In a nutshell, our proud and ambitious societies have been falling under their own weight, as our ambitions so decisively outgrow our care for making those goals sustainable. Some form of collapse and recovery is necessary. The best way is definitely by making population levels more manageable and putting a lot of effort into raising general educational and social integration levels and redistributing some wealth. The far easier, more likely and worse way is by increasing military and social conflicts in order to promote somewhat cathartical, if deeply deluded, destruction. Once our ambitions are destroyed, they stop causing quite so many unreasonable demands.
This is a reasonable analysis, and I mostly agree with you about nationalism. I think the trouble in recent times is that there has been inconsistency in how nationalism is approached in the world. I mentioned in another thread that, over the past several decades, nationalism was the preferred ideal in the former colonial, developing world, mainly centering around national liberation movements opposing the European colonialists. Many Western liberals and others saw this as righteous dissent of people defending their rights and sovereignty against European colonial oppressors. While it seemed like a noble cause for freedom and justice in the world, it created an ideological contradiction and a tacit approval of nationalism as a viable political ideology. That was a mistake. Another approach should have been used by embracing a more all-inclusive ideology.
The sad thing about it all is that we could have put the final nail in nationalism's coffin at the end of World War II and during the subsequent civil rights and anti-colonial era. I think there were a lot of good intentions and people sincerely fighting the good fight for justice, both within America and around the world which was trying to shake off the yoke of colonial oppression and recover from the abuse and trauma their nations had dealt with for far too long. But there have been also strong undercurrents of hatred, vindictiveness, desire for revenge/retaliation. There's a sense of "now it's our turn" and "turning the tables." Embracing one's own cultural identity has also become quite noticeable among minority groups, where they emphasize "our people," "our culture," "our history," "our language" - focusing only on themselves and "other"-izing everyone who is not part of "our people." This has been going on for the past few decades, at least since the 80s. Whole generations have been born and come of age since then. I'm not saying it's all negative, some of it is positive and seems in the same vein as the righteous fight for freedom and justice won by earlier generations.
But structurally and ideologically, it still has a certain quasi-nationalistic bent to it which has remained a part of the public dialogue and seems to be permeating into other areas. Again, this may have been the wrong approach. If we agree that a resurgence of nationalism is a dangerous thing, then we need to take a long, hard look at where it has manifested itself and how we got to this point.
