None of this is a new observation. More than half a century ago the sociologist Robert Bellah gave the pattern a name—civil religion—and catalogued its saints, its martyrs, its holy days, and its sacred symbols. But this civil religion comes with a cost.
Nationalism 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, neighbourhoods, 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." Evolutionary theorists have a name for this pairing, too: parochial altruism. There is a real possibility that its two halves—generosity turned inward, wariness turned outward—evolved together, each making the other viable in a world of competing groups. If so, the kindness and the suspicion are not separate faculties we might hope to pry apart, but two sides of the same coin.
At its best, patriotism is gratitude and stewardship. It is care for one's home, loyalty to neighbours, 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.
Orwell drew the line at exactly this point: patriotism, as he defined it, is "devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life" with no wish to force it on others, defensive by nature, while nationalism is "inseparable from the desire for power." The distinction is worth keeping, because it lets us honour the first while staying wary of the second.
Often patriotic citizens forget that their own families were once immigrants. If you go far enough back, almost all humans are descended from "immigrants," except perhaps some who still live in sub-Saharan Africa. As I described in the chapter on evolution, humans originating in Africa migrated across the world over tens of thousands of years. However you draw the boundaries, only a small fraction of families still live where their ancestors were the first human settlers. There is a particular irony in societies built almost entirely by waves of immigration, that later turn a cold face to newcomers.
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 strongly 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 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 patriotism. 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 soldier lost in battle 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. 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.
There is an old and exact word for what happens when the sense of the sacred settles on something human beings themselves have made: idolatry—the first of the two temptations I described in discussing consciousness. A nation is among the largest things we have ever made, and when the nation stops serving persons, and persons begin instead to be sacrificed to the nation, the old word applies exactly.
There is an uncomfortable implication here for the argument of this book. If the real goods of religion—belonging, ritual, meaning, the sense of being carried by something larger than oneself—flow through nonspecific channels rather than through any particular doctrine, then nationalism is simply another vessel carrying the same goods. That is partly why it moves people so deeply, and why it will not yield to argument alone, any more than faith does. You cannot reason someone out of a need you have not offered to meet some other way.
Once the nation is felt to be sacred, military power begins to acquire a special moral glow. Global military spending now runs to roughly $2.7 trillion a year, and it is still rising. Broader estimates of the economic impact of violence run to something closer to $20 trillion annually. Even allowing for debate about definitions and methodology, the scale is staggering. By way of contrast, the world spends on peacekeeping and peacebuilding well under one per cent of what it spends on its armies. The military figure is also vastly greater than most published estimates of what would be required each year to eliminate all of the world's extreme poverty. Indeed, on the World Bank's own figures, a single year of world military spending is roughly the size of the entire annual shortfall separating almost half of humanity from even a modest standard of living. Dwight Eisenhower—a five-star general before he was a Republican president—drew the moral in 1953: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." 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.
Human societies will always require policing, disaster response, protection against violent actors, and organized defence 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 with colleagues from other nations, 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. In an open letter to the United Nations in 1947 he argued that the scale of modern destructive power had made absolute national sovereignty dangerously obsolete, and he supported some form of supranational democratic authority—what he often called world government—as a way of preventing catastrophe.
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 greatly strengthen international law and increase the authority, accountability, funding, 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. At best, tribalism, nationalism, and religion give us festivals, songs, neighbourhoods, architecture, and cultural beauty. At worst, they give us fear, exclusion, and repeated conflict.
References
Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Rev. ed.). Verso. (Original work published 1983)
— Anderson's influential thesis is that a nation is an "imagined community": its members will never meet most of their compatriots, yet each carries an image of their communion. The account is largely cultural and historical rather than psychological, locating the rise of nationalism in print capitalism and the vernacular press. It is cited here for the point that we are able to feel kinship—and grief—for millions of strangers we will never see.
Bellah, R. N. (1967). Civil religion in America. Daedalus, 96(1), 1–21. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027022
— The founding statement of the idea that a modern nation possesses, alongside its churches, an "elaborate and well-institutionalized" civil religion, complete with its own saints (Washington), martyrs (Lincoln), sacred texts, holy days, and symbols. Bellah drew on Rousseau, who coined the phrase religion civile, and on Durkheim. The essay is the direct conceptual parent of this chapter, and the reason the pattern it describes deserves to be named rather than merely noticed.
Choi, J.-K., & Bowles, S. (2007). The coevolution of parochial altruism and war. Science, 318(5850), 636–640. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1144237
— Using game theory and agent-based simulation, the authors show that altruism toward one's own group and hostility toward outsiders—"parochial altruism"—could have evolved together under conditions plausible for late-Pleistocene humans, each trait making the other viable in intergroup conflict; neither, they argue, would likely have evolved alone. The result is a formal model, not a proven history, and it remains debated. Warmth binding an ingroup is the same force that hardens its borders.
Durkheim, É. (1995). The elementary forms of religious life (K. E. Fields, Trans.). Free Press. (Original work published 1912)
— The seminal argument that religion is fundamentally social: through collective ritual a group generates "collective effervescence," experiences its own unity as something sacred.
Einstein, A. (1947, October). Open letter to the General Assembly of the United Nations.
— Written in frustration at the deadlock over international control of atomic energy, Einstein argued that "security is indivisible" and that lasting peace required "a modification of the traditional concept of national sovereignty"—a supranational authority with real legislative and executive power. He returned to the theme repeatedly until his death. The letter is reprinted in O. Nathan and H. Norden's Einstein on Peace (1960) and is widely available online; the U.S. National Archives holds related correspondence (Identifier 7873451). It is the source for the chapter's account of his turn toward world government.
Eisenhower, D. D. (1953, April 16). The chance for peace [Address before the American Society of Newspaper Editors]. Washington, DC. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-chance-for-peace-delivered-before-the-american-society-newspaper-editors
— Delivered twelve weeks into Eisenhower's presidency and five weeks after Stalin's death, and remembered as the "Cross of Iron" speech. The sentence quoted in this chapter continues: "This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children"—the same ledger of squandered talent the chapter draws up in its own terms—and the speech then prices a single heavy bomber in schools, power plants, and hospitals. That the era's most decorated soldier, speaking as a Republican president at the height of the Cold War, made the case in these terms is a reminder that this argument belongs to no political side.
Institute for Economics and Peace. (2025). Global Peace Index 2025: Measuring peace in a complex world. https://www.economicsandpeace.org
— The source of the chapter's figure for the global economic impact of violence: US$19.97 trillion in 2024 and an estimated US$21.8 trillion in 2025, expressed in purchasing-power-parity terms. The estimate is a broad model that folds in the cost of homicide, incarceration, private security, and lost productivity as well as war, and it has been criticized for not measuring direct human injury; it should be read as an order-of-magnitude indicator, not a precise ledger. The same reports supply the striking contrast that global spending on peacebuilding and peacekeeping is well under one per cent of military spending.
Orwell, G. (1945). Notes on nationalism. Polemic, 1.
— Orwell separates patriotism—"devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life," defensive and content to leave others alone—from nationalism, which he takes to be "inseparable from the desire for power" and marked by obsession, self-deception, and indifference to atrocity when committed by one's own side. The essay is freely available via the Orwell Foundation (orwellfoundation.com).
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. (2025). Trends in world military expenditure, 2024 (SIPRI Fact Sheet). https://www.sipri.org
— The authoritative annual measure of military spending. World military expenditure reached US$2.718 trillion in 2024—a tenth consecutive annual rise and the steepest since the end of the Cold War—of which the United States accounted for roughly a third. On present commitments SIPRI and the United Nations project the figure could climb toward US$4–6 trillion by 2035. These are the numbers behind the chapter's point about the moral glow that attaches to armed force.
United Nations. (1948). Universal Declaration of Human Rights. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
— Article 1 reads, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." The universalist phrasing was hard-won: Hansa Mehta of India is credited with changing an earlier draft's "All men" to "All human beings." The Declaration elaborates the United Nations Charter's pledge (Articles 1 and 55) to promote "human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction."
United Nations. (2025). The Sustainable Development Goals report 2025. United Nations.
— Cited for the comparison between military spending and the cost of ending poverty. Ending extreme poverty (the $2.15-a-day line) through direct, data-targeted income transfers has been costed at roughly US$300 billion a year—about 0.3 per cent of global GDP—by researchers at Berkeley's Center for Effective Global Action, while guaranteeing full social-protection floors is put by this report at roughly US$1.4 trillion a year. The moderate-poverty comparison in the chapter is open arithmetic on World Bank inputs: about 44 per cent of humanity lives below the upper-middle-income poverty line of $6.85 a day (2017 PPP), and the Bank's Poverty and Inequality Platform puts the global poverty-gap index at that line near one-fifth, so the aggregate annual shortfall is on the order of 0.2 × $6.85 × 365 days × 8 billion people ≈ US$4 trillion in purchasing-power terms—plausibly nearer US$2 trillion in market dollars, since a dollar buys more in poorer countries. Every one of these figures is of the same order as, or smaller than, a single year of world military spending, which is the only point the chapter needs.
World Bank. (2024). Poverty, prosperity, and planet report 2024: Pathways out of the polycrisis. World Bank. https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/poverty-prosperity-and-planet
— The Bank's first post-pandemic global assessment, and the source for the chapter's moderate-poverty figures: roughly 3.5 billion people—44 per cent of the global population—live below the $6.85-a-day standard typical of upper-middle-income countries, a count barely changed since 1990, and on current trends lifting them past that line would take more than a century. The underlying poverty-gap data are freely explorable at pip.worldbank.org. (In June 2025 the Bank re-expressed its lines in 2021 prices—$3.00, $4.20, and $8.30—without changing what they measure.)
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