ON CREATING
A GLOBAL WISDOM CULTURE

Now that the word global has grown so pervasive, I say it’s time to develop a culture that suits our era and our urgent planetary needs: a Global Wisdom Culture.

Culture is not simply something that befalls us and assimilates us into itself from when we’re born, but it is also a shaping force that can itself be reshaped intentionally, as social scientist Paul H. Ray and others declare.  This is a proposition to examine, and one with vital implications.

Sociologist and survey researcher Ray and his colleague Sherry Ruth Anderson published in 2001 an influential book, The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World, the premise of which is that established cultures can be intentionally redesigned or reprogrammed to be more salutary, just as an individual can learn to live more healthily by practicing wholesome regimens.  People can change and cultures can change, even radically and rapidly—and now is an urgent time for such world-wide cultural changes to evolve and manifest.

The fundamental question to explore in this regard is “How can a culture be redesigned and changed intentionally and successfully?  This is a question for social scientists and socio-cultural engineers to address, as in fact many such opinion leaders are even now doing with concerted efforts to leverage a “global shift” in human life ways toward practices that are sustainable and life-enhancing planet wide, evolving toward a viable Earthwise and future-friendly culture.

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