First time here? What are you up to?
No, I've been here a few times. In fact I was in California just a month or two ago on holiday. This time I'm at Stanford for three days (!) for a rather intense funding planning conference.
Since my brain thinks it's lunchtime, I'm up dreadfully early, so I may as well answer these while I have some time.
What I meant by nationalism was extreme nationalism, such as in the Third Reich or the driving force behind colonialism. I think that the shock of losing their empires, which had been justified by religious means, might have contributed to it. Nationalism obviously isn't entirely gone as you pointed out, but it's nothing like it was just 70-80 years ago. Today Europe contains some of the least patriotic countries in the world, while America, the Western nation that has avoided this mass apostasy, is one of the
most patriotic. We can observe how this happens, as America's extreme right-wingers have seemed to have turned the Constitution into a holy document. Check this
book if you're interested, although I haven't read it yet.
I think you're making a number of assumptions here that don't really hold up.
First, I don't believe there was really such a big link between colonialist-type nationalism and religion. Of course colonialists spoke the language of religion to justify what they did, but their actions tended to belie this language. For example, in the early to mid-nineteenth century in India, the British authorities tended to discourage Christian evangelism among Indians (and active forbid it among Indian soldiers serving the empire) because they thought it would be bad for morale. Christian Indians tended to be greatly discriminated against by Hindus at this time, having fallen afoul of the caste system, and yet still had to pay taxes as if they were Hindus; and the authorities did little to help them. In the later nineteenth century, the authorities did take a more pro-evangelism line, attempting to convert the Indians, but this was simply because they thought a Christian population would be more passive and easily controlled.
I also think you're confusing imperialism with patriotism. You say that the US is a highly patriotic country today, and you may be right, but it's not an imperialist one, at least not in the way that the British empire was imperialist. If the loss of religion were really connected to the loss of empire, that wouldn't explain why the US remains more religious than Europe, given that it never really had an empire (other than the Philippines, I suppose).
It also wouldn't explain why the Scandinavian countries are among the least religious in Europe, despite never having had empires in modern times; or why Italy and Spain are among the most religious countries in Europe, despite having lost what empires they had.
I think you're right that the US today is far more religious than most European countries. There are some who would deny this, but it seems evident to me. I'm not convinced, though, that it's necessarily more patriotic. Patriotism certainly takes different forms in the US compared to Europe, but I'd say that most Europeans are still (depressingly) patriotic. We've surely seen ample evidence of that in London this year. And I don't think European-style patriotism has much to do with religion. If anything it's more to do with sport. When the whole of south London sprouts England flags during the World Cup it's not because everyone's suddenly found God.
Moreover, one can point to other countries where patriotism is very strong and visible and yet religion is not. Japan is a very secular country where most people are not religious, but I think it's as insanely patriotic as the US.
I'd agree with you that there may be links between patriotism and religion. Both involve identification with a larger group and belief in the importance of rather vague abstractions. But I don't think that's much of a link - rather, it's just human nature to do that sort of thing.
The decadence in Europe might be reversing in the long term, though, with both David Cameron and Angela Merkel denouncing multiculturalism and the European Union becoming unstable.
Cameron and Merkel are right-wing loons who would denounce multiculturalism no matter what the actual situation were. But multiculturalism is a completely different issue from both levels of religious commitment and patriotism; even if their sentiments reflected those of Britons and Germans at large, which I hope they do not, I don't see that it would make much difference to what we're talking about - or to the issue of "decadence", by which I'm not sure what you mean. I don't think the EU is going anywhere either, but if it did, I wouldn't be inclined to view that as a positive development.
I know you have a philosophy background, and so I hope this okay:
Where do you personally stand on the mind-body problem? I feel like I've been coming down on the dualist side, which bugs me because I try to stay away from metaphysics.
This isn't my area. But most philosophers of mind today are functionalists, which means they think the mind is a function (of some kind) of the body. What they understand by the "of some kind" part is where the disagreements lie. Dualists think the function involves properties of the body which are somehow not material or explicable materially, while non-dualists reject this. Personally I think that functionalism seems reasonable and that dualism doesn't really explain anything, while bringing a whole load of weirdness that just requires more explanation.
My inclination is to say that the mind is to the body what the music is to the violin: it's not identical with it, but it's wholly explicable in terms of it.
The funny thing, though, is that there aren't really any arguments for this kind of position, it's more of an intuition. Most of the actual arguments in philosophy of mind are for dualism, and the arguments for non-dualism generally involve trying to demolish the dualist arguments rather than construct anything positive as an alternative. Which is a rather unusual sort of situation.
By decadence I mean cultural decadence, the feeling that your culture is worthless and that patriotism is for the brainwashed. Sort of like the left-wing loons who call for America to take in every hungry Mexican that we can.
