Values for a New Millennium : Activating the Natural Law to Reduce Violence, Revitelize Our Schools and Promote Cross-Cultural Harmony

Robert L. Humphrey was an Iwo Jima veteran, Harvard graduate, and cross cultural conflict resolution specialist during the Cold War. He proposed the "Dual Life Value Theory" of Human Nature.From the experiences of childhood in the Great Depression, trips as a teenager in the Panamanian Merchant Marines, national-class boxing, the awe-inspiring sights of selfless sacrifice on Iwo Jima, and finally, fifteen years in overseas ideological warfare, Humphrey observed that universal values exist and, ultimately control human behavior. Humphrey is a graduate of Wisconsin University, Harvard Law School, and the Fletcher School of Diplomacy.At the beginning of the Cold War, he left a teaching position at MIT to help lead the struggle against Communism. Finding that U.S. education was contributing to, rather than reducing, American overseas problems, he developed a new leadership approach that overcame Ugly American syndrome among hundreds of thousands in crucial Third World areas. More recently, his methodology won commendations for educating the alleged uneducable: Mexican-American street-gang youths in southern California, and Canadian Native teenage dropouts.Until Communism's fall, Humphrey kept his new methods confidential. Those methods are significant: (1) From his experiences with young infantrymen in heavy combat, and with the peasants in many villages of the world, he perceived humankind's basic goodness that philosophers have missed or under-rated. (2) In place of compartmentalized, primarily mental education, Humphrey has developed a human-nature-guided (moral, physical, artistic, mental) approach.

Robert Humphrey was a child of the Great Depression. Those were the days when life's lessons were learned in the school of hard knocks. He earned money as a semi-professional boxer. He rode freight trains, worked in the Citizens Conservation Corps (the CCCs), and finally joined the Merchant Marines. Those experiences got him through his youth, worldly-wise but morally sound. He transferred into the US Marines during World War II. There, as a rifle-platoon leader on Iwo Jima, he passed the ultimate course in life-and-death values.

Near the war's end, a gunshot-wound ended his hopes for a professional boxing career. He was discharged from the Marines. For twelve years he passed through eight colleges and universities "searching, just searching." He was looking for answers to that eternal question: "Why?" Why that terrible Depression that devastated his peaceful little hometown? Why that insanity on Iwo Jima that killed most of his Marine friends?

He took a Harvard Law degree and settled into teaching Economics at MIT. Then came the Cold War with the predictions that the Communists would win. He went back overseas to see if his global experiences would guide him in solving America's self-defeating Ugly Americanism. All through the first crucial Cold-War decades, his contracts were financed--success after success--by the US Information Service, the Chrysler Missile Corporation, the Army Research Office, and the Marine Corps. He taught culture-transcendent, "win-the-people" values in the most vital overseas areas--those surrounding the Communist block. The approach did overcome the Ugly Americanism. It did win back the foreign peoples. And it kept the lid on sabotage and violence in his assigned areas. It opened up a new social-scientific pathway to human conflict-resolution.