Nayef Al-Rodhan Quotes

Circumstances will determine what I term the survival value of humankind’s moral compass. Being highly moral in an immoral environment will almost certainly be detrimental to one’s survival and vice versa.

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.

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.

We are therefore driven by both basic survival instincts and rational thought.

Strict ethical guidelines need to be developed in anticipation of significant technological and biotechnological advances in order to guarantee human dignity.

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.

The lack of collective dignity felt by so many in the Arab world is the result of a combination of internal autocratic and corrupt regimes, with predictable ineffective and unaccountable governance, supported by external actors with short-term geopolitical interests.

Addictive drugs misuse the brain’s existing pre-programming, activating reward mechanisms and extreme feelings of pleasure. When stimulated, the brain’s pleasure centres emit signals to repeat the behaviour. In this sense, the brain is pre-programmed to feel good.

The history of human civilisation is a history of mutual borrowings.

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.

One challenge is to agree on minimum criteria of good governance that are not perceived as a threat to cultural traditions and to draw on moral concepts that are indigenous to specific cultural settings. {{fix cite}

Civilisational triumph is thus not a zero-sum enterprise that favours one geo-cultural domain over another.

Morally relevant emotions are essential for living in social groups and they provide the basis on which we may construct conceptual frameworks that help guide our actions, but human beings should more accurately be thought of as being endowed with morally relevant capacities rather than innate moral knowledge.

I define sustainable history as a durable progressive trajectory in which the quality of life on this planet or other planets is premised on the guarantee of human dignity for all at all times and under all circumstances.

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.