Since
Dr. Robert L. Humphrey's book - VALUES FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM
- edited by his personal student - Jack Hoban, was
very hard to find, I had decided to dedicate some
pages for allowing you to read about some of his stories
and cases.
His incredible work and research that he had accomplished
throughout his life will amaze you. His global cross-cultural
detective work to stop cross-cultural conflicts and
violence resolution are important lessons to be remembered.
These are taken from the book itself.
Please
click on image to visit Dr. Humphrey's OFFICIAL
website by Jack Hoban.
DR.
ROBERT L. HUMPHREY'S
www.LifeValues.com
He
is sorely missed.
Incidentally,
it is helpful to consider the roots of violence, initially,
from the overseas perspective, rather than the domestic, for
two reasons: 1) that is where we first clearly perceived the
deep, somewhat innocent nature of those roots as ignorance,
and 2) it is easier for us rational/emotional human beings
to maintain objectivity while discussing our foreign, rather
than our domestic (for instance, racial) troubles, because
most of us are less emotionally involved in the overseas issues.
Since
the foundation of the violence is innocent ignorance, that
makes it easier to solve than if the basic problem were intentional
wrongdoing, but it does not make it easy; easier, but still
very difficult. Why so difficult? Because the ignorance at
the foundation of the problem is shielded against correction
by what we call the truth-resisting embarrassment syndrome.
Often neither side of a social conflict wants the true underlying
reason for the trouble admitted. Both insist on attributing
the problem to more respectable, surface causes (if not, most
naively of all, to intentional evil itself).
Here
is a small but typical illustration: a few years ago, I was
asked to solve a cross-group problem in the U.S. between two
white groups. The children in a grammar school from the hilly,
wealthy area were discriminating against comparatively poor
children from the low country. There was some fighting among
the children. The complaining parents of the poor children
believed that the reason for the discrimination was bigotry
among the wealthy children. It took me less than a day of
interviewing among the wealthy children to find out the real
reason: (as one child stated) "the skin diseases that
all the gully kids have and are giving to us (highland) kids."
The
facts proved to be that a few, and only a very few, of the
lowland children occasionally brought the itch to school,
and over the past three years, possibly two of the wealthy
children had picked up the annoying skin irritation.
I
presented these findings to an informal committee and advised
that it would be an easy problem to solve. But guess who did
not want to have the problem discussed any further if we had
to reveal a few cases of the itch? Would you guess: The school
administration? The parents of the wealthy children? Or the
parents of the poor children?
The
answer: all three groups. Why? Because a little fighting over
alleged bigotry was more acceptable than facing that actual
problem of a dirty skin disease no matter how minor. Too embarrassing!
The
indispensable purpose of this short chapter is to establish
strongly the fact that there are hidden, unmentionable roots
of violence. Being unmentionable because of embarrassment,
these basic reasons-such as a skin disease-can be almost impossible
to surface and cure.
Above
from pages 85 - 86
Dr.
Robert L. Humphrey's
VALUES FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM
Click
on image to BUY BOOK
