The study of nationalism is addicted to dichotomies: civic versus ethnic, lateral versus demotic, political versus cultural, voluntaristic versus organic, and so forth. It is understandable. Considering a multifaceted phenomenon with so many diverse manifestations, managing the data by categorization is a natural human response. And, to be fair, it can yield insight into ways that certain dominant types emerge and diverge. Yet too often it serves to explain away, rather than explain, the complexity of the subject. Having placed the types in their categories, we assume the problem solved and absolve ourselves of the harder task of understanding how they come to be bundled in the first place. Categorization also carries a none-too-subtle hint of normative judgment, as we discover creative ways to distance our rational, tolerant, and progressive patriotism from their emotional, narrow, and backward tribalism.

Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community by Bernard Yack should be adopted as one of the steps needed to cure us of this addiction. The argument of this book is basically right, and as I was reading it I was continually struck by its essential rightness. The emotions that bind intergenerational communities around shared cultural heritage cannot be separated from the rational construction of voluntary political institutions. Our moral judgments of nationalism, and our ability to effectively counter its more negative manifestations, are hampered by the widespread myth that they can, or even that they should be separated.

Too many disparate points of clarity are raised to illustrate this argument and its implications for me to effectively cover them all in this space. So if you want any further explanation as to why it is right, I suggest you read the book. I could end my review there, but the Critical Dialogue format encourages me to not just critique the work but engage the argument, which I am eager to do. And though my engagement may appear to start from a tired refrain, bear with me; I realize that an argument this sophisticated deserves more in response than a rehashing of the primordialist–modernist debate.

If nations are indeed communities built on bonds of social friendship stemming from shared cultural heritage, then no doubt such communities have existed for as long our species has been capable of social behavior, and will exist as long as we continue to be so. Thus, it is sensible to suggest that there is little of substance to distinguish modern nations from their premodern counterparts. Yet I would propose that a thing that is the same in its internal structure nonetheless becomes a different thing when placed in a radically different ecology. A community of social solidarity built around shared cultural heritage functions so differently in a global environment suffused with the notion of popular sovereignty that it becomes something substantially different.

That difference lies in the very phenomenon that Yack so effectively exposes from the outset of his argument: the myth of the civic nation. That the civic nation is a myth is one of the things fundamentally right about this book. One cannot build a nation on voluntary political principles alone as these offer no prepolitical test to determine where the boundaries of the nation and its values begin and end. Popular sovereignty cannot function without some prior understanding of who “the people” are. Indeed, if I would quibble with this thesis, it would be over the less controversial counterimplication that there remains an ethnic myth parallel to the civic one. The contingencies of birth determinative of social identity are by definition objects of fact that precede cognition, and the need for some manner of shared cultural heritage, broadly defined, to cement intergenerational loyalty is itself no myth, simply the reality with which the civic myth must contend. If anything, I would go further and say that Yack is too quick to discount the importance of at least some actual cultural traits (p. 74)—common language, values, basic skills and/or shared totemic symbols—in addition to a notional shared cultural heritage, to the effective functioning of a modern society and economy.

So I do not dispute that the civic nation is a myth. My point, rather, is who are we—nationalism theorists, of all people—to downplay the importance of myth. Myths have power, often more power than the material realities with which they contend. The civic myth is more than just a conceit of academics or “liberal wishful thinking” (p. 131), but a force that has transformed the logic of community and political behavior on a fundamental level. The principle that all individuals are of equal moral worth, once considered controversial, if not absurd, is now universal (p. 268), along with the related ideal that individuals should have equal share and voice in the institutions of governance. These principles become tests against which the values that structure and motivate collective behavior are measured. One does not see actions taken in the interest of universal political principles justified by modern states with the language of ethnic group interest, in the way that actions in the service of ethnic group interest are nearly always framed—however implausibly—in the rhetoric of universal political principle. The last political movement I can think of that even attempted to do so was Nazism, and even that could arguably be classed as an isolated outlier of the post-Enlightenment era. The nation may be a community of social solidarity built around contingent signifiers of cultural heritage. But the fact that it wants to be a community based wholly on voluntary political principle is no less crucial to its nature. Indeed, the nation could well be conceived as the narrative that bridges this impossible ideal with that uncomfortable reality.

The question of “when is the nation” is ultimately a dispute between those who are interested in the forces that have remained continuous throughout human history and those more interested in the depth of social change brought about by modernity. Both lines of inquiry can yield insights of value. But my insistence that it is not just nationalism but the nation itself that has changed through its engagement with the civic myth is not without significance. If modernity provides a substantially changed cognitive framework in which the nation is now situated, then unpacking exactly why and how such a narrative forms and maintains coherence in such a context—how the irresistible force of the modern civic myth is reconciled to the immovable object of contingent ethnic reality, both in general and in particular cases—is the next step we are challenged to take to carry these ideas further.

For while this book presents a novel theory of nationalism, comprehensively grounded between moral philosophy and the social construction of community, there is another word in the title that receives relatively less attention: psychology. What conflicting drives within the human mind make the cognitive pathways that constitute national narratives plausible as ways to reconcile the principles of popular sovereignty and national loyalty in the modern world? This is the question that must be answered if we are to translate these ideas into practical tools for solving the problems that nationalism creates, while preserving our commitment to the Enlightenment values from which it emerged.

To that end, Yack does us something of a disservice in introducing his distinction between a people and a nation—with the former as the population subject to particular institutions of popular sovereignty, and the latter as the intergenerational community of social solidarity, even while recognizing that it is the merger of these concepts that has generated nationalism as we understand it. Not just because, as he acknowledges (p. 97), the terms as he deploys them are counterintuitive to common usage: The People is usually understood as an organic community, whereas “nation” connotes at least some quintessentially modern elements such as a common economy and common rights and duties for all members (to borrow from Anthony Smith’s earlier formulations).

More to the point, while this distinction highlights a contradiction vital for understanding the internal dynamics of nationalism, the act of making it compromises at least some of the good work Yack has done toward curing us of our tendency to compartmentalize. It is certainly true that a community in which the principle of popular sovereignty is exercised and a community of social friendship stemming from shared cultural heritage are different in any number of ways—in origin, in structure, in function, and in mechanisms of legitimation. But what is therefore most interesting—and what we must understand and respect if we are to have any hope of ameliorating nationalism’s darker effects—is how the intense intermingling of these concepts alters the meaning of both, to the point at which it is now so natural for the human mind to conflate them that we require 344 pages of rational argument to disentangle them.

Indeed, the power of myth is such that we often remain helpless even in the face of such argument. As I read this book and wrote this review, Israel has been bombing Gaza to devastating effect, while Hamas indiscriminately fires rockets at Israeli population centers. And I watch my friends—rational people, including scholars of various aspects of political behavior, all of whom I deeply respect—taking sides on social media, posting and reposting comments that desperately and fervently seek explanation for the suffering in some idiosyncratic concept or belief—evil or dysfunctional, genocidal or paranoid—inherent to either Zionist or Palestinian identity and ideology. At a time like this, reading Chapter 9 on the moral problem of nationalism was positively soothing, offering an explanation not just for what was going on in the Middle East but in my own virtual community as well.

The cause of suffering during such conflicts is not to be found in religion, or even in nationalism’s dark gods, though it makes us feel better to look for it there, distancing it, as it does, from our rational, liberal selves. It is rather to be found in a convergence of depressingly modern and progressive principles, all of which the best of us would be loath to abandon. Certainly there is individual self-interest involved: When you or your family are threatened with violence, you expect the institutions to which you are subject to shield you and feel helpless if they do not. There is also community solidarity, when those with whom you feel bound by ties of social friendship are threatened by those with whom you do not.

Unrestrained cycles of violence, however, occur only when the other is seen as violating universal principles of justice as well, becoming not just a threat to be countered or an enemy to defeat but a wrongdoer to be punished for failure to respect the principles of human equality and popular sovereignty that the unlimited exercise of your national self-determination embodies. The forces of friendship, justice, and self-interest—which usually balance one another to maintain an equilibrium of empathy and moderation—instead converge against a common other, pushing us across a tipping point on a descent into dehumanization.

The sub-heading (in chapter 9), that one need not be a fanatic to act like one, ought to be the new mantra of anyone seeking rational explanations for ethno-nationalist conflict, as the search for dark gods as agents of conflict and suffering only feeds the beast. Seeking a solution to conflict in some reason why any one community’s exercise of control over its own political fate deserves to be constrained merely adds you to an expanding pool of wrongdoers, intensifying the sense of fear and violation and the aggressive response. But getting nations to recognize sensible limits to their exercise of self-determination seems no more likely, at least until we have better means of understanding and appreciating exactly how the particular network of rights and wrongs that make up a national narrative functions to resolve the conflicting drives that underlie the need for both popular sovereignty and intergenerational solidarity in modern societies.