Evolution, Economics, and Education

I wonder if nationality is in the process of giving way to something else. Social networks?

Nope. What kind of information-gathering/processing economies do social networks bring to everyday experience? Social networks are the substrate for institutions; the blank slate for the emergence of order.

I think the answer is already observable: Large multinational corporations. Most already operate by providing a hybrid of what used to be considered separate public and private functions. Most already transcend national boundaries. Many already have the following that religions had centuries ago.

Belief in an all-seeing moralistic god tends to be restricted to large-scale societies, for example, suggesting that it is functioning as a monitoring device...

That seems a little "just so" - large scale societies are also pagan - and how do we characterize China? More likely is that humanity changed in fundamental ways with the advent of agricultural societies - see Cochran & Harpending's 10,000 Year Explosion.

Belief in an all-seeing moralistic god tends to be restricted to large-scale societies, for example, suggesting that it is functioning as a monitoring device...

What does this suggest about large-scale polytheistic pre-modern societies? These earlier religions, rather than offer moral guidelines for human action, tended to serve an explanatory role in that they rationalized then-unfathomable natural phenomena, but offered little in the way of prescreptive behavior (except general piety and the occasional sacrifice, depending on the society).

What served as the "guarded egalitarian" driving force in these civilizations? To the extend that charity and egalitarianism are normal goods, could it simply be societies at that point were simply too poor, and living standards too close to subsistence-level for the average citizen, for these psychological mechanisms to evolve/manifest themselves?

By the way, "D.S. Wilson" is better known as David Sloan Wilson, in contrast to his recent collaborator Edward O. Wilson. It's hard to keep track of all the distinguished Wilsons in the human sciences: D.S. Wilson, E.O. Wilson, J.Q. Wilson, W.J. Wilson, and so forth.

Yeah, that does sound very "just so". I also don't see a lot of evidence that the nation-state has taken precedence over religion, or even that religion is particularly important in shared norms.

Because, you know, there was never significant cultural diversity amongst Catholics....

I recommend the psychological theory of Claire Graves as a way to understand this psychosocial evolution.