Since I'm curious now about Scratch's degrees, I'd like to see Coggins answer the questions. Maybe Coggins can give us example from his own work that he considers intellectually and philosophically serious.
Can I nominate this gem that Dr. Shades inquired on?
Quote:
Nonintervention in the affairs of other nations is a good principle with much to commend it--until it becomes the servant of an isolationism born of the shallow materialist decadence and historical amnesia that lies at the base of both leftist and libertarian isolationism.
Is this an example of philosophical seriousness? If not, can Coggins post another?
This was the brief elucidatoin I gave, but not on the same thread in which Guy's question is posted. And yes, I would consider this philosphically serious, even if not, obviosly, exhaustive (and I made some slight corrections to the text).
Isolationism of the kind to which I'm referring, regardless of whether its manifested as a political theory from either the Right or the Left, is a manifestation of what the Book of Mormon calls "carnal security." Its a complacency and a kind of, I would say, intellectual stupor born of generations of unrelenting peace, prosperity, material consumption, and ever greater leisure time and options for fulfilling it. After 9/11, there was brief period of coming together as awareness that we were in the midst of a long, drawn out global war against our very civilization and its foundational principles, which very soon lapsed back into the same opiate-like complacent haze of the assumption of a continuing and endless future of material affluence which nothing will ever alter or impede. We were disoriented-momentarily-by 9/11 and the decade of terrorist attacks here and around the world during the prior decade, but only momentarily. Unlike the WWII generation and that conflict, life has gone on for us here at home as if nothing had ever happened. 9/11 is a dim memory. The I-Pod, the big screen TV, the new SUV, the Sony Playstation, our collective and individual futures filled with the RV and the golf course weren't even fazed by 9/11 except for a relatively few people who can see past that carnal security to an exhausted civilization (American and, to a somewhat more advanced degree, Western Europe) that faces extremely serious consequences unless it can rally itself intellectually and morally to the defense of its culture, its values, and its intellectual and political patrimony, among the most important aspects of which are individual freedom and liberty, which are, in my view, the very principles the most taken for granted by a critical mass of modern westerners and Americans and, even sadder, two principles for which many in this culture and in European societies aren't really even willing to fight for anymore.
The philosophies of the late Sixties and early Seventies have been stunningly successful in eroding and even stripping away (in the public schools, most strikingly) an understanding of and sense of loyalty to the principles of individual liberty and of our political and social freedoms, such that many, if not most of us, are quite literally sleepwalking through WWIII, wrapped securely in our silken cocoons of technology, leisure, sensual comforts, and material convenience. Nehor is, unfortunately, a textbook example of this attitude, and, coming from a Mormon, quite stunning, as most of this kind of stuff comes from International ANSWER types.
You can find a good deal of it, however, at the Von Mises Institute, a think tank loaded with excellent ideas on political liberty, economics, and political economy, but steeped deeply in fantasy in the area of national security and international relations.
Ultimately, both the Left and the Libertarian Right share, in this area, the "opiate of the people", which isn't religion, but the personal and cultural anesthesia generated by generations of unending material progress, prosperity, and ever greater material expectations and assumptions. At the end of the day, this comes back, not to political theory, but to the Gospel. We see in the "pride cycle" plaguing the Nephites generation after generation, precisely these attitudes and their consequences.