Nationalism is more destructive than religion, and almost as much of a collective hallucination.
Possible. But I don’t see why this would be controversial.
It’s pre-controversial. I say it now and then, but people just ignore it.
There’s a contingent of atheists who are seriously pissed off at people having religions, but I haven’t seen anything comparable against nationalism, even though these days, wars are apt to be more about nationalism than religion.
It’s pre-controversial. I say it now and then, but people just ignore it.
Mostly because highly educated people on LessWrong don’t know many nationalists personally. They do know many religious people.
In any case classical pacifist movements where basically about this. Getting upset about nationalism seems a 19th or 20th century thing to do. Its not that the arguments against it are new and haven’t sunk in because of future shock level, its just that elite respectable opinion in the Western world has long ago shifted closer towards that position and most people living in the West suffer very little if any harm from the residual traces of nationalism. And the residual traces aren’t that notable, most people in say Western Europe are because of the well known traumas of wars in that time period not very nationalistic.
wars are apt to be more about nationalism than religion.
It is hard to say something like the Iraq war was caused by nationalism, though obviously “spreading democracy” is pretty much not only part of an ideology but is also a key part of America’s civic nationalism.
With most wars in the rest of the world that don’t directly involve Western states (obviously many of these are proxy wars). Ie. The ones that actually should matter to utilitarian since they consume far more lives, do indeed often seem to revolve around ethnic clashes. But this is where it gets tricky.
How do you classify the conflict in Sudan a few years back? One can claim that civil war was a religious one since Muslims where attacking animists and Christian villages and the latter where retaliating. How do you measure how much of it was because of nationalism. Is destructive Muslim or Irish Catholic nationalism a bigger blemish on religion or nationalism? What is the better approach to attacking it if you feel that the phenomena is not conductive to how you want to order the world?
Also nationalism evokes images of people being proud of the state or considering themselves a part of a people that numbers in the tens of millions and has supposedly some common past and a common destiny before it. Most of humanity has no idea of anything like that (outside of religion). It is basically a Western thing with very similar phenomena in East Asia and to a lesser extent the Indian subcontinent and Latin America. Most of humanity is much more tribal than it is nationalistic in the classic sense. And the types of bloody civil wars and revolutions one sees in Africa and the Middle East are I think evidence in favour of this.
It’s pre-controversial. I say it now and then, but people just ignore it.
There’s a contingent of atheists who are seriously pissed off at people having religions, but I haven’t seen anything comparable against nationalism, even though these days, wars are apt to be more about nationalism than religion.
Mostly because highly educated people on LessWrong don’t know many nationalists personally. They do know many religious people.
In any case classical pacifist movements where basically about this. Getting upset about nationalism seems a 19th or 20th century thing to do. Its not that the arguments against it are new and haven’t sunk in because of future shock level, its just that elite respectable opinion in the Western world has long ago shifted closer towards that position and most people living in the West suffer very little if any harm from the residual traces of nationalism. And the residual traces aren’t that notable, most people in say Western Europe are because of the well known traumas of wars in that time period not very nationalistic.
It is hard to say something like the Iraq war was caused by nationalism, though obviously “spreading democracy” is pretty much not only part of an ideology but is also a key part of America’s civic nationalism.
With most wars in the rest of the world that don’t directly involve Western states (obviously many of these are proxy wars). Ie. The ones that actually should matter to utilitarian since they consume far more lives, do indeed often seem to revolve around ethnic clashes. But this is where it gets tricky.
How do you classify the conflict in Sudan a few years back? One can claim that civil war was a religious one since Muslims where attacking animists and Christian villages and the latter where retaliating. How do you measure how much of it was because of nationalism. Is destructive Muslim or Irish Catholic nationalism a bigger blemish on religion or nationalism? What is the better approach to attacking it if you feel that the phenomena is not conductive to how you want to order the world?
Also nationalism evokes images of people being proud of the state or considering themselves a part of a people that numbers in the tens of millions and has supposedly some common past and a common destiny before it. Most of humanity has no idea of anything like that (outside of religion). It is basically a Western thing with very similar phenomena in East Asia and to a lesser extent the Indian subcontinent and Latin America. Most of humanity is much more tribal than it is nationalistic in the classic sense. And the types of bloody civil wars and revolutions one sees in Africa and the Middle East are I think evidence in favour of this.