Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

In the world of free speech, it often feels like we take two half-steps forward followed by a troubling leap backwards, and today’s line-up fits that mould. Last week’s infamous US Congress hearings in which the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn were seen prevaricating over whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” went against their institutions’ respective codes of conducts has opened the eyes of many. That all three presidents said it depended on the context brutally reveals the extent to which educational authorities have, as Matthew Syed put it in the Sunday Times, “serially genuflected before wokeism”. The unsurprising news from the publishing industry that woke books are flopping is positive news and reminds us of the old mantra, “go woke, go broke”. We discuss whether the publishing industry might now come to its senses and write the books that the few remaining readers want to read. But for this week’s great leap backwards we head to Denmark, which has just introduced a law banning the desecration of sacred texts, a mere six years after the repeal of the nation’s 334-old blasphemy law. Is this our measure of the speed at which the new cultural revolution has taken hold? We end on a note of optimism, however, that so many in the Danish Parliament remain appalled by the new law and fully intend to keep the debate going.

"That's Debatable!" is edited by Jason Clift.