Nationalism has got to go. Yes, even yours.

With the exception of the ten people who aren’t here right now, everybody is just trying to get by on this pale blue dot of ours. It’s harder than it looks. We tell ourselves—and teach our children—different, often contradictory, and always incomplete stories about how and why things came to be the way they are, and we hold and act on different conceptions of essentially contested concepts of what is fair, what is just, and what is ours.

From our earliest days of childhood we learn to bucket people into in-groups and out-groups: our family, our neighborhood or village, various racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious, class, and caste groupings, the country we live in or were born in, etc. If we can say we’ve progressed societally relative to our ancestors, it’s because our in-groups include more of humanity than theirs did. After all, the most impoverished, Hobbesian worldview is egocentric sociopathy, an in-group of one. The goal, therefore, is one in which people conceive of all of humanity as their in-group, and the out-group is the empty set. Which is to say, bog-standard cosmopolitan secular humanism is true.

As a step along the way, nationalism was a progression relative to what came before it. (Nations tend to be much bigger than 150 people, after all.) But here we are in the third century of people wreaking havoc on everyone around them in its name. We can now conclusively say that nationalism is an awful idea and ought to be thrown in the bin. All nationalisms, not just the ones you don’t like. “America, fuck yeah!” & MAGA bullshit, Arab nationalism (pan- or otherwise), Bolsonaro-style Brazilian nationalism, British nationalism, Hindu nationalism à la Modi, Irish nationalism and Ulster loyalism both, Russian & Ukrainian nationalisms, Zionism, and every irredentist, jingoistic, and revanchist movement the world over. All of them. They all have to go.

We have trouble imagining solutions to intractable world conflicts precisely because nationalism and its Westphalian enabler make us blind to much of the solution space. Sometimes we manage to awkwardly squish alternative structures into a Westphalian frame, but this often “works” by baking historic divisions into the system, entrenching divisions and empowering ideologues instead of helping those who build bridges.