My favorite author, Samuel P. Huntington just died on December 24th 2008. I read his books for his straight to the point and never boring line. Perhaps, strongly, because the minute I read his Who Are We? I found the elaborative explanation of what I had in my entangled mind, that Culture is the heartbeat that makes people march everyday,including to the war.
Jonah Goldberg said that Huntington's 1996 "The Clash of Civilizations" work:
"was deeply, and often willfully, misunderstood and mischaracterized by those who didn't want it to be true. But after 9/11, it largely set the terms for how we look at the world. In it, he argued that culture, religion and tradition are not background noise, as materialists of the left and the right often argue. Rather, they constitute the drumbeat to which whole civilizations march. This view ran counter to important constituencies. The idea that man can be reduced to homo economicus has adherents among some free-market economists, most Marxists and others. But it's nonsense on stilts. Most of the globe's intractable conflicts are more clearly viewed through the prisms of culture and history than that of the green eyeshade. Tensions between India and Pakistan or Israel and the Arab world have little to do with GDP."