This research has introduced and specified Neville’s Cultural Keyline as a potent new model and concept for the social
and behavioural sciences. Neville derived Cultural Keyline from over 40
years of action-researched praxis. Cultural Keyline
is potent, dense and multifacited; it is concurrently
a model for sustaining wellbeing based inter-relating and interacting, a concept
for the psychosocial sciences, a folk concept for enriching everyday life
interaction, a worldview, a mode of being, a mode of sensing, and a mode of
values based personal and social interacting. In this research I have specified
Cultural Keyline firstly from my use of it in action
research, and secondly, as an aid to understanding and synthesis of Neville
diverse actions, and as an aspect of everyday life relating.
Cultural Keyline
nestles with and co-enriches other models and concepts discussed in this
research – NLP, connexity, connoisseurship, cultural locality, dichter und denken, emergence, free energy, Inma,
kennen, Keyline, self organizing
systems, social topography, sociomedicine, and stimmung. These have also been woven into the process of
understanding and synthesis of Neville’s diverse actions and in my action
research.
Neville
adapted his father’s Keyline agricultural practices
in evolving Cultural Keyline. Neville used Cultural Keyline in evolving a micro-model of epochal transition and
in all of his life work – in Fraser House, Fraser House Outreach, and the Laceweb.
Self-organising
grassroots networking action continues to be spreading in the Region. Epoch
transitional action linked to Neville’s action research, on all accounts, seems
to be alive and thriving. We are, at time
of writing, fifty-five years into Neville’s 250 to 500 year timeframe. It seems
we are ‘on schedule’. The outreach from Neville’s
action research is evolving a transitional paradigm of human future.
I now give more specific conclusions.
Neville was evolving his transitional epochal processes grounded in
humane values. These values framed connexity-based
embodied knowingness, and also framed interpersonal interaction and
inter-relating in the unfolding life-world. Values were not explicated and laid
down in law – values were lived in connexity relating
as part of their communally evolving lore. Neville’s way of moving onto the
socio-topographical higher ground at the Keypoints
with dysfunctional people (where their disparate informs merge as energy) is to
be experienced - and when experienced, explanatory and descriptive words are
unnecessary and superfluous.
When Neville and his
father began taking nature and the unfolding context as a guide for action,
they were exploring things beyond their competence. Neville evolved Cultural Keyline and associated ways of evolving exquisite relevant
competences by competently acting in contexts that went beyond his competence.
When in overwhelming contexts Neville would be very ‘open’ - in Wolf’s terms (1976); he would also have his actions framed by
humane caring respecting values. Neville would be open in the sense of
surrendering his senses to the context, and then catching the collective
richness and wisdom of the living system context he was embedded in. Neville
would catch the system telling him what to do. He received subtle cues - though
sometimes obvious if you have eyes to see – as well as fully formed valued
insights out of inner silence about what to do next.
I sense that Neville’s
peak performing became activated – he become more fully alive – when his was
ecologically in a zone beyond competence while caringly using his exquisite
competences. This is where and how
his new competences emerged. Neville engaged in entering into this liminal (threshold) zone for a lifetime and was evolving
new exquisite competences daily.
Neville began constantly placing himself, staff, and patients
where they were all acting ‘beyond competence’ and acquiring competences to do
this functionally, valuably, and ethically. He passed on his ways to people so that they also gained new
competences and could be effective when confronting overwhelming contexts.
Neville was modelling how people together can be functional, valuable and effective
when they were out of their depth. Big Group was structured overwhelm. The mood
was:
We
don’t know how we do this; we’re the best in the world, so lets get started
again (Dec 1993, July 1998).
The mood when entering
this zone was articulated by Neville:
Of course it was miraculous. We were the best in the planet, and we all
believed this, so we would acknowledge our failings, as we were streets ahead
of everyone else (Dec 1993, July 1998).
It was also articulated
by patients (Yeomans, N. 1965a, Vol. 4, p. 51):
When
both the staff and patients are working well together in the Unit, a peak of
enthusiasm is reached at times when everyone sees almost any move at all as
being gainful. New enterprises are embarked upon with an eagerness that is
almost inspired and success is a certainty.
Before Neville, the
wider system’s response to the dysfunctional troublemakers was confining them
in asylum back wards and prisons. People who withdraw when they sense they are
out of their depth have their current competence as a limit to action. Ethical
codes state that one must withdraw from helping in contexts where one reaches
the limits of competence. Neville complied with this protocol in drafting a
code of ethics for people not competent in his way (Yeomans 1998). If Neville had used a model that relied on
being competent then he too would have collapsed into incompetence, defence,
withdrawal and resignation in overwhelming contexts. He would have been
modelling patients back to themselves - all incompetent in overwhelm. Fraser
House patients would have left the Unit incompetent in overwhelming contexts
and nothing would have changed.
Having experienced and
embodied Fraser House way, people leaving Fraser House would often be faced
with overwhelming situations. After experiencing Neville’s way they had evolved
processes for moving through these functionally - with the supplemental support
of their local networks. Neville evolved Cultural Keyline
in part as a way to go beyond competence ethically and ecologically.
As I introduced in my methods
section, none of the people I interviewed who were connected to Fraser House -
the staff, Alf Clark the researcher, the outpatient and the patient, and none
of the other people who knew Neville well from outside of Fraser House - could
articulate Neville’s way. None of the youth who I have interviewed at Geoff and
Norma’s farm could articulate Geoff and Norma’s way. Neville never articulated
his way.
Ross in his 1992 ‘Dancing with a Ghost’ article quoted by Tim Rogers (2000) refers to what I am calling ‘non-expressible knowingness’ as a
‘different form of reasoning’. Ross was writing of his experience of becoming
able to know where the fish were feeding in an
Neville and the people who worked with
him know enough to use this knowingness in exquisite action. They cannot put it
into words. They are like me with ‘Cultural Keyline
in Dec 1992. It is like people who have experienced the way have a metaphoric
‘fingerprint’ that others can sense in their actions, and one in the way, can
readily sense when some one does not have the way; that these people have
special knowing, understanding and way are evidenced by their outcomes in
context.
Neville left me quite a challenge in
suggesting I do this PhD. I have tracked down the majority of the things he
evolved and what he did. I have documented his effectiveness. I have detailed
much of his processes and the processes for using his processes (metaprocesses). In this thesis I
have engaged in documenting, detailing, analysing and explaining. This thesis
adds in most of what Neville left out of his engaging with people, and leaves
out what is most vital and important – that is firstly, the experience of being
immersed in Neville’s Cultural Keyline way over time
in the types of contexts Neville constituted, and secondly, the embodiment that
may flow from this. All of my explicating of Cultural Keyline is far removed from the experience of experiencing
being immersed in the action research outlined in this thesis - and the
embodied understandings that may flow from this. Neville took care not to
attempt to explicate what he did. He rarely articulated his way. Attempts to
articulate it miss the lived-life essence. Having a little of the way expressed
in words outside of lived context typically has people drawing incorrect
conclusions. The hallmark of Neville’s way is to experience and embody the
experience. This thesis may provide a way to enter the way. I sense that here
it is salient to again let Ward 10B in Townsville Queensland stand as a warning
to anyone who may want to implement ideas culled from this thesis without
allowing for the interwoven richness of Neville’s way and value underpinnings (Queensland Commission of Inquiry 1991).
I have presented evidence that
Neville evolved many innovations that have been adopted and adapted in
Australian society. Neville evolved a viable, effective and low cost
complementary biopsychosocial model and complementary
alternative (1993a; 1993b) to the current expert delivery of psychiatric and somatoform drug
centred treatments. Neville’s alternative is supporting the dysfunctional
fringe rich in potential, and enabling them to help themselves in a very
particular form of total dispersed therapeutic community.
Psychological defence strategies work towards having people
staying the same and hopefully not getting worse. Defence, control, and stasis
tend to accompany each other. Rather than defence and stasis, every aspect of
Neville’s work was evolving contexts for growth towards wellbeing in all its
aspects; everything was geared towards growth and holding a space for growth.
There is potential for growth in far from equilibrium states. Growth is
typically entangled with increases in adaptation, emergence, integration,
inter-relationship and complexity. Neville
worked with this connexity.
This research has established that Neville created normative
model contexts where enabled communities of dysfunctional mad and bad people
under extreme stress, without expert ‘we do it for you’ intervention, generated
their own growth towards wellbeing within and between themselves. This thesis
has detailed a working model of how to generate humane growth in people systems
under extreme stress.
History is full
of world powers that have collapsed. Today we have a complex global
politico-economic system integrated like never before with the consequent
threat of a collapse having global implications. As a stark reminder of how
close to the edge we can be, in September 2005
In
a world of rampant cross-cultural conflict, Neville evolved processes for
intercultural peacehealing as well as processes for
exploring transitions to new forms of cultures and intercultural syntheses that
respect diversity – an epochal local-lateral folk-based transition process.
Neville’s way may be effective for addressing many of the major issues facing
life on Earth. This thesis may provide
fertile ground for further research (refer Appendix 40).
Neville posed the
question, ‘Whither Goeth the Law – Humanity or
Barbarity (Carlson and Yeomans 1975). Today we face these alternative futures - Humanity or Barbarity. Neville has created a new model of
human future - a way where the common-folk, as in ‘folk in common on the global
commons’ on the margins are quietly playing a vital part together in whither goeth the World of
human futures.