In the aftermath of Scotland's decision to remain in the United Kingdom, Daniel Hannan defends British nationalism as a source of harmony in the debates over Scottish independence in in "The positive case for nationalism". He argues that that nationalism led to the best in human nature revealing itself in people's acquiescence to the outcome of the election.
At the end of the post he takes aim at the view that nations are simply made up lines on a map:
Most ordinary people – that is, people who are not literati or politicians – take feelings of national belonging for granted, and see patriotism as an unalloyed virtue, like honesty or courage. Yet the prevailing intellectual fashion is that patriotism is artificial. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn popularised the idea that nations depend on “invented traditions”. A.C. Grayling held that they were synthetic creations, “their boundaries drawn in the blood of past wars”.
What was once Marxist critique is now academic orthodoxy. Virtually every political science postgraduate who passes through my office has been taught the same bilge about nations being “imagined communities”. And so, technically, they are, in the sense that they exist largely in people’s minds. But this is true of lots of perfectly real things. Why is a £20 note worth £20? Because we agree that it should be. Why is David Cameron prime minister? Because we agree to treat him as such.
Those who disparage or detest nationhood are guilty of an old Marxist conceit: the notion that people can be reconstructed, purged of the “wrong” ideas, cured of “false consciousness”.
As usual when talking about the nature of nations, Mr. Hannan is right, and very much so - even if the cosmopolitan sentiments within us may wish otherwise.
The idea that nations are simply imagined communities, and therefore may be discarded by an Enlightened era isn't a sound argument. The conclusion simply doesn't follow from the premises. Nations may be imagined communities, but that doesn't imply that they are unreal. Here a metaphysical point needs emphasis: Mental objects exist just as extended ones do. (All of you who think that metaphysics isn't necessary take heed. We actually need to know a thing or two about what kinds of substances exist to talk coherently about the world.) Nor are those mental objects necessarily arbitrary.
It's the peccadillo of an adolescent to think that simply because something, such as tradition, exists only in the minds of its adherents that it is therefore made up and arbitrary. As David Sloan Wilson has shown in Darwin's Cathedral, the human mind can develop such objects because such objects have helped our far-off ancestors in their struggle for existence. Imagined communities and other mental objects have biologically evolved because they are useful adaptations.
Adaptations, in turn, have some form that reflects the problems they help solve. One can go as far as to speak of them as embodied knowledge. That embodied knowledge must in some sense be complex and in being complex. Culture's reality as a set of mental object is betrayed by the complexity of those adaptive structures no less than the tactile properties of some sand in one's hands would prove the reality of that sand. If imagined communities and other traditions were simply made up, they would be random in their form. Instead, though, they are adaptive. Britannia, Rule the Waves! tells us something about the problems which have faced British society in the past just as a polar bear's lush fur would tell someone about the environment it inhabited.
There is also an underlying biological explanation of of patriotism that Mr. Hannan doesn't touch on when he writes: "Patriotism, as this blog never ceases to argue, is what makes us behave unselfishly." That explanation is that, as a cooperative species, Homo sapiens has evolved an innate desire to belong to a band. Nature has left Homo sapiens a distinctly cooperative species, and that propensity to cooperate is reflected in a desire to belong to a community because without such a sense of belonging cooperation to a human degree would be impossible. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin argued that traits such as "sympathy, fidelity, and courage" evolved to such a degree in human beings because "selfish and contentious people will not cohere" (Darwin 1989[1877]: 134-135[129-130]).
Even though human society has greatly changed since the conditions of our band-ancestors, human instincts have remained comparatively constant, and so the same instincts that would lead someone to desire the solidarity of a band compel them to find a first-person plural in the nation. In a sense, patriotism is atavistic because it reflects our desire to belong to bands even though patriotism's object is a much wider civilization. There shall always be a human desire to belong impelling people's patriotism, what matters is how culture directs that emotional impetus.