The New model of British Class Structure and Human Ecology

Earlier in April the BBC Labs published a new model of British Social Class with BBC Labs. The model, developed through research by sociologists Fiona Devine and Mike Savage in 2013 identifies seven classes in British society. It's an interesting model and it has close, but not identical, parallels to taxonomy of demographic structure of Human Ecology which I published in 2009.

I've just connected with Fiona Devine, who responded very warmly, and am hoping to meet to discuss their model with them. If you haven't seen the Devine/Savage model, or see the Human Ecology model of social structure, both can be found in the title link of this post. I'd recommend a quick look if you have five minutes.

One of the things that I'm finding with my Human Ecology Theory is that it often anticipates ideas subsequently developed by independent researcher in other fields. I am therefore always delighted to learn of independent research and development which has come to the same or similar conclusions to those of Human Ecology Theory. If you know of any other examples, please can you let me know?

http://humanecology.webeden.co.uk/#/social-models/4538343199

(c) Simon P Walker 2011

NEWLY LAUNCHED RESEARCH CENTRE

PRESS RELEASE 23.4.2013

Simon P Walker is delighted to announce the launch of the new CENTRE FOR HUMAN ECOLOGY THEORY in April 2013.

The Centre aims to develop insight into human behaviour using Walker's Human Ecology Theory as the major tool through its primary research projects.

At its launch, the Centre can announce research which has evidenced a new understanding of adaptive cognitive ability. A new assessment measure of adaptive cognitive ability has also been invented and used successfully. The assessment measure correlates with pre-existing measures of academic success whilst opening up new understandings, insights and possibilities for improving an individual's thinking.

Read more about the study at the Centre for Human Ecology Theory



About the Centre for Human Ecology Theory The Centre aims to bring together a community of practitioners from around the world committed to developing understanding of human behaviour and how to engender more humane, sustainable living through application of Walker's Human Ecology Theory.

We welcome contributors to the Forum and invite enquiries about potential research proposals using Human Ecology Theory.



(c) Simon P Walker 2011

A Little Book of Sparks

This week, a friend and fellow traveller in the lands of human flourishing, Shaun Lambert, has released his new book, A Little Book of Sparks. Shaun is one of who has explored the Christian tradition of mindfulness more carefully and thoughtfully than most. He offers, in this book of daily readings, a narrative hung off the framework of Mark's Gospel, a daily journey into what it means to be 'watchful'. When he asked if I would write the forward to the book, I gladly agreed, not only because I have shared a little in Shaun's journey, but because I think he is opening up a layer on understanding of the Christian Gospel which has been closed to us for many centuries. I commend A Little Books of Sparks to all those who wish for a deeper knowledge of God in their lives.

Here's the link to A Little Book of Sparks

And here's an extract from Shaun's reading for the second day....

Day 2: The Empty Self – working on our self-awareness

As Christians we believe that we have a relational God, who lives in a community of love – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As human beings we are made in God's image, which makes us relational creatures. It is interesting that evolutionary psychologists have also discovered that we are relational creatures.

The main condition we have to wrestle with is that we are empty. We will not be undone by empty talk, or being empty-handed in the current economic crisis, but by our empty selves.

Some philosophers and psychologists, Christian and otherwise, characterise the post-war self as an empty one. We need a D-day of the soul, where God's love invades us and occupies the territory we currently fill with consumer goods, unneeded food, artificial stimulants and busyness. Obesity is an increasingly recognised national problem. In addition, there are many who embody emptiness by refusing food.

Jesus warned of the danger of emptiness, and more profoundly than just running on empty. In the parable of the Ten Virgins, the foolish ones are those with the empty lamps, who have no interior life (Matthew 25:8). In Matthew 12 the evil spirit which comes out of a man returns with seven others worse than itself to fill the empty soul (verses 43–45). Our inner emptiness is implied when the Bible affirms the importance of being filled by the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:4).

The way out of this economic crisis, according to some, is for us, the consumers, to spend our way out of trouble. Our government, as with others in the West, constructed a post-war economy based on the production of far more consumer goods than required to fuel economic growth. This was fanned by the growth in easy credit and the rise of an advertising industry proficient in psychological manipulation. Every advert tells us that we are empty unless we fill ourselves with their product.

There is a spiritual solution. Instead of mindlessly existing as vacuum cleaners sucking up all the consumer items we can, attempting and failing to fill our emptiness, we can cultivate the watchfulness that Jesus commends (Mark 13:37). Not many modern books on prayer stress the importance of cultivating this attention, but in the Philokalia – a collection of Christian texts written between the fourth and the 15th centuries – a state of watchfulness is considered the hallmark of sanctity.

Lacking this awakened attention, we are seemingly unaware of this construct of our time, the empty self – which afflicts Christians as much as it does any secular person. Ray Mears, the survival expert, talks about a vanishing world of wilderness, wisdom, and bushcraft. The watchfulness Jesus teaches us is bushcraft of the soul. The minimum night watch in biblical times was three hours. If you failed to stay attentive you could be beaten and have your clothes set on fire. This adds poignancy to Jesus' lament to Peter, 'Could you not keep watch for one hour?' (Mark 14:37).

The average attention span today is assessed at between seven and 11 minutes, although it can be measured in seconds for internet browsing. The question to ask ourselves is, 'With what am I filling my empty self?' I know for myself that not owning my own house has shown me how I would long to fill my inner emptiness with home ownership. A few years ago, getting rid of my car showed me how much I filled my emptiness with the status and freedom of car ownership.

In our society these things have ceased to be icons of God's grace and have become idols that replace the space God is to fill within us. Contemplate taking them away and suddenly the presence of God is intensified in us. If we seek first the kingdom of God, if the inexhaustible tongue of fire that is the Holy Spirit rests on us, we can resist the siren call of consumerism to fill our empty selves. Try it! Unlike the adverts, it works. The riddle and the paradox of truth within the idea of an empty self is that we are in pain and incomplete, because we have an empty space within us where God should be. We are filling that space with the wrong things.

Shaun Lambert is a Baptist minister in Stanmore, NW London. He is part of the New Wine leader's network, and PREMIER Mind and Soul network. For the last ten years he has studied integrative and relational counselling at Roehampton University. He wrote regularly for the Baptist Times. He believes that all truth is God's truth and that Christians need to be learners and thinkers who help critique and transform culture. Shaun is currently researching the possibility of a PhD in New Testament studies focusing on watchfulness in Mark's gospel. He is married to Clare and has two children, Zachary and Amy, and a dog called Coco. (c) Simon P Walker 2011

Ninth Lesson: Home

Advent means to await a coming. It is a looking ahead to another time, another season. To be in advent is to accept that this current season, this current life, is not fully whole- there is another, more full life to come. We are travelling toward it, bidding it toward us.

What is this other life?

It is the life in which we are fully at home. There is much in our current life that is dislocated and alien. I am misunderstood, few if any know of what I long for. I accept this disappointment and make do anyway. Yet deep down, I desire Christmas; for Christmas speaks to us of being fully at home.

Christmas is arrival, the coming of a new child. It is of the birthing of a new home, the welcome of a baby into the arms of his mother. It is the renewal of the potential for each of us to be embraced, welcomed and loved fully. It is the end of the Advent wait.

The Christ child is a real baby, physical, flesh and blood, born in Palestine two millennia ago. But perhaps the Christ child is not only a real baby in history. Perhaps we also are that child. Perhaps we too, each year, are offered the gift of being born again. Perhaps that gift is to be fully found, by the One who made us. To accept it is to allow ourselves to be discovered. To risk the openness of being found. To receive the gift is to choose to believe that, beyond the fear of rejection, is the hope of acceptance. It is to believe that there is one to whom your boundaries are sacred; there is one who will tread with care around your perimeter, whose foot prints will mark out your borders and whose presence will defend you.

If this were true, then each year we make a choice to accept this gift or to reject it. To allow that child to be born in us today.

May you find faith and hope to make this accept this gift on the eve of this new year.

(c) Simon P Walker 2011

Eighth Lesson: Tree

There existed in the garden a tree. Its fruit had no particular qualities but in order to ensure that the man and the woman would not fall out of his gaze and cease to be, the God defined the boundaries of their safety, he defined the fruit of the tree as forbidden fruit. “You shall not eat of the fruit of this tree,” he declared, “for if you do so you shall surely die.” Man and woman knew that within the gaze, they were loved, they existed. However, the God did not seek a relationship coercion but mutual acceptance, choice and vulnerability. The God knew that in order for the man and the woman to love him freely, they must choose to love. And to choose to love, they must also be able to choose not to love. The tree existed in the garden in order that the man and woman might freely choose to love. The tree existed as a doorway also into a death. For outside the gaze there was no life. To choose to eat of the fruit of the tree freely, to step beyond the gaze willingly, to turn aside from the embrace, was to choose to suffocate themselves. He understood that to turn from the gaze was to seal oneself into self-reference, to turn one gaze only upon oneself, to cease to be seen and known. It was to commit oneself to a locked room, sealed of access to love and embrace, to slowly asphyxiate.

The man and the woman took the fruit and bit into its flesh. And their eyes were immediately open to their nakedness. They looked at each other now, outside the gaze; they looked at each other in unease; they looked at the folds and curves hiding within each other; they looked at the difference that spoke of the unknown, the unbidden, the strange. They looked, and felt fear, outside the gaze. Not held, not safe.

They must manage alone.

So they clothed themselves.

The clothes hid them. The clothes deflected gaze, concealed the person within. The clothes offered protection in vulnerable world. They substituted the protection of loving gaze for protection of fabric, deception of pattern, deflection of costume. They provoked the endless enactment of persona that was to follow, scene after scene. Down history, the enactment of self. Act after act, drama after drama, character after character, created and performed on the stage of history.

In what ways will we perform ourselves today? Will we sit in the tradition of Eve and Adam enacting ourselves as an mask of concealment? Or will we risk starting a new tradition? Theatre in the round, not theatre behind a curtain.

(c) Simon P Walker 2011

Seventh Lesson: Gaze

There is an old story in a sacred book in which a God forms a garden. Within this beautiful space he calls into being animals and plants of all kinds of varieties. He fashions waters and dry lands, he sets lights to govern the day and the night. He makes everything fitting for its place. Finally, he crafts mankind: a man and a woman, made in his own image, male and female. He breathes his breath into the lungs of the man and the woman and they come alive, animated by his Spirit. The man and the woman are naked and they know no fear or shame.

This God would walk in the garden in the cool of the day, with the man and the woman, enjoying the heavy scent of the ground returning the sun’s heat in the evening air. Having opened this space within himself, the God would delight to open himself into the space, disclosing his mind, embracing that which he had created. The Spirit of the God danced among the trees, calling forth the waters to play and the birds to sing. The Word of the God anointed the animals with name and blessing, calling forth laughter. The Father in this God embraced all that had flowed out of him, declaring it good.

The God would walk in the garden in the cool of the day, naked with the man and the woman, naked. The day would settle and end in stillness and shalom, a deep peace of all things settled in their right rhythm, fitting place, loved gaze. The world existed within and through that gaze. And there was no shame and there was no fear.

If you gaze unstintingly into the eyes of a young baby, they will turn their head aside, avert their gaze. The reason is that the sensations stimulated by having such attention paid, within the baby’s brain, are too strong, too intense. Dazzling in their emotional intensity. A flood of neurochemical love.

To be fully seen is to be held in such a gaze. The gaze literally creates us in our early months. Many of us never learn to hold that gaze. Many of us grow up as adults still unable to tolerate attention being paid to us. We avert our gaze, we distract with humour, deflect attention away. We are unable to tolerate being seen. If we are to grow more full, then we need to discover how to hold such a gaze offered by those who love us. It is the beginnings of the pathway to healing and renovation.

John O’Donohue asks in his Benedictus who, ‘during this day has seen us?’

Who indeed, has seen me today?

(c) Simon P Walker 2011

Sixth Lesson: Digging

Imagine taking a spade and beginning to dig. As you slide the sharp blade into the soil you are conscious of slicing through the thin visible limits of your life. Quickly, the blade passes through the web of thin roots sustaining the perennials and recent plantings. The root masses are well connected, slightly dry, tracing fine fingerlets across the surfaces, drawing efficiently water and nutrients. It peels away easily, that layer. You place the blade again into the earth, press down, deeper. As you do so, you notice the change in texture- it is darker, the material heavier. It has aroma. You kneel and place your hands into the earth, rub it between your fingers; it is dark, clog and stains your fingers.

As you dig on, the spade catches on stones, buried fragments of brick; you prise them out, they are old, unknown, forgotten. Why are they there? How did they get there? You dig on, the blade stabbing into a black mass. It does not give; you have struck a block. You feel it with your fingers- it stretches out, bifurcating, branching; you dig round it then prise at it with the spade. It won’t budge. Where you have struck it, the flesh is white, tuberous, fibrous. It oozes. Where is it drawing its life from, unseen as it is from the sun? In these depths what does it feed on? What keeps it alive? And what is it? Can it grow?

It is old, unfamiliar to you, a gnarled tuber belonging to your history. Or was it there in the land before you? How deep does it go? Is it one, or one of many? How far does it spread? Does it reach out, connecting, fusing, spreading, underpinning the soil above it? What would happen if it were removed? Would the surface collapse? Have you been walking over it all these years, resting on it, relying on it? Does it support or compete with what you plant over its surface? Is it drawing nutrients away, down, into the depths, sucking, draining away moisture? Is it parasitic? Does it speak of health or disease? Is it even mine or has it transgressed, migrated, spread from other lands? What name do you give it? It will survive long after the plants on the surface go. Long after the vivid displays decline, grow tired and faded, this tuberous life will continue, growing, breathing, pressing outward. When you are spent, when your land is barren, will this be all that is left? Is this what constitutes you? Is this what you find at my core? Does all your life come from this?

You are afraid and wonderfully unsettled by what you are discovering. You shiver. You feel like you are walking on land that is alive. Most of your life is hidden from you. Most of your life is yet to be uncovered.

You are yet to be uncovered.

(c) Simon P Walker 2011

Fifth Lesson: Roots and Tubers

Our soil is a world of as yet undiscovered fertility. Planting as we tend to, near the surface, for rapid growth and homogeneity, we should be unsurprised by the repetitive, apparently unremarkable yields our soil produces. It will suffice in the main, for the life and work which we find ourselves involved in. Our aspirations have fallen.

Take a moment to remember back to your imagination as a child. In those days your mind was able to reach for a thousand different possible futures and identities. Happy afternoons were spent exploring the landscape of commanders, nurses, fire fighters, kings and queens, mothers and fathers, teachers and dancers. These tubers of thought and possibility have been left discarded. The energy and life which funded their genesis however, remains; indeed, within their contwined masses lie a genetic legacy, a potency of gift, a tangled ball of history and experience, a layered bulb enfolding tender dreams.

Over time, you have gathered together your thoughts, organising them into a small corner of yourself where they can be aligned and configured with one, or perhaps two, narrow purposes and identities. This narrowing, driven as it was by often harsh necessities, leaves most of our land unexplored. Soil has depth and, beneath the surface, beyond the thin layer of productive topsoil, lies a darker richer loam. Interestingly, this hidden structure is very much older and more basic to our identity and being than the layer which sustains the growth we consciously present on a day to day basis.

Where does it come from? It is simply given to us. The deep blessing of the human life is that it is unbidden. The abundant generosity of this creation is a great mystery; that each buds, bulges, swells and breaks out onto the topography of human history from nowhere.

We find that, within our soil, there is already a rich fecundity of ideas, invention, love and agency. More than we ever imagined or deserved.

Unbidden, we are invited out into a bigger world, a bigger self.

(c) Simon P Walker 2011

Fourth Lesson: The Dark Season's Growth

Most of what we are and might become is buried beyond our sight. Our time and attention is spent, largely, upon the surfaces of our lives. The inordinate busyness and pace of the surrounding world requires almost total concentration if we are to hang on to the features and objects we attempt to retain and arrange on the harassed landscape of our lives. Pegging our insecure job down which threatens to blow away leaving us entirely exposed to the elements; or preventing the wind catching the corners of a fraying relationship and tearing it across the middle; or hacking our way through the thick undergrowth of overgrown bills; or hurling a bit of unloved water upon the shoots of the other plants growing at our fringes- a holiday plan, a charity we are involved in, an elderly parent needing care.

We suffer from a culture which rewards the productive, well maintained exterior. We frantically attempt to maintain the surfaces of our land. We attempt to produce ever greater yields of productivity by becoming busier, more efficient, better prepared. We buy technologies to compress time, speeding communication, gathering data to keep us ahead of the game. And in so doing, we lie permanently stunted, prevented from stretching and reaching out, underneath, to the possible depths of our roots.

Gardeners understand that the barren seasons of the year are those from which fertility springs. The reason for this is simple. What ultimately sprouts forth from the surface is nourished, sustained and dependent upon the nexus of roots threaded beneath the surface. It is the dark months, the hidden growth which sustains the beauty of the next season’s flowering.

Advent is a dark season. Little grows. Fallen fruit from last year's harvest lies rotting. The naked branches of pruned shrubs are ugly. It is such times that our roots reach out for sources of nourishment if we linger and allow them to. Now is a day for noticing loss; welcoming apprehension; absorbing failure and disappointment; tolerating incompleteness. No fallen fruit is wasted; it becomes the nutrient from which the fruit of next year will grow.

Next year may not yet be upon us. Success may be tomorrow's harvest. For now, accept the rhythm that invites you to wait and trust, growing stronger in your capacity to desire without fulfilment. Whilst you wait, do not lose your confidence in this ground you are in. Trust that the soil contains good things, and await the discovery of your scale that is yet to come.

(c) Simon P Walker 2011

Third Lesson: Love

Your end is my beginning. Yet where are my edges? Who set them? Are they fixed in eternity or even in time?

This dialogue will preoccupy us for the rest of our life. It is a quest upon which almost all of our action in the world will be based. For instance, the ones we love will be bonded to us because their presence completes us; we sense completeness, we sense our borders being properly established as we inhabit our landscape. Our sense of peace and safety in our landscape emerges as our definition is clarified; we are confirmed, validated. I am more me with them. I am defined through their presence and my landscape takes form.

Love defines our limits and describes our texture. We cannot describe ourselves by mere self-reflection. The mirror which is given to us is the view offered back to us from the people gathered around the edges of our landscape. Their sight describes us; their vision of us is spoken over us and we absorb it. It settles like rain over the surface of our land. From its irrigation, that which is as yet hidden, mere potential, will grow. Or not. The land cannot grow without rain, spoken rain. Felt touch. Fingers reach out and tend our soil, tease out its surface. Feet fall on our earth, leaving their footprint, pressing their form into our folds. Love defines our shape.

This is sacred work- an agency given to form another’s personhood. It is not always work done well. Some to whom it is given, parents and carers alike, lack the wisdom and sensitivity to enfold another’s being through their own posture. Some lack the stability to offer a consistent presence, a reliable reflection, a held gaze. Some lack the care to tread deftly, instead they hurry, rush, careless of the crushing force of their feet where they trample. Some are distracted, absent, diverted, unavailable- their gaze is elsewhere, their words attending to and affirming a landscape elsewhere. Some are heavy handed, cajoling and fingering, pressing and forcing out a growth made more in their own image; a revision of their own mistakes and aspirations.

The legacy of this work, whether well done or otherwise, will live with us. Our land is malleable, in these early years. Later, its folds will become less pliable, more resistant, stiff, fixed into that pressed form. We will find our contours owe their origins to historic influence and we must learn to navigate over them as best we can. However, the sacred task remains our preoccupation; to find our ending. To know the land that we have been given in the world- its dimensions, extent, texture and form.

What must give us courage and hope is the divine thought, which has already sown our land with love and goodness before our origins even began. We are not unimagined. What is within us has been seen and can yet come to be. And it is good. Our space in the world, our place in time and space, the specific, unique, particular and unrepeatable piece of history which is us is real. It is substance. Within the fabric of the world, our space has been woven.

(c) Simon P Walker 2011