Nayef Al-Rodan
Nayef Al-Rodhan is a philosopher, neuroscientist and geostrategist.
By promoting justice and thus the interests of the international community as a whole, a state will be able to make its influence over others sustainable and achieve its own national interest.
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.
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.
Knowledge about things beyond our immediate environment may be acquired through deduction, if the initial premises are believed to be correct.
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.
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.
In my view, most human beings are innately neither moral nor immoral but rather amoral. They are driven by emotional self-interest and have the potential to be either moral or immoral, depending on what their self-interest dictates, and will be influenced in their choices by emotions and socio-cultural contexts. Circumstances will determine the survival value of humankind’s moral compass in that being highly moral in an immoral environment may be detrimental to one’s survival and vice versa. Indeed, our neuronal architecture is pre-programmed to seek gratification and feel good regardless of the reason. All apparently altruistic behaviour serves self-interest at some level.
Human and societal security should be seen as complementary to state security, and security must be thought of in multi-sum and multi-dimensional terms (human, national, transnational, environmental and transcivilisational).
Many of the great achievements in history that are commonly attributed to one geo-cultural domain often owe a great debt to those of others. In this sense, some of the greatest achievements of human civilisation have been collective efforts and are part of the same human story.
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.
The power of emotions as drivers of behaviour, especially when survival is perceived as being at stake, needs to be recognised and taken into account at all levels of society and governance.
Strict ethical guidelines need to be developed in anticipation of significant technological and biotechnological advances in order to guarantee human dignity.
Civilisational triumph is thus not a zero-sum enterprise that favours one geo-cultural domain over another.
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.
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.
The history of human civilisation is a history of mutual borrowings.
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.
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.
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.
Emotional Amoral Egoism indicates that ethnic conflict should be understood in terms of a reaction to a failure to satisfy a group’s basic physiological, security and ego needs due to discrimination, experienced by a group whose relations are premised, above all, on cultural affinities.