Are Progressives the New Traditionalists?

It has been getting confusing, recently, sorting out what it means to be a cultural "progressive" or a "traditionalist.” As one who has always considered himself to be near the cutting edge of progressive culture, it is somewhat disturbing to discover that, at least according to many journalists and critics in the dominant media, I have been classified by them as being old-fashioned, and dismissed as being from the cultural past.

Funny...I always thought my leading-edge "cred" over the years was as solid as the next person's: I've been active in progressive politics for years, and have lived in places like Venice Beach in L.A. and the Lower East Side in New York. In the mid-90's I helped start an Internet company and produced rave-style events. This year was my 9th attending the Burning Man Festival in Nevada. I've traveled to Tibet, India and Thailand, took the shamanism and tantra trainings, got the T-shirts, blah blah blah. Okay, so I've always thought that my personal passions throughout the years also placed me somewhere near the frontiers of consciousness and progressive social and artistic movements. How naive could I be!

In the mid-90's I chose to move to the town of Sebastopol in Sonoma County, California so I could live in a community with a critical mass of like-minded thought pioneers. The city council has a Green Party majority. Our city leaders talk about creating "sustainable culture," and they promote ideas like city-wide solar energy programs. We have well-attended town meetings about topics such as Peak Oil. There are a lot of hybrid and bio-diesel fueled cars driving around town. People actually care about global warming. Most people I know here are technologically and Internet savvy, and they get their news and information from a variety of alternative sources. The local residents here are generally well-traveled, well-read, and well-informed about world events. There are a lot of alternative schools in the area. There is a diverse and abundant number of non-traditional healing practices here, and apparently enough clients to support them. And for a town its size, Sebastopol hosts an amazing array of leading-edge musicians and artists. And most importantly, people here seem to genuinely care about creating "community." It's my kind of place.

I consider these values and lifestyles -- or at least I used to consider these values and lifestyles -- to be near the cultural leading-edge. Now, thankfully, the group-think mentality of cynical journalists, the self-appointed arbiters of what is culturally current or not, have finally set me straight. I have now surrendered to what they have been telling me for years: all this stuff -- concern for ecological sustainability, care for social justice, interest in integral healing methods, appreciation of other cultural forms of art and spirituality -- is in the "cultural past."

How do I know? Because it seems that whenever Sebastopol, or, for that matter, whenever any similarly progressive Northern California community is mentioned in any mainstream media, even in our local New York Times owned Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the smirking and cynical comments invariably refer to the town's characteristics as being some nostalgic permutation of "60's" or "old hippie" values. You hear terms like "throwback," "dated," or "time-warp." As the Executive Director of the annual Harmony Festival, which is a celebration of all the alternative ideas that attracted me to this area in the first place, I have become almost numb to the mainstream media's knee-jerk and simplistic interpretation of progressive values and lifestyles as being all about the "60's. I always attributed it to confusion on the part of clueless journalists who just didn't know how else to label these things.

However, a high-profile example of this form of snide journalism finally penetrated my denial. While reading an article in the October 2005 issue of Wired magazine about Tim O'Reilly, one of Sebastopol's leading entrepreneurs and a highly respected Internet pioneer, two descriptions in the article about the town of Sebastopol -- my town -- stood out. The first one was tolerable: "....Sebastopol, California, a post-hippie enclave between the wine country and the Pacific Ocean." Okay, at least it said post-hippie. Fair enough.

It was the second Sebastopol reference later on the same page that really set off my reaction: "... I take the road to laid-back Sebastopol, 50 miles north of San Francisco and 35 years back into the cultural past." This sentence was then followed by the smug line: "(Signs at the town line proudly proclaim Sebastopol a nuclear-free zone.)" Proof, apparently, of an entire town mired in a time-warp from 1970. Okay, granted, maybe the sign is a little dated (more like from the 80's). But...35 years back into the cultural past? Ouch. Reading this article was painful in that I had to acknowledge that, alas, it was not unusual. I had to face it: being a vortex of cultural dinosaurism is a progressive town's inevitable reputation among the cynical and jaded media mind-set. We seem to be an easy target.

My immediate reaction to this troubling observation was to commit myself to changing my cultural past ways. I wanted to become cool, and live on the cutting-edge as I once thought I did. So, I decided to get with the program. The first question to address was: if Sebastopol is 35 years back in the cultural past as the article stated, where, then, is the cultural present? If I drive to Rohnert Park, a nearby town consisting of developer generated housing tracts and shopping centers, am I going 35 years forward in time? Or better yet, where is the very leading edge now? What lifestyle can I adopt to really be on the cultural forefront? Given the definition of the cultural past as the sarcastic media commentators have defined for me, I set off on a research project to discover the new edge, and I finally came up with the ultimate lifestyle of what's really culturally current today. Here is the simple version of my report:

• Move to a new housing tract of monster homes in the U.S's fastest-growing exurbs of Phoenix, Las Vegas and Dallas.

• Join a Pentecostal mega-church, the fastest expanding segment of the fundamentalist Christian movement, which overall claims membership of 20 million and growing.

• Become an avid NASCAR fan, which reportedly outstrips football in popularity.

• Drive an oversized SUV. Some 56 percent of those recently polled stated that rising fuel prices wouldn't alter their devotion to their mega-cars. While hybrid vehicles are just 4 percent of vehicles purchased, SUVs remain strong at 26 percent.

• Get most of my information about the world from Fox News, which has the highest Nielsen rating of any cable news channel.

• Watch an average four hours and 32 minutes of TV daily.

•  Shop mostly at Wal-Mart, which experienced a 3.8 percentage rise in September same-store sales despite closing 155 of its outlets due to Hurricane Katrina.

• Watch a lot of ESPN, a company that did a 2000 survey indicating that 57 percent of the 32.2 million American men ages 18 to 34 who log onto the Internet do so to catch up on sports.

Now that's cutting-edge. If I were to live this lifestyle, I thought, I would never again be ridiculed in any national magazine, like Wired, for living in the cultural past.

However, after further consideration, I realized that, alas, this cultural lifestyle would be way too radical for me. Too edgy. So, after much soul-searching, I had to admit that perhaps I like being stuck in the cultural past. Maybe I am a traditionalist after all. So now, as my lifestyle and my community gets derided in the media as being old-fashioned and from the past, I say, why not just go with it? I like it that my old-style, traditional town has lots of yoga studios and places to buy chai. Just call me old-school.

Besides, in order to be on the new cutting-edge it requires that I could never have done many of the things I did in my so-called progressive past. As it turns out, if you have ever done something that registers even a blip on the cynics' woo-woo meters, you're forever disqualified from being part of contemporary culture by the more-current-than-thou critics. Ever had your house Feng Shui'd? Sorry. You're old-school and always will be. Ever attend a workshop on non-violent communication? Or go to a Jam Band concert? Take an eco-tour in Costa Rica? Listen to a lecture by Noam Chomsky? Take a massage class? Work on a campaign to keep a nuclear power plant out of your home town? Forget about it. You'll always be stuck in the cultural past. Unless, of course, you proclaim that you deeply regret your youthful indiscretion, and then you might be granted a pardon by the cynics.

In fact, if you even know about some of this woo woo stuff you're disqualified from being culturally current. According to the new American cultural media meme, if you can name more than one yoga style, or have ever used the word "permaculture," you're suspect as being from the cultural past.

So for now, I've given up on the idea of being culturally current. Actually, I was thinking of starting an organization called the Traditional Values Coalition, but I think that name has already been taken by one of those new-fangled radical groups that are way too edgy for my old-fashioned taste.

So, are progressives really the new traditionalists? An obvious example of this twisted confusion was the recent Measure M campaign that happened here in Sonoma County. It was a local attempt to take a pause in the use of of genetically modified crops in the region until further studies could be done. The old-fashioned traditionalists, or at least those I once thought were the traditionalists, want to plunge ahead and grow untested genetically modified organisms that were produced in chemical laboratories, and then wait to see what the hell happens to the local eco-system. The live-on-the-edge, wild and radical progressives want to adhere to the Precautionary Principle, and go slowly to make sure it will be done safely and responsibly, if at all, with a deep care for the conservation of our agricultural heritage and concern for the long-term consequences of our actions.

Or, is it the other way around?

Scott McKeown
scott@harmonyfestival.com