Part 'tree -- Mens Rea Exposed!

The Economist is perhaps the standard-bearer of classical liberalism in the global media: it is a 160-year old magazine (scroll down) that still refers to itself as a "newspaper" and, true to the tenets of its Scottish hat-making founder, continuously evangelises about how only free markets and free trade can be counted on to build a better world. While I don't entirely buy into The Economist's vision, which I view as unnervingly utopian in its own right, I accept their sincerity of purpose and admire it.

A key to The Economist's enduring credibility is what may be perceived as the "dismal science's" inherent objectivity. If (and I mean "if") it is perceived as being stripped of emotion, irrationality, bias, prejudice or what have you, econimics can be a powerful weapon in debates over public or social policy and, ultimately, in politics.

Facts and unadorned statistical analysis don't lie: these are supposed to be, at least in theory, an economist's stock in trade. In a broader sense The Economist trace their philosophical lineage to the age of reason (see above link) and they remain firmly in that trajectory of progressive thinking that has been moving mankind forward ever since.

What I can't understand, therefore, is how such a newspaper so readily turns its back on its own principles when it comes to political analysis, particularly in relation to the U.S.

As is obvious in my previous post on this topic, Lexington really gets to me. I don't know why he/she/it - whomever or whatever hides behind that famously pseudonymous byline -- bugs me so much. Maybe it's that palpable smugness capable of being worn only by those who believe the god of statistics is on their side, and who have the added luxury of pronouncing as much anonomously.

In light of Lexington's endless harping about the supposed intolerance of the left, not a single Lexington column comes to mind in which the regular occurrence of right-wing intolerance and worse was identified or called into question. Nor can I recall a single column in which Lexington concedes any exception to the rule that liberals must tolerate anyone and anything if they hope to avoid being branded as hypocrites. Lexington mischaracterises "tolerance" by suggesting that it means caving in to right-wing demands, including those that would seek to impose on the nation out-and-out insanity enforced by blatant thuggery.

The tactic employed is hardly novel: it relies on the time-honoured tradition of mischaracterising all progressives as bereft of principles or moral constancy (both of which are supposedly in the exclusive domain of the religious right: read, religion equals morality and all else is rot).

The permissiveness of those Godless liberals, so the logic goes, is doubly perfidious because in their limitless hypocricy liberals deign to "permit" only leftist social and political norms to take root in modern cultural institutions (i.e., schools and universities, newspapers and Hollywood, the federal government) to the exclusion of traditional or religious (i.e., conservative Christian) values and morality. Of course, if one reads or listens to many conservatives, this is the charitable view: many on the right ascribe the weakening of the moral fibre of America not just to hypocricy (as Lexington appears to say) but to a conspiracy of effetes who in reality hate America. This is a regular theme on Fox and Rush Limbaugh.

To "prove" their point, conservatives engage in what appears to be some kind of crude tautology. Don't accept the recitation of the Lord's prayer in a state-financed classroom? Intolerant! Gotcha! Don't accept the teaching of "intelligent design" as "science" in state-financed science classrooms? Intolerant! Gotcha!

Like a lot of conservative pundits and opinionologists, Lexington conflates liberal "intolerance" with the liberal or moderate (or some may say sane) desire to find common ground, to maintain the separation of church and state (which evangelicals historically zealously endorsed) or to establish minimum standards for what constitutes "science" (insistence on observing the scientific method, peer review, etc.).

I, too, freely admit I am intolerant of any detractors of the heliocentric theory or of the theory of gravitation: they are, after all, only theories. I guess this makes me a liberal elistist, too.

By so circumscribing the context of the liberal conspiracy of "intolerance" (i.e., continually referring to supposed depredations inflicted by "American liberals" upon a God-fearing nation), Lexington presents an entirely unbalanced picture of the cultural and socio-political dynamic at work in America. Worse, Lexington unconscionably -- or perhaps consciously -- covers for extreme elements of the Christian and extreme right, who in obviously don't really believe the left should tolerate just anyone's faith-based application of the scientific method.

Next -- Lexington and the Iraq war.