How can Spengler posit that mankind has no systematic flow to it, that each civilization is a separate rise-and-fall saga? America wouldn't have existed without the British, who wouldn't have existed without the Romans, who were hugely influenced by the Greeks. The Persians and the Egyptians influenced the Greeks, and were in turn influenced by them as well. Etc. I guess it's true that natural geographic barriers (vast steppes, Urals, Siberian waste) mean that the influence eastern civilizations had on the west is less obvious and less pronounced, but it's there. And they certainly influenced each other. How does he deal with the Chinese dynasties that rise out of the ashes of one another? :: I fail to see why both ideas of history presented in the article can't be true. Can't history be a series of civilizations that reach their apogee, accomplish things, and then decline -- while also fitting into a grander historical template? Isn't that what we have? Collective human knowledge, et al. Incidentally, Dead on.Thus, it sometimes seems as if America is on autopilot as it moves haltingly but with seemingly inexorable force toward ever-greater involvement in the world even as discomfort increases within the electorate.