One scholar contends, for example, that being a member of a nation both "enables an individual to find a place . . . in the world [in] which he or she lives" and also to find "redemption from personal oblivion" through a sense of being part of "an uninterrupted chain of being". Yet it must also be said that group identification and nationalism are not synonymous. The sense of sovereignty attached to cultural identification is relatively modern. "Nationalism and nations have not been permanent features of human history," as one scholar puts it. Therefore , nationalism, having not always existed, will not necessarily always be the world's principal form of political orientation