaks more in terms of dynamics of human social interaction as it affects community and political organization

Metaphor, Morality, and Politics
Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust. An early and abbreviated discussion of the themes in George Lakoff’s book, Moral Politics
Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, Or,Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust by George Lakoff, 1995
http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/lakoff/New_School.pdf
or in html format
http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html

George Lakoff – biography
http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/people/lakoff

Spiral dynamics:

http://www.clarewgraves.com/home.html

Popular Quotations from Clare Graves . .
http://www.clarewgraves.com/theory_content/quotes.html

Levels of Existence as Seen by Dr. Clare W. Graves
from… “Human Nature Prepares for a Momentous Leap,” The Futurist, April 1974
http://www.clarewgraves.com/theory_content/CG_FuturistTable.htm

If you think Glare graves was the only person to investigate levels of human existence, then guess again.
Table comparing Graves’ Research to Other Theories (This is for the lover of the arcane.)
http://www.clarewgraves.com/theory_content/compared/CGcomp1.htm

Overview of Grave Theory – DR. GRAVES on ASSESSMENT
http://www.clarewgraves.com/theory_content/assessment.html#tachistoscope


Current Events: (We always talk about current events to start out)