Freedom requires morality

As we approach Pesach and muse about the benefits of liberty, it’s worth considering the impact of current technology on our freedoms. With the advent of the Internet Age, access to information, and hence the construction of individual understandings separate from any official or authoritative perspectives, has enormous ramifications for education.

As British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has forcefully articulated in The Dignity of Difference, contemporary information technology is the biggest leap forward since the printing press, and its effects may not be calculable for centuries. But if it resembles Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing in the 1450s, we are in for quite a ride.

The last time around, religion itself was transformed, as Sacks writes: “No sooner had printing been developed, than Bibles started flying from the presses in the hundreds of thousands. In England alone, it has been estimated that more than a million Bibles and New Testaments were published between the Reformation and 1640… Nothing did more to challenge ecclesiastical authority than the fact that the Bible in vernacular translation was now readily available to large masses of people, who could read and debate its words in the privacy of their homes.”

Such a revolution, but multiplied many times over, is currently underway and it cannot help but leave Judaism and all other religions changed in its wake. What happens when every Jew can access almost every text, in his or her native language, and no longer seek religious authorities to disseminate or “translate”– with all that such a word implies – the ideas contained in those texts? As with many other technological developments, this phenomenon carries mixed blessings. The ability to directly access information enhances intellectual and emotional freedom at the same time as it presents other risks.

To cite a different example, a recent issue of the medical journal Pediatrics published a study indicating that 42 per cent of a national sample of 1,500 Internet users aged 10 to 17 had been exposed to online pornography within the last year. Not surprisingly, there was a higher incidence of male users. Other surveys found the incidence of pornographic usage to be even higher. Ubiquitous outlets such as MySpace and Facebook further encourage the posting of risque poses and more. This too, is what freedom brings, and once the genie has left Egypt, no amount of free leeks or onions will place pornography or even more insidious “cultural expressions” back into the bottle of restricted availability.

None of this is, or should be, surprising to those who are involved in education on any level. I don’t favour a return to information suppression, even if it were possible. The harder task, but the one that’s key in the long run, is to be able to discuss what freedom really means and how best to use it.

An exodus from slavery does not necessarily represent freedom. As Rabbi Sacks writes elsewhere, a “free society must be a moral society,” and such morality must be transcendent of shifting human whims. As Pharaoh learned and as we are still struggling to internalize, the divine presence is real and, ultimately, the only liberation.