Nayef Al-Rodhan Quotes
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The enduring assumption that human behaviour is governed by innate morality and reason is at odds with the persistence of human deprivation, inequality, injustice, misery, brutality and conflict.
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Knowledge about things beyond our immediate environment may be acquired through deduction, if the initial premises are believed to be correct.
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A set of global values in keeping with human nature and dignity need to be identified and developed.
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Security, stability and prosperity will depend on the application of the multi-sum security principle that captures the multi-dimensional aspects of security and insists on the centrality of global justice for lasting security.
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Indeed, collective triumph will also depend both on the application of reason and the recognition that a great deal of knowledge is indeterminate and may be temporally, spatially and perhaps culturally constrained.
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Each high point in the history of human civilisation has taken place where the conditions were ripe and has borrowed and built on the achievements of other cultures whose golden age may have passed.
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The history of human civilisation is a history of mutual borrowings.
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Civilisational triumph is important because if it is not actively sought, conflictual relations between members of geo-cultural domains may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Considerations of justice are also integral to efforts to generate transcultural security in the first instance and, ultimately, transcultural synergy.
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International cooperation is required to prevent anarchic situations developing and the unmasking of ever-present brutality and injustice that results from fear for survival in such situations.
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Focusing purely on extremism, whether in the Arab-Islamic world or the West, will not alleviate the root causes of tensions between members of different cultures. It will only alienate those who do not recognise themselves in those stereotypes, and generate fear and misunderstanding.
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Indeed, there is no evidence to suggest innate morality. It is therefore important to create the conditions under which the expansion of our moral communities may become more likely.
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Cultural essentialism is, thus, intimately tied to power relations. Fixity, homogeneity and separateness are prioritised within an essentialist framework. Therefore, part of any effort to resist essentialism is recognising diversity within difference, contingency, mutability and connectedness.
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Policies that assume that human nature is a tabula rasa (clean slate) should be reviewed and revised to reflect that man has an in-built genetic code for survival with no evidence for innate morality.
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Much of what we often consider knowledge is actually a point of view held without sufficient grounds: in a word, dogma.
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Justice is paramount to civilisational triumph because of its centrality to human dignity needs, the success of individual geo-cultural domains and the well-being of human civilisation.
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Morality, if present, should not be relied on because it will be trumped by self interest in most circumstances.
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Human beings are emotional amoral egoists, driven above all by emotional self-interest. All of our thoughts, beliefs and motivations are neurochemically mediated, some predetermined for survival, others alterable.
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People should be educated about the links between education, ideology, and politics as a way to promote the virtue of humility.
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In my opinion, a life governed by reason is likely to be more dignified than one shaped by dogma and unbridled emotions.
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Globalization is a process that encompasses the causes, course, and consequences of transnational and transcultural integration of human and non-human activities.
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Those who are outside the centres of power, because of the need for a positive and not simply a stable identity, are likely to find an independent identity appealing.
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Policies should take account of the emotional dimensions of human behaviour rather than assuming rational action.
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Almost every golden age of geo-cultural domains has been characterised by good governance, exchanges, borrowing, innovation and the adaptation of earlier contributions to forms of knowledge, and rationalism.