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The Three Primary Worldviews Some of the most interesting and informative research on worldviews has been done by psychologists Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson. In their book Cultural Creatives, they define three primary worldviews dominating North American culture. Questioning some 100,000 respondents over the course of a decade, Ray and Anderson discovered that roughly twenty-five percent of people would identify themselves as having a Traditional worldview, while fifty percent felt they had a Modern worldview, and the remaining twenty-five percent were trying to define a new worldview. Ray and Anderson label this third group Cultural Creatives, because they believe this group will be driving the cultural changes that occur in the coming century, as we shift from a society dominated by a Modern perspective to one dominated by something else. Ray and
Anderson describe the Traditional worldview as "… a culture
of memory. Traditionals remember a vanished America and long for its
restoration. They place their hopes in the recovery of small-town, religious
America, a hazy nostalgic image corresponding to the years from 1890
to 1903. This mythic world was cleaner, more principled, and less conflicted
than the one that impinges on us every day today."(i) In contrast,
those with a Modern worldview "… are the people who accept
the commercialized urban-industrial world as the obvious right way to
live. They're not looking for alternatives. They're adapting to the
contemporary world by assuming, rather than reasoning about, what's
important, especially those values linked to economic and public life."(ii)
Breaking with both of these worldviews, the " Cultural Creatives
like to get a synoptic view-they want to see all the parts spread out
side-by-side and trace the interconnections. Whenever they read a book,
get information on-line, or watch TV, they want the big picture, and
they are powerfully attuned to the importance of whole systems."(iii) Footnotes i) Paul
Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, Cultural Creatives, p. 80.
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