A Nation is the aspect a whole population assumes when organized for a mechanical purpose, chiefly commerce and power, as distinct from a society, which exists for mutual human cooperation and sharing of life. When a people organizes itself into a Nation, the living bonds of society are subordinated to the efficiency of the machine, and human relationships are reduced to functions within it.
When individuals act through a large impersonal organization, the collective dilutes personal moral responsibility so that a Nation can commit cruelties no single member would commit alone, feeling righteous rather than guilty. The machinery of the Nation allows men to exploit and dominate others while the conscience of each individual remains comfortably detached from the consequences.
Tagore warns, in lectures delivered in Japan around 1916, that Japan having proven an Asian nation could master Western industrial and military power now risks copying the West's nationalism along with its machinery, mistaking imitation of Europe's aggressive methods for true progress. He argues Japan's real gift to the world lies in its distinctive cultural spirit, which it endangers by adopting the predatory nation-model it has just defeated the West at.
Tagore reframes India's central challenge not as achieving political nationhood but as solving the coexistence of many races and communities within one geography, a social and human problem the Western nation-form cannot address because it is built on exclusion and uniformity. Viewed this way, adopting nationalism would make India abandon its actual historical task of unity-in-diversity for an imported political abstraction.
A civilization may advance in power, wealth, and efficiency while its inner moral and spiritual life stagnates or decays, because the Nation measures success by production and dominance rather than by the fullness of human relationships. Tagore holds that a people can grow strong and prosperous and still be impoverished in the only terms that make a human life worth living.