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The Tongue Is a Fire

It’s​ puzzling, unsettling even, to see ‘free speech’ rearing its head in public debate again, rousing passions...

Dabhoiwala tells us that when he tried to find books on the subject, ‘it turned out that, although endless volumes had been written on censorship in every time and place you could think of, the history of free speech as a modern concept had attracted almost no attention – except from Americans fixated on their First Amendment.’ Contemporary uses of the term seemed equally unclear to him, amounting to little more than slogans to whip up publicity for the speaker or denounce his or her enemies. as a consequence, 21st-century Americans have become as inured to the extraordinary levels of lying and slander in their public discourse as they have to the equally staggering incidence of mass murder by guns in their schools and streets, and for the same reasons – the acceptance of a relatively recent and novel set of presumptions about the meaning and importance of constitutional clauses drawn up two hundred and fifty years ago. It’s a collage of other people’s rants which he tells us he culled mostly from Wikipedia, and it blames all the usual suspects – political correctness, feminism and, above all, uncontrolled immigration – for the rot that was destroying Western society: just the sort of causes that the bright young lefties on Utøya island would have been propagating.

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