Adapting writing from 1970s onwards. Latest Update Oct. 2014
This is an excerpt
and amalgamation from a few seminal papers by Dr Neville Yeomans that links
ConFest into the exploring of Epochal Change in Global Societies.
In Neville’s 1974 ‘On Global Reform - International
Normative Model Areas (INMA)’ paper[1] he wrote about his
involvement in the New State Movement in Far North Queensland and its potential
relevance for his ideas. At one level this ‘On Global Reform’ paper was written
for the Australian Humanitarian Law Committee, and as a paper submitted on
humanitarian law for Neville’s law degree. At a more significant level, I
suspect that this paper is Neville’s key epochal transition document.
Its precursor is Neville’s ‘Mental
Health and Social Change’ paper discussed previously.[2]
Neville’s wording of
the Forward to his father’s ‘City
Forest’ book[3] published in October 1971 draws on and
extends Neville’s ideas from his July 1971 Mental Health and Social Change’
paper,[4] and acts as a
precursor to his 1974 ‘On Global Reform’ paper.[5]
The City Forest
Forward is fully consistent with Cultural Keyline principles:
1.
Sensing Australia’s unique marginal geo-psycho-social
topography for evolving micro-model transitional communities towards human
cities and humane caring continental nations
2.
Enabling self-organizing contexts where caring resonant
people self-organize in mutual-help using values and behaviours respecting the
Earth and all life forms
‘On Global Reform’
specifies Neville’s Epochal Quest and his big picture long-term framework for
achieving epochal transition. Neville told me of this paper in 1994 and said he
was unsure of where I could find a copy. I kept asking and finally found it in
June 2000, a month after Neville’s death, in a collection of Neville’s papers
recovered from his Yungaburra house by Marjorie Roberts.
In this On Global
Reform paper, Neville writes about one model of Global Governance being put
forth by people described as ‘normative realists’ (Neville recognized downsides
of their position):
The global transition model of the normative realists has
emphasized a credible transition strategy in the move towards a more peaceful
and just world. However it is necessary to make
such a strategy both meaningful and feasible to persons and groups, and to
underpin that world level analysis with relevant application to individual
communities. An attempt will be made to do this in an Australian context by
presuming the creation of an INMA in North Queensland.[6]
Refer Falk, R. A. (1974). Law and National Security: The Case for Normative Realism. Utah Law Review No. 1; Falk, R. A. (1975). A
Study of Future Worlds. New Delhi, Orient Longman.
Neville refers to a
‘credible transition strategy’ - recall that Neville structured Fraser House to
be a ‘transitional
community’. For Neville, the exploring of the nature and behaviours of
transitional communities in Fraser House was evolving ‘Global transitional
models’. Notice Neville’s linking of macro and micro in the above quote – using
the principal, ‘Think globally. Act locally’ – using the following elements:
1.
A World level analysis
2.
A global transition model
3.
A credible transition strategy
4.
A strategy both meaningful and feasible to persons and
groups
5.
Underpin that World level analysis with relevant application
to individual communities
Notice that Neville
uses the expression, ‘presuming the creation of an INMA in North
Queensland’; Neville would regularly presume that something already existed,
and start inviting people to be a part of it. Neville would so presume INMA
that it did ‘exist’; people never knew the extent of it. Neville actualised INMA from a potent articulated
virtual reality, repeated passionately.
Neville continued:
It is submitted
that…consciousness-raising...would occur firstly among the most disadvantaged
of the area, including the Aborigines. Thus human relations groups on a live-in
basis could assist both the growth of solidarity and personal freedom of
expression amongst such persons.
In initial
experiences along this line the release of fear and resentment against whites
has led to a level of understanding and mutual trust both within the aboriginal
members and between them and white members.[7]
In the last paragraph, the ‘initial experiences’ Neville
was referring to was the Human
Relations Surviving Well in a Dominant World Workshops in Armidale and
Grafton in 1971-1973.[8] In
saying, ‘the growth of solidarity and personal freedom of expression amongst
such persons’, Neville was referring to the experience of participants in those
workshops. Neville spoke of people regaining their voice and forging
inter-community cooperating in networking. Terry Widders referred to ‘social
and cultural communication’.[9]
Notice
that the above process is again using Cultural Keyline:
1. During the milieu of the Human Relations Gatherings, at
the various Therapeutic communities
in North Queensland and within the evolving networks:
a. Pervasive attending, sensing and supporting of self-organising action, emergence, and Keypoints conducive to coherence – monitoring theme, mood, values and interaction
among the Indigenous and the marginal. The following quote from Cultural Keyline
provides more on this monitoring process being used in Fraser House:
One of the Fraser House Handbooks (Yeomans, N. 1965a, Vol. 4, p. 1-54) confirms that during the staff discussion in the tea break following Big
Group, the two official observers for the meeting used the Red Book to give
their report to staff, followed by comments by all staff members present,
including the Group Leader/Therapist. The points assessed were:
o Mood
o Theme
o Value
o Interaction
o Therapist’s role and techniques employed.
From these ‘post-mortems’ comes much of the knowledge needed.
These four aspects - mood, theme, value and interaction were the essence of
what Neville was personally
constantly scanning for. These guided his interacting with the group. In having
these as the ‘discussion framers’ along with Neville’s role and process,
Neville was fast-tracking all staff into his way. Note that while these review
session were very involving, they were condensed by being limited to 30
minutes. They happened twice a day so the ‘unfinished’ may be taken up later if
deemed a potent theme.
b. Fostering cultural locality (people connecting
together connecting to place)
Neville[10] and
resonant people engaging in support towards strategic design possibilities and
context-guided perturbing of the social topography towards wellbeing – where nothing
happens unless locals want it to happen and make it happen; to paraphrase
Maturana and Verden-Zöller:[11]
….mutual help in interactional and relational space
re-constituting social relating through a flow in consensual coordinations of
consensual coordinations of behaviours (process about process) and emotions
towards consensuality and cooperation, rather than competition or aggressive
strife – evolving homo sapiens amans (lover) rather than homo sapiens
aggressans (aggressor).
2. Sensing and attending to the natural social system
self-organising in response to the perturbing, and monitoring outcomes.
Neville further links
the INMA framework to a tightly specified cultural locality and place with the
following:
Turning
to the ethics and ideology of INMA people; it is axiomatic that for a
life-style and value mutation to occur in an area, such territory needs to be
in a unique combined global, continental, federated state and local
marginality.
Globally
it needs to be junctional between East and West[12] at least geographically and in historical potentiality. At the
same time at all levels it needs to be sufficiently distant from the centres of
culture and power to be unnoticed, unimportant and autonomous.
Sensitive to the
significance of place in Cultural Keyline, biogeography and social topography,
Neville envisioned a four-fold locality positioning for his INMA to best
explore global transition models at the margin - in the niche of Far North
Queensland:
1.
Global (junctional between East and West)
2.
Continental (within the continent of Australia)
3.
Federated State, (within a Federated State System) and
4.
Local marginality (Atherton Tablelands)
The words ‘unnoticed,
unimportant and autonomous’ are apt descriptors of the Laceweb networking in
the Australia Top End.
Neville told me[13] that in 1963 when
Neville travelled the World speaking to Indigenous peoples about the best place
in the World to begin evolving a normative model area, the constant feedback was
that Far North Australia was the most appropriate. Neville told me many times
that Far North Queensland
and the Darwin Top End were the
most strategic places in the World to locate INMA. Initially I kept thinking he
meant the best place for least interference. While ‘least interference’ was
important, he meant the best place to start global transition modelling. In
July 1994, Neville told me that action would be best above a line between
Rockhampton on the East Coast of Australia, and Broome on the West Coast. The
Australia Top End was a marginal locality adjacent the marginal edge of SE Asia
Oceania – a region containing around 75% of the global Indigenous population as
well as containing 75% of the World's Indigenous peoples.[14] Neville was
convinced that these were the very best people on the oppressed margins of
global society to explore new cultural syntheses.
I’ve been told[15] the most advanced
global discourses on global futures are going on in languages other than
English – among the world’s oppressed Indigenous people. Neville had first
action researched ‘marginal locality’ in Fraser House.
Recall
that Neville sensed the sensibleness of local people engaging locally, regional
matters been engaged in regionally, and aspects of the global commons (water,
weather, air, migratory birds, oceans, sea life, and the like) being engaged at
the global level. With this he sensed the three levels having governance
processes. In this he was not in the least bit interested in a Global World
Government. Refer Declaration of
Governance and Law.
Neville
had been reading the writings of Richard Falk of Princeton University in USA
and other normative realists who were connected to the World Order Model
Project, called ‘WOMP’ for short. Neville spoke[16] about INMA being a place for action researching various
utopias, and where local aspiring utopias can respect and celebrate other
aspiring utopias. Turner uses the term heterotopias meaning multiple
co-existing Utopias respecting diversity.[17]
Neville
evolved practical action towards evolving multiple utopias, where every aspect may
be grounded in action research, with unfolding outcomes tested by the locals in
respective local contexts. What works may be repeated by locals in local
contexts and passed on as rumours that others may adapt and test if they want.
Respect between utopias may be fostered by what Widders called ‘cultural
communication’[18] and by implication from Terry’s later work, ‘intercultural
communication’.
Neville’s monograph
then proceeds to outline his 200-year transition process. (Neville at varying
times gave differing time periods for the transition - up to 500 years.)
Neville writes of adapting one of the World Order Model Project’s (WOMP) models
toward what he described as a ‘more problem-solving and value priority
functionalism’.
By
comparing texts it can be seen that Neville drew upon Richard Falk’s 1975 book,
‘A Study of Future World’s, although Neville did not refer to this in his ‘On
Global Reform’ paper. Neville also drew upon and referenced Falk’s Journal
article, ‘Law and National Security: The Case for Normative Realism’
(Falk, R. A. (1975). A
Study of Future Worlds. New Delhi, Orient Longman’; Falk, R. A. (1974). Law and National Security: The Case for
Normative Realism. Utah Law Review No. 1.)
In Cultural Keyline Chapter One I introduced Neville’s three transition phases in his global reform model:[19]
This design involves
the conceiving of a three-stage transition process (T1-T3) (where T1, T2, and
T3 signify three transition processes):
Tl Consciousness-raising
in national Arenas
T2 Mobilization in Transnational Arenas
T3 Transformation in Global Arenas
Neville went on to describe proposed political frameworks:[20]
The political organs
have tripartite representation:
1.
Peoples,
2.
Non-government Organizations, and
3.
Governments.
Notice the bottom up ordering.
It
is submitted that T1 consciousness-raising….would occur firstly among the most
disadvantaged of the area, including the Aborigines.[21]
This
bottom up ordering Neville repeated in writing the Extegrity Documents with me on
reconstituting collapsed or collapsing societies in 1999, discussed later.[22]
This
follows Neville’s starting with the marginalised in Sydney and gathering in the
Indigenous people from the asylum back wards (where residents are ‘warehoused’
because they are deemed to be incurably dysfunctional).
The
next step could be focusing their activities on the INMA.[23]
Recall
that Neville established Fraser House as an INMA – an
Inter-personal/Inter-network Normative Model Area. At Fraser House people who
were labelled by wider society as mad and/or bad got on with their change work
and left Fraser House as members of functional and well networks comprising
between 50 and 70 people. For many, their experience of difference after
residing or attending Fraser House was palpable; they could see difference
occurring in their peers. Others did not even notice they were different; and
through this non-noticing they did not sabotage their own change work - they
just got with a functional life taking action with others for wellness. They
were together taking practical action for a better world. In this context of momentum
towards wellness there was generally little insight in as far as people had
little understanding of how this was
all working or what was contributing
to it working; though the transforming was at some level credible and
self-evident and at some level they knew it was
working. Momentum was generated through the free energy in the networks and
people would ‘go with the flow’. This gels with Fraser House being:
i. A credible transition
strategy
ii. A strategy both
meaningful and feasible to persons and groups
iii. With relevant
application to individual communities
Neville
also energised the Armidale and
Grafton Gatherings in 1971 – 1973, and his Therapeutic
Community Houses in Mackay, Townsville, Cairns, and Yungaburra as INMAs.
Neville formed INMAs in these locales by networking among the Aboriginal and
Islander nurturer women and resonant others.
This
would be accompanied by widespread T1 activities in the INMA, conducted largely
by those trained by previous groups. Aborigines from all over Australia and
overseas visitors would be involved as has begun.[24]
An
example has been the Small Island
Gathering in July 1994.[25]
Over
a number of years the Indigenous population of the INMA would be increasingly
involved, both black and white.[26]
This
especially started with the Armidale and Grafton human relations gatherings
(1971 to 1973).
Co-existing
with later T1 activity is a relatively brief consciousness raising program
with the more reformist humanitarian members of the national community, i.e.
largely based on self-selected members of the helping and caring professions
plus equivalent other volunteers. However their consciousness raising is
mainly aimed at realizing the supportive and protective role they can play
nationally, in guaranteeing the survival of the INMA beyond their own
lifetimes, rather than trying to persuade them actually to join it by migration[27] (my italics).
In 1986, when I first
met Neville I slotted precisely into the italicised sentence. I was one of
those ‘more reformist humanitarian members of the national community’.
In writing, ‘rather
than trying to persuade them actually to join it by migration’, Neville
actively encouraged me not to shift North. He said I was most valuable
as a distant resource person; in supporting the Laceweb Internet homepage and
doing this research perhaps I may contribute to, ‘guaranteeing the survival of
the INMA beyond their own lifetimes.’ This Biography forms part of this
research.
In the years
following 1974 when Neville wrote the ‘On Global Reform’ paper, he followed through
with the above social action. Neville implemented his networking firstly in the
Queensland Top End, and in the early Nineties extended this to the Darwin Top
End.
Neville’s paper[28] continues with the
Second Level Transition phase (T2 level):
‘T2 has two subunits:
T2 (a) commences with
the mobilization of extra-INMA supporters nationally.
Neville was doing
this on his return to Sydney for a couple of years in 1987 through to 1989 at
the Healing Sundays in Bondi
Junction in Sydney.
T2
(b) moves to the mobilization of transnationals who have completed T1
consciousness raising in their own continents. That mobilization is of two
fundamentally distinct types:
T2 (b)(i)
mobilization of those who will come to live in, visit, or work in the INMA.
As far as I can
determine T1 consciousness raising is evolving in the Far North Queensland
INMA, with links across Northern Australia and the Darwin Top End. T1
consciousness raising is also occurring among marginalized people across the
East Asia Australasia Oceania Region (this is discussed later). This
consciousness raising has continued in the Far North Queensland INMA since
Neville’s death in 2000. There was a flurry of activity in January 2012 to
accompany me and my son Jamie’s visit to the Atherton Tablelands[29].
T2
(b)(ii) mobilization of those who will guarantee cogent normative, moral and
economic support combined with national and international political protection
for its survival.
By T3, the effects of
T1 and T2 have largely transformed the INMA, which is now a matured
multipurpose world order model. Its guidance and governance will be
non-territorial in the sense that it extends from areal to global. Politically
it is territorial, economically it is largely continental; in the humanitarian
or integral sense it is continental for Aborigines and partly so in other
fields, but it is largely global.
T3
for the INMA is then nearing completion, while its ex-members who have returned
to their own continents are moving these regions towards the closure of T1, the
peak of T2 and the beginning of a global T3. This is perhaps 50-100 years away.
By the time of the peak of global T3 humanitarian consensus provides the
integral base for development of a World nation-state of balanced integrality
and polity. World phase completion could perhaps be 200 years away.[30]
To quote the INMA
poem[31]:
INMA
believes that persons may come
and go as they wish, but also
it believes that the values will stay and
fertilize its area, and
it believes the nexus will cover the globe.
Small beginnings have been made in T2a and T2b(i). Laceweb is about 50 years into the 200 plus years considered by Neville. Refer the bottom two boxes in Founding History of Social Transforming Action.
The above 200 year global transition model is resonant with the Yeomans pervasive sensing of all of the myriad inter-connected, inter-dependent inter-related aspects of self organizing nature on the Yeomans farms and being mindful of timing and placement in design. Neville quoted Maturana:[32]
In this evolutionary process, living systems and medium change together in a systemic manner following the path of recurrent interactions in which their reciprocal dynamic structural congruence (adaptation) is conserved.
In Neville’s 200 year model, resonant people are the medium for change and the uniquely appropriate placed bio-geographical context of Northern Australia is the ideal medium for the medium – ‘reciprocal dynamic structural congruence’.
While Neville
envisaged a ‘World nation-state’ he was not
advocating a ‘World Government’. He always spoke of ‘global governance’ with global
governance of global issues – the global commons – like global warming, the
atmosphere, the seas, large river systems, and global peacekeeping. Regional
issues would be covered by regional governance and local issues by local
governance. Recall that Neville had pioneered this three tiered governance in
Fraser House. Neville envisioned many aspects of current government service
delivery after a time being to a considerable extent carried out by communal
self help processes.[33]
Having set out his
transition process, for completeness Neville proceeded in his On Global Reform monograph to give
a glimpse of his macro thinking about longer-term generative action for
evolving possibilities towards humane law and caring governance in the INMA.
It can be noted that in Neville’s ‘On Global Reform – International Normative Model Areas’, he had not specified in detail the processes he envisaged taking place in any of the three transition phases. He had given an over-view and then went on to specify possible legal and governance models that may be applicable at some time way in the future.
Extegrity as the Missing Piece
It was not until November 2002 (two years after Neville’s death) that I realized that Exegrity[34] – a set of documents that Neville and I worked on for nearly a year in 1999 (when he was in constant chronic pain) was this piece missing from his, ‘On Global Reform’ monograph. These Extegrity documents set out a comprehensive Laceweb process for non-compromising funding and the reconstituting of a decimated society such as East Timor or Bougainville. For Neville, the name ‘Extegrity’ embodied the notion, ‘extensive integrity’.
The documents were inspired by a European Commission document relating to social reconstruction following societal collapse through war.[35] Typical of First World documents, the European Commission document places government, then law and then people as the order of priority. True to the process Neville sets out in his ‘On Global Reform’ paper, Neville turned the European Community document on its head in rewriting them as Extegrity.
The sequence for action embodied in the Extegrity Document is as follows:
First comes enabling local self-help and mutual-help towards bio-psychosocial wellbeing.
Second comes the re-connecting with local lore rather than law. Locals reconstituting their lore raises possibilities for the local-culture-sensible emergence of norms, rules, obligations and local law - during their co-reconstituting of community, while sharing in therapeutic Community Healing Action in evolving cultural locality.
Third comes local democratic governance by local communities as exemplified by the Fraser House patients’ committee-based governance. From this local governance may emerge regional and global governance consistent with Neville’s model mentioned above.
From this may emerge law. A non-compromising non-pathologising international peace-keeping process may ensure a peaceful framework while the above three processes[36] are evolved.[37]
At each of the three levels - people’s wellbeing, lore and governance – the Extegrity Document sets out social action which reframes the European Community document to being Laceweb Cultural Keyline way.[38]
Neville described the Extegrity Documentation as an isomorphic (of matching form) reversed, reframe of the European Community documents. (For completeness we even matched the layout, paragraphing, fonts and font sizes.)
A feature of both the
European documentation and the Extegrity documentation is a preference for
partnerships-in-action between previously conflicted people. It was this
funding preference for partnerships between previously conflicted peoples and
the ‘completeness’ of the European Community document that attracted Neville to
adapt these forms.[39]
The Extegrity Documentation was sent to UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, to Mary Robinson, Head of UNHRC, and to various Global governance bodies. It was also circulated widely among Indigenous communities in the Region – for seeding possibilities.
The UN process in
East Timor implemented the First World model of ‘nation state’. It used the
First World model of nation building as per the model in the above European
Union Document. Resonant with Pupavac’s article[40] some commentators I spoke to
who were present in the East Timor post-handover (a period from 1999 onwards )
spoke of Western psychosocial aid based on diagnosing post traumatic stress and
labelling resulting in pathologising of the local population. Balancing this, I
found many forms of resilience and local adaptive psychosocial mutual help
present in Dili and Bacau[41] among Indigenous
East Timorese of all ages.
East Timorese women I
spoke to in 2004 were very concerned that angry young men who had:
o
years of fighting in the hills
o
little contact with females, and
o
no work prospects
o
had little or no support in adjusting back into communal
life
and that they would
end up in the criminal justice courts and prison system that the UN had
prioritised after re-establishing national government.
First set up
Government, then law, second set up a criminal justice system with police
courts and jails. Third, the people come a very poor third as a focus. This top
down impositional process imposes a control system upon a population who have
been devalued, disconnected and dysfunctionalised by traumatising social
forces. This new control system coerces dysfunctional people to conform.
What was the best
response that grassroots folk could come up with under extreme duress may
remain as embodied aspects of being and habits of a lifetime unless integral
reframe possibilities emerge.
Also refer:
Healing Artistry, Gene Expression and Gene Modulation
Transforming Experiences
for Wellbeing
Extegrity reverses
this devaluing, disconnecting dysfunctionalising process and embraces natural
micro-experience as the process of personal and social transforming towards
being well together.
ConFest
and the Next 250 Years
[1] Refer (Yeomans 1974).
[2] Refer (Yeomans, N.
1971c; Yeomans, N. 1971b).
[3] Refer (Yeomans, P. A.
1971b).
[4] Refer (Yeomans, N.
1971c).
[5] Refer (Yeomans 1974).
[6] Refer (Yeomans N.
1974).
[7] Refer (Yeomans 1974).
[8] Refer (Aboriginal
Human Relations Newsletter Working Group 1971a).
[9] Refer (Franklin 1995, p. 59).
[10] Neville referred
me to this article (Dec 1993).
[11] Refer (Maturana & Verden-Zöller,1996).
[12] Refer (Parkinson 1963).
[13] Aug, 1988, Dec, 1993 and July, 1998.
[14] Refer (Widders 1993).
[15] Aug, 2004.
[16] 1993, 1997.
[17]
Refer (Turner 1982).
[18] Refer (Franklin 1995,
p. 59).
[19] Refer (Yeomans N. 1974).
[20] Refer (Yeomans N.
1974).
[21] Refer (Yeomans N.
1974).
[22] Refer (Yeomans, N. & Spencer L., 1999).
[23] Refer (Yeomans 1974).
[24] Refer (Yeomans N.
1974).
[25] Refer (Roberts and
Widders 1994).
[26] Refer (Yeomans 1974).
[27] Refer (Yeomans N.
1974).
[28] Refer (Yeomans N. 1974).
[29] Refer Appendix 40
[30] Refer (Yeomans N.
1974)
[31] Refer (Yeomans N. 2000a)
[32] Refer (Maturana, H. & R. Verden-Zöller, 1996).
[33] Refer Figures One, Two, and Three.
[34] Refer (Yeomans & Spencer 1999).
[35] Refer (European Initiative for Democracy and the Protection of Human Rights 1998).
[36] Refer (Yeomans & Spencer 1999).
[37] Issues
regarding interfacing between Extegrity grassroots mutual help wellbeing ways and
First world pathology-based aid (Pupavac 2005) are explored in a paper I wrote
with Andrew Cramb and Dihan Wijewickrama for Psychnet, ‘Interfacing Alternative and
[38] It also reframes the international psychosocial model mentioned in Chapter
Three, where therapeutic ethos is being used for pathologising for social
control by wide interests in the
[39] Refer (European Initiative for Democracy and the Protection of Human Rights 1998).
[40] Refer (Pupavac, 2005).
[41] Refer (Regional
Emergency Psychosocial Support Network Quarterly Newsletter, 2004 Vol 3, No 1.
p5).