Notes on Nationalism (1945)
Both nationalism nor patriotism barely make sense any more. Time are changing. When Orwell wrote this piece he was influenced by the war, extreme situations like wars or famines always cloud your judgements.<p>I recommend reading the seemingly unrelated <i>The Knowledge</i> by Lewis Dartnell. It describes the skills that would be necessary to rebuild civilisation after a hypothetical global cataclysm. Why is it relevant? If you read it, you will realize that all of civilization is fundamentally based on global markets and the global shipping of crude oil and other resources. Without these, nearly all technologies of daily life would break down in a very short time frame, including agriculture and medicine. The connections and dependences between countries are massive and completely unavoidable at our current level of technological development. In the long run, all countries have to work together or modern society will fail. (It may also fail because the resources dwindle extremely fast, viewed at an evolutionary time scale. Expanding mankind into space is unavoidable, or at least robot mining will be needed.)<p>Add to this the fact that we can communicate in real-time with the whole world and get news about distant events and politics within minutes, and patriotism starts to appear in a completely different light - as a silly appeal to traditions with no substance. Bear in mind that nations are entirely artificial entities and territorial conflicts have become (almost) impossible due to the global trade dependences.<p>This doesn&#x27;t mean that there is anything wrong with mild forms of patriotism, of course, just that there are no particular advantages to it in the long run.<p>In a nutshell, we live in an essentially transnational society and this cannot change unless you&#x27;re willing to give up almost all of modern technology.