Must reading from Spengler at the Asian Times. 

I remember a know-it-all in college whose ideal was a world without borders.  Without borders, he reasoned, there would be no reason for war.  Without borders, I reasoned, how could we isolate the tyrants before killing them to preserve our way of life?  I'm a simple thinker.

Back to Spengler:

"Civilizations exist because men wish to overcome death, and have learned that ties of blood and language are not sufficient to win immortality. They require a form of social organization that rises above mere ethnicity, that promises a higher form of continuity between the dead and the yet unborn. But supplanting the ties of blood and language is a daunting task at which most civilizations ultimately fail."

More:

"Unlike animals, human beings require more than progeny: they require progeny who remember them. To overcome mortality we create culture, a dialogue among generations that links the dead with the yet unborn. Even the Neanderthals buried their dead with grave-gifts, a token of belief of life beyond the grave. Whether or not we pray to a personal god or confess a particular religion, the existential question remains the same. Without the hope of immortality we cannot bear mortality. Cultures that have lost the hope of immortality also lose the will to live.

Culture is the stuff out of which we weave the perception of immortality. With sad frequency, ethnic groups will die rather than abandon their way of life. Historic tragedy occurs on the grand scale when economic or strategic circumstances undercut the material conditions of the life of a people, which nonetheless cannot accept assimilation into another culture. That is when entire peoples fight to the death."

Heady and good.