How did nationalism and nation states arise? Smith's standard text "Nationalism" presents the standard historical and anthropoligical views. He even mentions kin-based biology and gene-culture co-evolution. Too bad he, like most historians and anthropologists dismisses it.
But, like all good books, most rewards come from the muses they inspire rather than the direct knowledge they impart. Smith's brief description of Gellner's 1960's - 19080's theory of nationalism was one such muse for me. From what I understand, Gellner's nationalistic origin theory is abased on reconciliation between an urbanizing proletariat and established urbanites (elites & proletariat). When combined with a literate society, coordination took the form of nationalism and nation states.
From a gene-cultural multilevel selection lens, this actually seems OK. Could sufficient migration levels within a loosely coupled ethnie during a religoius-political Great Awakening cycle produce an adaptive group and moral Big Brother (List & Pettit type) that was happy to stick to fixed boundaries?
I suspect internal migration, not based on expansionist conquest might be key. Seeing loosely coupled people as part of the same adaptive group would require some sort of meta-narrative bind. I'd suggest Scott Atran's work on religion makes sense here. You need some quasi-factuals to bind people and serve as low cost commitment displays. These would also serve as a guide to understand the moral Big Brother, provided of course you had a sufficiently primed cultural background to correctly do so.
The missing piece is non-expansionist tendencies....
Could this be where progressive religion comes in? For instance, early Christianity seems to have made hay with the idea of Salvation and universalized divinity. Everyone is a son of God. Everyone can be saved. By treating others as yourself (or at least not like chattel) you then save yourself. While this ideology eventually turned into imperialism, I would suspect it started out very pluralistic. I also suspect this general class of cultural proclivity is highly adaptive as it sets up selection for higher levels of organization.
The problem comes from Progressivism's Pandora's box. One everyone is seen as human as your in-group, then there's not much stopping you from destroying other groups for their own liberation. I think we're in that phase right now. That's the neo-catholic idea I discussed the other week.
The piece that needs explaining is why the first nations would remain internally focussed. I suspect the answer is in "just the right levels of internal migration relative to cultural disparities". This seems akin to the very narrow solution space 1970's group selection needed to operate within in order to be theoretically possible. I believe D.S. Wilson showed that this very narrow, improbable, solution band is actually where groups reside. My guess is that some fitness (wealth) transfer from governments or elites back to commoners is part of the stabilizing solution. And, that pluralistic tendencies combined with just the right amount of inward focus caused by narrow-band migration levels produce the necessary solution space for non-expansionist Nationalism.
But I could be wrong. However, while improbable, it just feels right for some reason....
The Protestant revolution did something
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