Nearly Speechless

I remember, when I was younger, reading about an invention that automatically tore paper towels off the roll, saving that tiresome wrist motion involved in...you know, actually tearing off a paper towel by hand. I remember thinking "That's ridiculous!" wondering what they'd think of to automate next.

Well, now I find this: another manifestation of the Automated Conscience.

The kosher phone is stripped down to its original function: making and receiving calls. There's no text messaging, no Internet access, no video options, no camera. More than 10,000 numbers for phone sex, dating services and other offerings are blocked. Rabbinical overseers make sure the list is up to date....

Some saw [mass-market cell phones] as a non-threatening convenience. Others believed the sophisticated phones offered an unhealthy freedom: the ability to download pornography or allow young people to make furtive contact with the opposite sex -- which is highly restricted in ultra-Orthodox society. The conservative magazine Family called the multitasking new phones ''a candy store for the evil impulse.''

The rabbis' solution -- find a cell phone that's only a phone.

''They saw the future and were frightened,'' said one of Israel's most prominent attorneys, Jacob Weinroth, who was asked by the rabbis to approach Israel's four main cellular companies with the idea of the pared-down phone. ''In 10 years, we may have commercials coming over the phone. Maybe gambling, dating. The community wanted to keep the cell phones, but not allow this commercial world to enter their communities through them.''

Maybe it's just me, but I find this symptomatic of one of the major problems with humanity these days: rather than using our OWN powers of resistance, we expect to live in an environment devoid of temptations. And if we can't generate that environment for ourselves, we demand that the government or outside agencies create it for us. This seems to be a particularly fierce need among conservatives, who want everything that offends them to be censored. "WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN???" they shriek, all the while ignoring the option of teaching their children to resist temptation. This cry for censorship, whether governmental or otherwise, seems to be a tacit admission: We can't make our children live up to the standards of behaviour we expect. Therefore, everything we disapprove of needs to be stamped out to compensate for the ineffectiveness of our teaching. To me, if you don't think you can raise your children to abide by your beliefs or to live up to your strict standards of behaviour, maybe you shouldn't be having children in the first place.

To me, inventions like the "kosher phone" say more about the people who believe their families need such a phone, than about the degeneracy of the culture as a whole. These people want to live in a hermetically-sealed Disneyland, where all those scary dissenting ideas just don't exist. Rather than forcing themselves to stretch their minds by considering these ideas, or to stretch their souls by resisting the temptations around them, they want to lay back and bask, serene in the knowledge that everything that might require mental or spiritual effort from them has been banished to the darkness. It's the cultural equivalent of the automatic paper-towel tearer-offer, only instead of fat wrists, it risks leaving behind a legacy of weak resolves and untested determination. If you've lived all your life in a little box where you never had to resist temptation, what happens when you find yourself in a situation where you HAVE to exercise some crucial moral judgement? If you've never had any practice with the small things, how will you be able to resist the really big ones? When the time comes, thirty years from now, when you're the CEO faced with the decision of whetherto dip into the employees' pension fund, wouldn't it be better to have had the opportunity to resist temptation in the guise of an Anna Kournikova screensaver?

In the story above, an attorney says this of the rabbis who demanded the new temptation-free cell phone: "They saw the future and were frightened."

To them, I say: Yeah, join the crowd.