National pride and patriotism should be something a nation earns by its ideals and principles, not something that is reflexive and based on externalities like geography, language or color.

Hard to argue with the general principle that a nation should prove itself worthy of the pride of its citizens. But nationalism can be "reflexive" if it arises from indoctrination, too; that's an "externality" less passive and circumstantial than geography, language, or color. Would you agree that reflexive patriotism arising from indoctrination has no more value than judgments based on geographical or biological circumstance?

I wonder if I didn't muddy the water by bringing up primate tribalism. That's an instinct, and behavior based on it might be labelled "reflexive". But I was actually talking about how the scope with which we apply it has evolved over time, and how greater and greater scope has served us well throughout our history. We leveraged it to go from wandering small packs of nomads to settle into larger villages, to group villages into kingdoms, to nations...and then the next obvious step seems to be to leverage it to our advantage into a global community. It's worked well so far, so it seems artificial to maintain that we should stop at the level of nations. I don't think we're done growing up yet.

There really wasn't anything reflexive about my mention of the UN as the first baby step toward a global civilization. That's just an observable fact, and the people who founded it seemed to see it as a first step too. The UN in its present form is flawed because it hasn't been allowed to grow into a suitable tool for managing a global society, instead having been stunted for 60 years as nothing more than a council of governments. I tend to agree with Conservatives that the UN would make a poor "world government" because it doesn't represent people, only governments. What I'm looking ahead to is the possibility of a global institution that does represent all of humanity.

I think that the EU is a slightly better model, but its flaws illustrate the problems with the UN model: It's schizophrenic about whether it's a council of governments or a true regional representative democracy. Too many of the individual member states are clinging too hard to their priviliges and power to the detriment of the whole. I'm afraid the UK is a prime example.

But give the EU credit for some things, such as eliminating most internal border controls for EU citizens. That's a sign of an integrated society, and something that the UN could never accomplish.