Just like religion, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Humans need belonging. National identity can give people meaning, gratitude, pride, and a feeling of rootedness. Patriotism can bring people together to cooperate, to build a good society, or to face difficult problems. This is true not only of nations, but of smaller units too: provinces, states, cities, schools, neighborhoods, families. People can love a landscape, a language, a history, or the memory of ancestors who endured hardship and built something.
But the same psychological mechanism that creates warmth and cooperation also creates outsiders. Fellow citizens of our nation, just like fellow members of a religion, become members of an ingroup, and therefore receive preferential regard, support, and trust compared to outgroup members—foreigners, rivals, or those who are simply not “one of us.”
At its best, patriotism is gratitude and stewardship. It is care for one’s home, loyalty to neighbors, respect for institutions that protect people decently, and a wish to pass something worthwhile on to the next generation. At its worst, patriotism becomes collective vanity. The nation stops being a practical civic arrangement and starts to feel almost sacred—above criticism, above humility, perhaps even above ordinary morality. The home group is imagined to be uniquely virtuous, uniquely wronged, or uniquely deserving. Critics become suspect. Outsiders become threatening. At that point harshness can begin to feel justified.
One of the great ironies of civilization is that many countries have beautiful constitutions and noble founding ideals while behaving badly toward outsiders. At their best, constitutions speak of liberty, justice, equality, dignity, due process, fairness, and restraint of power. But the emotional force of these values often applies only to insiders. A country may insist that its own citizens deserve humane treatment and equal standing before the law, while showing indifference or contempt toward people outside the border. The moral imagination stops at the passport.
This is one place where constitutions and scriptures are interesting to compare. At their best, both reach toward universality. At their worst, both become tribal property. People sometimes quote them not to enlarge compassion, but to justify selective loyalty. There is something strange about passionately affirming equality while only feeling it fully for one’s own side. If fairness, justice, and dignity are real values, they should not evaporate when a person happens to be born on the wrong side of a line on a map.
Religion and nationalism can also become explicitly fused. In some places this fusion is formal and built directly into law and state power: religious leaders may hold autocratic authority, or the state may define itself in explicitly theological terms. In other places the fusion is softer but still very real: politicians wrap themselves in sacred language, imply that the “real” members of the nation follow the dominant religion, and use religious identity as a marker of patriotic legitimacy. Religion then lends nationalism sacred prestige, while nationalism lends religion the machinery of the state. In many parts of the world, it feels as though these tendencies are intensifying again. The old tribal reflexes are not difficult to awaken.
This is also the point where nationalism begins to resemble religion most vividly: sacrifice becomes noble. The dead soldier becomes a secular martyr. Military cemeteries become sacred ground. National memorial days, uniforms, solemn parades, salutes, flyovers, and moments of silence are not trivial theatre; they are rituals. I do not mean this cynically. Some of these rituals can be dignified, moving, and morally serious. But psychologically they are doing something very similar to religious ceremony: they sanctify loyalty, make sacrifice visible, and bind the group together around a shared story of suffering and duty.
Once the nation is felt to be sacred, military power begins to acquire a special moral glow. Global military spending is now close to $3 trillion per year. And broader estimates of the economic impact of violence run to roughly $20 trillion annually. Even allowing for debate about definitions and methodology, the scale is staggering. It is also vastly greater than many published estimates of what would be required each year to eliminate extreme poverty. Beyond the numbers, there is the cost in human talent: engineers, chemists, manufacturers, and researchers working on military technology could instead use their abilities to give the world better housing, cleaner energy, safer roads, prosthetics, better medications, water systems, or even simply better playgrounds for children, instead of better ways to maim or kill them.
I am not proposing some childish utopia in which all armies disappear tomorrow. Human societies will always require policing, disaster response, protection against violent actors, and organized defense of civilians. But it is worth imagining a more mature global arrangement: less dependence on giant national war machines, and more emphasis on internationally accountable peacekeeping, policing, engineering, disaster response, and protection of human rights. It is worth imagining a system in which soldiers or security personnel would train in different parts of the world, learn other languages, work alongside people from other cultures, and spend more of their careers helping with floods, fires, epidemics, rebuilding, mediating regional conflicts, and civilian protection. The point would not be to erase local loyalties, but to weaken the automatic “us and them” mentality.
What can be done about this problem? This is one place where the best of religion and the best of civic life actually converge. The best religious values call for compassion, humility, fairness, hospitality, and recognition of the dignity of other persons—not just of one’s own tribe. Likewise, the best constitutional ideals call for equal protection, restraint of power, due process, and humane treatment. The United Nations, however imperfectly, points in this direction. The UN Charter speaks of promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins with one of the most beautiful sentences in political history: all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
Einstein, especially after the arrival of nuclear weapons, moved toward this kind of thinking as well. He argued that the scale of modern destructive power had made old-style nationalism dangerously obsolete, and he supported some form of supranational democratic authority—what he often called world government—as a way of preventing catastrophe. I think he was at least directionally right about the problem, even if the practical solution remains difficult.
Of course, there are dangers in any larger political arrangement. A world government, if badly designed, could become bureaucratic, overreaching, or tyrannical. There would have to be strong safeguards: systematic democracy, term limits, limited executive power, fair elections with protections against propaganda, and protections against wealthy candidates or partisan blocs using economic power to sway the electorate unfairly. A more modest movement in this direction would simply be to strengthen international law and increase the authority, accountability, and capacity of institutions such as the United Nations, rather than pretending that national sovereignty must remain absolute forever.
The task is not to abolish tribal feeling altogether, but to civilize it—to channel it toward celebration, artistry, local pride, friendly competition, and cooperative belonging rather than toward prejudice, ostracism, and war. If we are wise, tribalism, nationalism, and religion give us festivals, songs, neighborhoods, architecture, and cultural beauty. If we are foolish, they give us fear, exclusion, and repeated conflict.
