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11.24.2003

“HartBeat” is The Hartman Group's FREE online newsletter, providing insight, analysis, information and strategy to give business leaders the knowledge and vision to build sustainable brands.

On Cultural Fusion

"You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war..."

- Chris Rock

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Fusion Culture: how To See The Future By Looking To The Past

Assimilation is what used to happen to immigrants when we thought that America was a big melting pot. Immigrants arrived as young men and women, adapting as necessity required to their new environment, but still living very much out of the traditions and values of their culture of origin. And as they grew older they watched as their children became more American, and as their grandchildren grew up with hardly any sense at all of the kind of world from which their grandparents came.

The grandkids, maybe when they're older, will take an interest in their ethnic heritage, but it will have been too late. It will be a kind of hobby, not something that they live from as their grandparents did. We create museums for those elements in our culture that are no longer alive, and for the third and fourth generations and beyond the traditions of their grandparents have become, for the most part, museum pieces. These later generations have become Americans.

It's a different story, though, for the Caribbean and Asian people who have come to this country since the 1970s because, for all kinds of reasons, there just isn't the same kind of Anglo-dominated mainstream culture for them to assimilate into anymore. What it means to be an American has been rapidly changing in the last 30 years. The old Anglo culture is still there, of course, and for now it's still very influential in the government and corporate halls of power, but we are seeing more and more people, mostly kids, who are prodigiously adaptive to any number of cultural influences, and they move from one subculture into another with equally prodigious ease. That's what the sociologists mean by "multi-acculturation."

But we doubt this will remain a permanent feature in American society. In a few generations' time we will be seeing the emergence of a global fusion culture mediated through the inevitably homogenizing power of electronic information technologies. This fusion culture will draw from the pre-modern traditions of Asian, African, Latin American and various indigenous cultures, but in an increasingly hi-tech idiom.

This fusion will occur most easily in the US where there is already hardly any vestige of the pre-modern world, but will slowly transform even those societies in Asia or the Middle East or Africa or Latin America where pre-modern cultural forms are still strong. It's not just about what happens to people who immigrate here; it's about the cultures that they import with them that are being slowly woven into the fusion culture and how that will be exported back to the cultures from which they came. This trend will be abetted by what we're exporting through the Internet and MTV. Rap, for instance, started in inner-city black culture and is now a style imitated throughout the world. A global style is something you can see already everywhere, and this is just the beginning.

All traditional ethnic identity is rooted in pre-modern cultural forms, and the pre-modern roots of cultural identity will all but disappear by the end of this century. They won't go without a fight, as we're seeing now in the Islamic world, but we're convinced that ethnicity or any rigidly defined traditionalist worldview is simply fading as a dominating source of cultural identity. Ethnic identities simply will not be able to withstand the enormous consciousness-changing and power of the new information technologies.

There will be from time to time moments of nostalgia when it will be cool to get into one's ethnicity and to search for one's "roots." And there will continue to be enclaves of traditionalists who reject the postmodern fusion culture. But they'll just live like the Amish live in Pennsylvania or the Hasids in Brooklyn. They'll just keep to themselves and vote, if they vote at all, for whoever promises to leave them alone.

But the future does not lie in that kind of nostalgic clinging to the past. This is different from saying that the past isn't important for the future. The past will have an enormously important influence on the way we shape lifestyles in the fusion culture. That's where "retrieval" comes in. Retrieval is not about going back to the way things were, but of salvaging the all-but-lost elements - valued for their soulfulness - from fading pre-modern cultural traditions. The goal of retrieval is to integrate cultural elements from the past into a postmodern lifestyle that gives it more "soul," and this will be done in an eclectic, irrational way that will be very hard to predict except for its general outlines.

This is a complex phenomenon and deserves more discussion than we can give it here, but the broad-strokes concept is this: If you want to understand the future, try to understand better what modern societies left behind. What the culture has lost to "modern progress," it wants now to retrieve, and that's the key to understanding what we mean by the soul age and soul values. Modern societies, dominated by commercial/technological values since the mid-19th Century, have become slick and soulless, and while hardly anyone complains about the material benefits that commercial/technological societies have generated, there is nevertheless a profound dissatisfaction with the fundamental soullessness that has become associated with them. There is a growing hunger now for anything that has a soulfulness about it.

What late moderns long for is what societies strongly influenced by pre-modern values still have. All healthy pre-modern cultures have a deep sense of connectedness to nature, to family and its elders, to tribe or community, and to the spiritual world; and many late moderns long for those things because they are missing them in their lives. Traditional cultures produce things by hand, not machines. The art is beautiful but not slick; simple and accessible, not esoteric and impossible to understand. Time is not measured by clocks. Space is not something where things are experienced as separated from one another but rather as interrelated as in a medieval tapestry.

"Connection" is the characteristic experience for the pre-modern; "disconnection," fragmentation and alienation are more characteristic of the late modern experience. The emphasis on individuals and their rights to do as they please with little regard for the common good is a central element of modernity. And this in turn has led to the social fragmentation in which hardly any social bond is valued more highly than one's individuality and freedom. And yet, premoderns aspire that "individual space" within a community.

Immigrants or visitors to America who come from cultures where the old traditional, communal values still have some influence are shocked when they discover how the elderly are treated here - and at the crime, alienation, violence and loneliness that they find as well. In commercial/technological societies there is comparatively little sense of belonging to a larger group. Moderns are on their own in a way that would be inconceivable in a traditional culture. So connection, warmth, immediacy, humor, authenticity, intensity are all elements that shape the world of soul values, and they are what late modern Americans find missing and long to retrieve.

What exactly that means and how that plays out is the burning question. People will take what's soulful wherever they find it, whether it's from Asian spiritualities or African music and graphic arts, Shaker furniture or Mediterranean cuisine. The new Soul Culture will be a Fusion Culture driven by a longing to retrieve what's soulful from pre-modern cultural traditions integrated with and mediated by a postmodern information tech style.

Multi-acculturation leads to inevitable fusion. And understanding the social dynamics that are driving American (and eventually global) society toward fusion is at the heart of what we mean by understanding "trends" in the Soul Age.

We believe that much of the thrust into the Soul Age is driven by a longing to recover this lost sense of soulful connection. And it's the charm of their lingering pre-modern traditions that makes, for instance, a visit to "tradition-centered" cultures in Europe, Asia or Africa interesting to Americans for whom such traditions never really existed, except for a few years among its newly arrived immigrants and their children. But ethnic traditions, while they might stay alive in pockets here and there, eventually shrivel as third and fourth generations assimilate into the commercial/technological/media-centered culture that has played the principal role in shaping American society during the 20th Century. Even though a tradition-centered lifestyle is one few moderns would want to live themselves, many moderns want these traditional cultures preserved so they can take interesting travel vacations to places where they can experience their soulful charm.

Now how does all this relate to markets for products and services? If the culture is shifting, the markets have to adapt. And if we're right about the shift to soul values, then the marketers have to adjust to the changing needs and values of an increasing number of consumers who are looking for products, services, experiences and communications that reflect their need for a more soulfulness in their lives. Our world model is a useful tool because it can help marketers to predict where things are going within the larger culture, but also within any of a number of niche cultures that compose contemporary American society. If marketers keep their eyes on what is interesting to the trendsetters in the core of any given world, they will be given significant clues about what will become more widely accepted in the future, even if for now it interests only an esoteric few. That is why we constantly study the "core group," even if it doesn't lend itself to a scalable market; it gives us an understanding of what will be maninstream in the years to come.

So while that's true for any specific lifestyle world, we are also saying that all these worlds are caught up in a larger movement in which commercial/technological values are becoming increasingly balanced by soul values. So the people who are the innovators at the core of these new soul-centered lifestyle worlds are bellwethers for the rest of the culture.

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