Many thanks to Bernard Yack for his insightful and encouraging review. I’ll get right to the juicy bits.

Freud and Durkheim were good at formulating innovative and tantalizing hypotheses, and these hypotheses provide a conveniently accessible language for framing my own. I acknowledge that they were less effective at proving their hypotheses to any rigorous standard, and in that respect Yack’s critique of the theoretical foundations of my argument hits the mark. But I don't think these hypotheses have been so much disproven as superseded by subsequent developments in psychology and anthropology. Some of them – such as the powerful ambivalence felt toward signifiers of community and social authority—I would still hold to be largely true, though unacknowledged by most who presume nationalism to reflect an unambiguous positivity toward symbols of community and authority that in real life tends to exist only in the margins or in caricature. Admittedly, I have little more than intuition and anecdote to back that claim for now, but the development of new techniques in the cognitive and social sciences may bring us closer to verifying, falsifying and refining such hypotheses in the near future.

That said, it ultimately doesn't concern me that Freud and Durkheim were wrong about the asocial nature of humanity's primordial state, because I don't posit the origins of the religious impulse in any event in the primordial past. It lies in our species’ present capacity for abstract representational thought, and the unique ability this gives us to construct images of our communities and their foundations. The forces that counter our selfish drives may be as natural to us as those drives themselves; all the more reason why self-aware creatures need a consistent narrative to reconcile them. Even if our sociability evolved in tandem with our self-seeking behaviour, the former now requires confidence in intersubjective knowledge to function properly whereas the latter does not. The only reason I am able to, for example, lecture to a group of students without being terrified of what any of them might do next is because I know that they know that I know that they know the rules according to which we are supposed to interact. A lecture hall full of chimpanzees would be an entirely different scene.

That we perceive so much of our emotional and material security and wellbeing to depend on so seemingly dubious and ephemeral a foundation requires us to constantly reinforce that foundation through shared symbols, myths and rituals great and small. That, along with another gift granted us by our capacity for abstract representational thought—the ability to conceptualize our own demise, and the consequent need to imagine ourselves at least part of something greater and more durable than our own mortality—explains the universality of the religious impulse. It is therefore also, I believe, where the best psychological explanation for the civic and ethnic nation (respectively), as well as for the passions both constructive and destructive (in no particular order) that the nation evokes, is likely to be found.