I made a slip-of-the-tongue presenting a paper and said dying for the "county” instead of dying for the "country.” The beloved county of my birth is substantial, Essex County, New Jersey. Yet the idea of dying for a county has a ring of absurdity. Only for countries do people die and kill.

This single word makes all the difference. Academics spend extraordinary amounts of energy “deconstructing” just about every idea or concept. But “countries” reign supreme as absolutes. Indeed, we don’t think of nations as ideas or concepts. We understand these words as if they refer to solid, substantial entities.

Peter Berger in The Social Construction of Reality writes about “of course” statements, which refer to ideas that most members of a given society share and agree upon or take for granted.

These ideas seem self-evident, as if part of the natural order of things. They permeate our minds so deeply that we rarely interrogate them. You may insist, “Of course nations exist. Nations are real.” But I doubt if you can show me a nation—or explain what a nation actually is.