The Common Bond

For most of human history, human beings have been unable to thrive without the close cooperation of others. Every person is born into some form of family. Except in the most deprived circumstances, the family is where we first learn to cooperate. This cooperation is in pursuit of mutual support and protection. Historically, the family included more than just parents and children. It was a wider constellation of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and kin. These networks were not merely convenient; they were necessary. People worked together, shared labour, pooled resources, and supported one another in times of need.

From early times, multiple families also cooperated beyond immediate blood ties. Often they understood themselves as connected through a distant ancestor. They considered themselves part of a clan: an extended kinship network spanning generations. As clans grew, the founding ancestor receded into the mythic past. The ancestor became a symbolic figure whose story bound the group together. Occasionally, individuals not related by blood could be adopted into the clan. They assimilated into its customs and claimed the ancestor as their own. Jewish identity, for example, preserves a tradition of descent from remote ancestors whose stories shape the people’s collective memory.

Human beings also cooperate with those who are not kin at all. For such cooperation to continue across generations, there must be commonality. It must also persist across multiple spheres of life. Group identity plays a crucial role here. Together, these elements of commonality and group identity give rise to a common bond.

Commonalities

By commonalities, I mean the shared cultural forms. These forms allow non‑kin to recognize one another. This recognition happens as belonging to the same social world. These typically include at least two of the following:

• a mutually intelligible language
• significant customs and traditions that encode norms and expectations
• shared stories, myths, arts, and music
• a perceived shared history extending across generations

Historically, these commonalities required geographical proximity. People needed to live close enough to:

1. develop things in common
2. discover that they had things in common
3. sustain cooperation through regular interaction

Commonalities are objectively demonstrable. They can be pointed to, described, and even statistically enumerated, despite their fuzzy boundaries. For example, language proficiency exists on a continuum. However, it’s still possible to identify who uses a particular language consistently in daily life. This includes who uses it in intimate settings and in their inner imagination.

Crucially the lack commonalities significantly affect social interaction. The lack of a commonality is not nothing, it is a difference. Some differences are trivial. But some differences affects social interaction and can become the basis of a distinction between groups.

Group Identity

By group identity, I mean the subjective but enduring sense that one belongs to a group distinct from others. Ancestral relationship (descent from this rather than that common ancestor) is a commonality among clans. Among most nations differences in language, religion and custom pertain.

Group identity produces a positive emotional attachment that commands loyalty and trust. This identity is often experienced as involuntary—something one is “born into”—yet it can’t be imposed against one’s will. It is always a matter of self‑report, even if it can be predicted with reasonable accuracy.

Group identities may be layered or hierarchical, but they are not merely instrumental. They shape how individuals perceive themselves and how they relate to others.

The Common Bond

The common bond is the lived expression of group identity. It is the dynamic fusion of shared culture and shared belonging into a collective will‑to‑action. It manifests as shared expectations, emotional resonance, and behavioural norms that motivate cooperation.

Throughout this essay, I assume that a common bond is generally positive. It promotes the well-being of individuals within the group. Conversely, the absence of a common bond among people living nearby can hinder cooperation and increase the likelihood of conflict.

This does not deny the obvious: within any group, there are always centrifugal forces. These include personal desires, family interests, and rivalries. There are also temptations to pursue short‑term advantage at the expense of the group. But a productive society – which is important even to the anti-social requires that most people continue to act cooperatively. Without a broadly shared commitment to mutuality, society collapses.

Why Commonalities and Group Identity Promote Cooperation

Human cooperation depends on trust. Trust, in turn, depends on:

• social predictability
• shared assumptions about reality
• a common hierarchy of values
• mutual expectations of goodwill and reciprocity

This is true within families, friendships, and intimate partnerships. It is also true of clubs, associations, businesses, gangs, bands, and armies. These groups may be held together by affection or charismatic leadership. However, such bonds rarely outlast the original participants. They endure only if they are embedded in deeper cultural commonalities.

Religion and ideology can create powerful bonds. People often feel a strong connection with those who are neither kin nor friends. These strangers, however, share their tribal or national identity. This happens despite – sometimes – differences in personal belief. This suggests that commonality and identity operate at a more fundamental level than ideology.

We trust those who are familiar to us. Beyond that, we trust those who resemble us in language, culture, and values. Shared customs and traditions facilitate cooperation because they make behaviour predictable. Conversely, mutual incomprehension and linguistic barriers undermine trust. Conflicting customs and the absence of shared historical reference points also undermine trust, producing suspicion, anxiety, and conflict.

Are Group Identities arbitrary?

A reductive view will claim that group identity is merely a symbolic placeholder for commonality. It suggests that “X” is simply the name we give to people who share “Y.” There is some truth in this. We often struggle to articulate our own commonalities because they are the water we swim in.

But commonalities alone are not enough to create a group identity or a common bond. They are necessary, but not enough. Time, chance, and historical experience must transmute shared culture into shared identity, which then becomes self-creating and its own justification. Group identity gives rise to behavioural distinctions that can create an even stronger sense of group identity. This does not mean that Group Identity is an arbitrary construct.

I am referring to the straw‑man claim that tribes or nations are arbitrary constructs imposed by the powerful. It also refutes the idea that national identity can be conjured into existence without underlying commonalities. The reality is more complex, more organic, and more beautiful.

Group identity can evolve to transcend whatever commonalities and distinctions that gave rise to it in the first place. The original commonalities and distinctions might be long forgotten or replaced with more modern justifications. This does not mean they are all invented or a recent projection.

Commonalities, group identity, the common bond, and shared endeavor as a group (e.g. fighting enemies in a war) continually reinforce one another. They form a living and evolving ecology of belonging. This has shaped human cooperation for millennia. It continues to do so today.

Examples and Counter‑Examples

Human beings are undeniably self‑interested. At the most basic level, we are hard‑wired for individual survival. Yet this alone cannot explain why we are also family‑ish, friend‑ish, tribe‑ish, and nation‑ish. Evolutionary biology may account for familial loyalty through shared genes, and friendship may arise from affinity, reciprocity, and shared interests. But the historical fact remains: people have repeatedly formed loyalties far beyond the intimate circle of kin and companions. They have identified with tribes, clans, and nations—entities far too large to be explained by personal affection or direct reciprocity.

Liberal political theory often treats these wider loyalties as irrational: the result of manipulation, demagoguery, or false consciousness. The “natural” human being, in this view, is the rational, self‑actualising individual, and collective identities are distortions imposed from above. But this picture fails to account for the depth and persistence of tribal and national feeling across cultures and centuries.

Once basic needs—survival, reproduction, local status—are met, individuals still seek meaning, belonging, and continuity. The common bond provides these. It situates the individual within a story that began long before their birth and will continue long after their death. It offers a sense of participation in something larger than the self, and thus a form of symbolic immortality. A nation, tribe, or people becomes not merely a political unit but a vessel of memory, value, and purpose.

The Common Bond and Enlightened Self‑Interest

One could argue that national loyalty is merely about self interest and pragmatic calculation. People go along with the majority or the authorities because it is convenient or to avoid punishment. No doubt some do just that. Yet many more people subjectively identity with a nation which identification does not result in either reward or punishment. It expresses a felt attachment. This attachment is emotional rather than rational. It does not even need to be known by anyone else.

Moreover self interest cannot explain attachments that are contrary to self interest. Some individuals sacrifice wealth, comfort, and even life itself for the sake of a national community. Liberalism often provides a philosophical justification for detaching oneself from national loyalty. However, it can explain the converse – why national loyalty arises so naturally.

On Discrimination Toward Foreigners

A feature of national identity—indeed, of any group identity—is that it distinguishes between insiders and outsiders. This inevitably produces some degree of discrimination, even if mild. There is a preference for one’s own people in matters of loyalty, trust, and the distribution of social goods. To deny this is to deny the very structure of group identity.

It is theoretically possible to imagine a single global human community united in one cooperative endeavour. However, this is an abstraction. Such universalism fails for several reasons:

1. Insufficient commonalities across the entire human population.
2. Existing group identities that individuals already inhabit and value.
3. Human cognitive limits, which make it difficult to feel deep loyalty to abstractions rather than to concrete people and places.
4. Diminishing returns of cooperation as distance increases and personal interaction becomes impossible.
5. Finite resources, which create competition and a sense of possessor rights over what is “ours” rather than “theirs.”

These factors make it unrealistic to expect group identity to expand indefinitely. The boundaries of a group are shaped by shared culture. They are also shaped by the practical utility of those shared forms in motivating cooperation. Not all commonalities are equal. Some—especially shared values, norms, and historical experiences—are far more potent in shaping behaviour.

Moreover, when a point of commonality is threatened by an alternative, its importance increases. A shared language, custom, or memory becomes more salient precisely when it is challenged. Mutual protection extends beyond life and property to include the preservation of culture and identity itself. This is the common bond manifesting as a sense of ownership, belonging, and stewardship.

Some argue that this is an unnecessary inflation of group identity, turning it into an end in itself. But to belong to a group is necessarily to exercise some preference for its members over outsiders. No sustainable social formation can treat insiders and outsiders identically in all circumstances. If outsiders are not treated exactly the same, then discrimination—properly understood as differentiation— is inevitable. This observation of human behaviour does not justify legal and political discrimination, harsh treatments, denial of rights or encourage tiered forms of citizenship. The justification of political and legal equality for permanently resident foreigners and their descendants involves a different set of arguments, some moral, some practical. Some will insist that even mentioning that all human beings continually make in group and out group distinctions is a political ‘dog whistle’. But that implies a hidden meaning – here we are rather stating the obvious.

The Limits of Liberal Universalism

The in‑group/out‑group distinction is uncontroversial at the level of family. No one expects a family to treat strangers with the same loyalty, generosity, and long‑term commitment. These qualities are usually extended to their own members. Families share households, inherit wealth, and care for one another from cradle to grave. These privileges are not extended indiscriminately to every passer‑by.

Liberal universalism often concedes the legitimacy of family loyalty. It insists that beyond kinship, only personal friendship should justify greater loyalty and obligation. This applies only as long as such a preference does no harm to the rest of humanity. All other human relationships, it argues, should be governed by strict equality. This effectively collapses the social world into two categories—kin and kith—and denies the legitimacy of clans, tribes, nations, and peoples.

In the end, liberalism struggles to justify national identity at all. It cannot explain why nations exist, why people care about them, or why they command loyalty. And because universalism requires the erasure of particular loyalties, it ultimately demands that national identity be abandoned.

Nationhood, Liberal Theory, and the Limits of Constitutional Identity

Liberal theorists often argue that a nation is simply a collection of individuals bound by a common constitution and political system. As an aside, someone who is a ‘civic nationalist’ will also hold to such a liberal concept of the nation. There are some civic nationalists who are excited about preserving or promoting a constitution. But what is not permitted to the civic nationalist is to feel strongly parochial or superior to any other nation. Why would they?

However, the liberal concept itself is circular. What would lead a large population to identify with a particular constitution in the first place, unless their attachment arose from:

• a pre‑existing cultural common bond,
• a shared set of values and historical experiences,
• or an ideology that itself depends on cultural commonalities such as language, moral norms, and inherited assumptions?

Even in cases where ideology plays a central role—as in the United States—the ideology is not free‑floating. It is embedded in a cultural matrix. The American founding ethos, for example, drew heavily on classical liberalism expressed through Protestant sensibilities, English common‑law traditions, and a shared moral vocabulary. These were not abstract principles but cultural inheritances.

To claim that nationhood consists solely in adherence to a political structure is to conflate the nation with a philosophical school or a civic religion, while simultaneously stripping nationhood of its lived, practical significance. Ironically, this version of liberal theory tends toward a universalizing impulse: if a nation is defined only by consent to a political creed, then in principle all humans could be folded into a single global ideology. This is less a theory of nations than a blueprint for ideological homogenization.

The Myth of the Purely Civic Nation

There are no real‑world examples of nations held together solely by consent to a constitution. Even the United States—often cited as the archetype of a “civic nation”—was not founded in this way. Its early political institutions were shaped by a dominant cultural inheritance: English language, Protestant religious norms, common‑law traditions, and a shared moral and historical imagination. Newcomers were historically expected to assimilate into this cultural framework.

Where assimilation failed or was resisted—by either newcomers or the established population—tensions and conflicts emerged. These conflicts were not simply ideological but cultural, arising from incompatible expectations, values, and historical memories. The American founding was not the creation of a neutral civic space; it was the political expression of a particular cultural community.

Territory and the Problem of Mere Residence

Some liberal thinkers argue that membership in a nation arises simply from residence within a territory. But unless that territory has clear natural boundaries—an island, a mountain range, a desert frontier—the idea that one becomes a member of a nation merely by being physically located between lines on a map is arbitrary. It raises the obvious question: why these lines rather than others?

Territorial boundaries only acquire meaning when they correspond to:

• a shared history,
• a shared culture,
• a shared sense of belonging,
• and a shared expectation of mutual loyalty.

Without these, borders are administrative conveniences rather than the contours of a nation.

From Tribe to Modern Nation‑State

As clans become tribes and the latter expand in size, occupy larger territories, and developed more complex economic relations, change is inevitable. Over many generations—sometimes gradually, sometimes through abrupt historical ruptures—tribes evolved into nations. There is no single demarcation point between the two. Instead, the transition involved a constellation of developments: urbanization, the specialization of administrative functions, and the codification of customs into formal law.

To describe this process, I introduce the term institutional coherence. By this, I mean a common bond becomes integrated into institutions. The institutions include political structures and legal codes typical of a modern nation-state. They also consist of smaller entities like schools and universities, guilds, charities, co-operatives, unions, clubs, and societies. Institutions can only formalize what already exists in lived practice. Yet over time, people often lose sight of this. They forget the critical role of the common bond in giving meaning to institutional structures. Without it, these structures only survive due to bureaucratic inertia. Institutions can outlive their original purpose or legitimacy only because there is no immediate practical alternative.

Modern political theory frequently reverses the causal order, claiming that institutions create national feeling rather than the other way around. Liberal theorists often argue that the modern nation‑state manufactured national identity. We need to turn this theory the right way up. Institutions, laws, and shared ‘official’ languages reinforce and shape the common bond, but they do not conjure it from nothing. The relationship is dynamic and reciprocal, not unilateral.

Modern civic nationalism, with its emphasis on formal membership and ideological adherence, is indeed manufactured. Its utility lies in its ability to bind together multi‑ethnic empires, federations, and unions. But beneath this civic veneer lies an older, deeper layer. This is a national feeling rooted in shared culture, memory, and kinship. It is a common bond layered above and supported by the common bonds that are family or civic. It usually emphasizes ethnic character.

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Ethnicity, Race, and the Common Bond

At this point we should clarify something essential: ethnicity is not the same as race. Many different ethnic groups belong to the same broad racial category. If race and ethnicity were identical, the world would contain only a handful of nations rather than hundreds. In practice, race has rarely—if ever—functioned as the primary basis of a common bond.

Race does not generate meaningful commonality in societies where everyone belongs to the same racial category. Physical traits alone do not create shared culture, shared memory, or shared norms. Racial categories themselves are inconsistent and fluid; they only become socially salient when people of visibly different backgrounds encounter one another.

No ethnic group relies on race alone for its identity. If race were a powerful common bond, we would expect fewer distinctions, not more. Instead, nations form around cultural commonalities—language, customs, religion, shared history—not around racial traits. Racial difference today often correlates with recent foreign origin, not with the deeper foundations of nationhood.

Ancestry and shared historical experience help create culture. Each new migrant cohort adds fresh branches to the family tree, and over generations these branches mix into the wider population. A recent arrival of a different race will not share in the long ancestral heritage of the host population, but their descendants will gradually assimilate culturally. Over 7–8 generations, the number of one’s ancestors becomes enormous; even modest migration makes it statistically likely that future Britons will have at least one ancestor of a different race. The probability increases with each generation.

Cultural assimilation, however, tends to occur over time. The descendants of recent arrivals—regardless of race—will, all things being equal, adopt the language, customs, and historical memory of the society into which they are born.

For this reason, there is nothing intrinsically racist about national identity. Nations are not built on racial distinctions but on cultural ones. The common bond of nationhood arises from shared culture, shared history, and shared belonging—not from biological categories.

Institutionalizing the Common Bond: Informal and Formal Institutional Coherence

The basic common bond resembles extended family relations, comradeship, and neighborliness—forms of belonging sustained by personal familiarity and shared life. Local communities, especially rural ones, embodied this coherence for centuries. Even as formal political structures developed, these informal networks remained foundational.

Between the most intimate and the most formal lies informal institutional coherence, or civil society. These “little platoons” of associations, guilds, congregations, and local institutions provide an adjunct and extension. They supplement the basic common bond based on family and tribe. Civil society flourishes with urbanization prior to industrialization. Its forms grew horizontally, rarely vertically, they had fairly flat hierarchies. In Europe, civil society continued well into the twentieth century. It was the only form of secular semi-democratic or social and municipal societies.

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From Medieval Polities to the Modern Nation‑State

What we now call “states” were, in the medieval world, the personal possessions of kings and dynasties—families of warlords and military adventurers. Their territories were not expressions of a national common bond but the outcome of conquest, inheritance, and military power. Civil society existed, and cultural common bonds—especially religious ones—were real. But political authority rested on personal loyalty to warlords, not on shared national identity.

Feudalism emerged from the need to supply royal warlords with armed retainers. Victorious elites divided conquered lands among themselves with little regard for the identities of the people living there. Medieval polities were rarely coterminous with a single ethnicity; they were defined by what could be held, taxed, or subdued. Distances were too great, communication too limited, and cultural variation too wide for a national common bond to form across an entire realm. Loyalty flowed upward through clans, villages, and local chiefs, eventually reaching the dynast who held military supremacy.

The Rise of Formal Coherence

As territories expanded and populations grew, new layers of organisation emerged between rulers and the people. Corporations—both public and private—developed, sitting above the older bonds of clan, tribe, and village. Over time, these institutions, along with mass education and the media, eroded the older forms of informal coherence and produced a professional‑managerial elite.

Formal institutional coherence allowed cooperation across vast territories. Durable political structures, hierarchical leadership, and codified law replaced the fluid, customary norms of earlier societies. Traditions that once evolved organically were curated, standardised, and disseminated to a mass population through schools and print culture. The customary expectations of the dominant elite became formal law, enforced by bureaucrats rather than by communal pressure.

Royal warlords—and later their successors in bourgeois republics—were gradually compelled to share political power with the rising merchant and professional classes. This was a long, uneven process, largely complete in Europe by the eighteenth century. Social mobility from peasant to bourgeois was rare; the new middle classes emerged primarily from the ranks of former retainers, clerks, and urban specialists.

Nationalism and Mass Mobilisation

In the nineteenth century, rulers and republican elites alike discovered that modern warfare required mass armies. To mobilise millions, they needed more than dynastic loyalty. They needed patriotic feeling. Flags, anthems, national holidays, public rituals, and civic myths became tools for binding ordinary people to the state. These practices still exist today, though often in attenuated form.

The Dissolution of Informal Coherence

Today, the informal coherence once provided by civil society has largely dissipated. Formal coherence is maintained by large institutions—governments, bureaucracies, corporations—that manage society from above rather than through the horizontal networks of local communities. Yet these institutions still echo older tribal and civic forms through their use of symbols, rituals, and inherited traditions, usually drawn from the dominant ethnic culture.

Modern states resemble “little empires.” They are rarely culturally homogeneous and often contain multiple ethnic groups with varying degrees of autonomy and assimilation. Their borders reflect historical contingencies—wars, treaties, dynastic unions—rather than organic growth from a single tribe or people. Assimilation is partial, and the possibility of reasserted ethnic difference always remains.

In the twentieth century, these little empires democratised. Elites sought legitimacy through the support of “the people,” with political parties functioning as quasi‑tribal structures. Electoral constituencies and administrative regions often faintly echo older tribal territories, even if the memory of those origins has faded.

The Unwanted Future: The Nation-less Nation

A new future is emerging in which modern nations become arbitrary agglomerations of atomized individuals connected only by digital signals. Identity becomes defined by patterns of consumption rather than by place, kinship, or shared memory. Communal life withers. Borders remain on maps but become porous and politically meaningless. The elites who administer these structures are increasingly cosmopolitan, detached from any particular ethnic or cultural identity. Society is breaking down as a result, manifest as crime and social disorder. The state cannot govern where the people can no longer largely govern themselves. We have communities of personal interests and hobbies, but outside this their are no real communities. The administrative geographical units that are placeholders for real community are ‘low trust’ and suffering epidemics of loneliness. This societal hell is the result of the disappearance of the common bond at national, civic society and family scales. And all this in a space of little more than 50 years, two generations.

We have largely given up on trying to keep families together. This is because that common bond requires personal morality and responsibility. Additionally, historically at least, it required forms of social shaming in practice. Third sector and charity NGOs have replaced civil society. They are sustained by lotteries (gambling) and tax-harvested municipal beneficence.

And some believe a national common bond can at still be redeemed by the right variety of “civic nationalism”. Its proponents claim to be patriotic. However, they lack any deep commitment to or even concept of the patria – ‘Father’ or ‘Mother’ – land.

This refers to a nation defined purely by legal membership and ideological assent. Civic nationalism can only function if there is a real common bond. It is, at best, parasitic on more basic and enduring cultural and ethnic bonds. It cannot become a substitute for the real glue of the nation. Civic nationalism is unable to address deep cultural differences and emergent national, latent or incomer ethnic and religious identities. Eventually its fundamentally classically liberal logic doesn’t need a world of nations. It is equally suited to a single continent-sized polity. It also fits an eventual global order for an old/new global elite. Civic Nationalism can them become a fig leaf for the dissolution of the nation itself.

The family, the tribe, and the nation hold together through common bonds. In their essential natures, these bonds formed organically. They were neither imposed nor manufactured in the beginning. These forms of common bonds are also not historical relics but foundations. Today they offer a counter‑force to the homogenizing pressures of globalization.