Jim Garrison - Creating a New Cultural Renaissance

Is Barack Obama’s success in the 2008 presidential campaign an indication that we’re on the verge of a new cultural and political paradigm? Are the world’s socially and environmentally conscious citizens—the “cultural creatives”—starting to find a larger political voice? Jim Garrison (president of Wisdom University and cofounder, with Mikhail Gorbachev, of the State of World Forum) thinks so. And he has teamed up with renowned sociologist Paul Ray on a bold international project that he hopes will help catalyze what he calls the biggest cultural emergence since the Renaissance.

In this interview, EnlightenNext’s Joel Pitney speaks with Garrison about why he and Ray believe that the cultural creatives, a demographic that first coalesced around the social, environmental, and consciousness movements of the 1960s, have reached critical mass worldwide—only they don’t know it yet. According to Garrison and Ray, many of the cultural creatives still see themselves as isolated and alone on the cultural fringe, without recognizing the extent to which their values are now becoming mainstream. So in order to help wake these progressive millions up to their own growing presence on the world stage, they are conducting an epic sociological survey to catalog the full shape and reach of this movement internationally.

Tune in this week to find out exactly how Garrison and Ray are proposing to take the idealistic vision of the sixties and turn it into concrete, practical change.

BIO
 
Jim Garrison cofounded the State of the World Forum in 1995 with Mikhail Gorbachev. The Forum is a San Francisco-based non-profit institution created to establish a global network of leaders dedicated to those principles, values, and actions necessary to guide humanity toward a more sustainable global civilization. With President Gorbachev as its Convening Chairman and Jim Garrison as its President, the Forum has brought together leaders from around the world to its annual and regional convenings to deliberate upon and take action concerning issues of global concern. Jim's most recent focus, and that of the Forum, has been the Integral Governance Initiative, dedicated to establishing global issue networks to solve global problems.

Garrison became active in foreign policy issues, particularly with Soviet-American relations, in the mid-1970s. From 1986 to 1990, he served as Executive Director of the Esalen Institute Soviet American Exchange Program, which engaged in nongovernmental diplomacy with Soviet counterparts in a variety of sectors. In 1991, he founded the International Foreign Policy Association in collaboration with Georgian President Edward Shevardnadze and former Secretary of State George Schultz, focusing on providing humanitarian relief for children in the former Soviet republics. He has also written six books on various aspects of philosophical theology and history, including Civilization and the Transformation of Power (2000) and the most recent America as Empire (2004).

Garrison was born in Szechuan Province, China, in 1951 to Baptist missionaries. He lived with his family in Taiwan from 1953 to 1965, after which they settled permanently in San Jose, California. He holds an M.T.S. in Christology and History of Religion from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge University.