Nayef Al-Rodhan - Cultural Quotes

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Cultural and ethnic diversity benefit humanity's future, survival, strength and excellence, promoting what I call cultural vigour, similar to the way in which molecular and genetic diversity promote hybrid vigor in nature and thus strength, resilience and a higher potential for a problem-free future.

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

Nayef Al-Rodhan
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.

Nayef Al-Rodhan
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.

Nayef Al-Rodhan
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.

Nayef Al-Rodhan
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.

Nayef Al-Rodhan
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.

Nayef Al-Rodhan
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.

Nayef Al-Rodhan
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.

Nayef Al-Rodhan
There is only one collective human civilisation comprised of geo-cultural domains and cultures.

Nayef Al-Rodhan
In order to stop the cycle of disenfranchisement, frustration, and discontent, dignity must be central, paving the way for a governance model that is affordable, acceptable, and applicable to various regional and cultural sensibilities.

Nayef Al-Rodhan
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.

Nayef Al-Rodhan