Where’s our morality?

Editorial

Last month, a gifted New Jersey music student jumped to his death off a bridge after his roommate surreptitiously streamed video feed of the student in a romantic encounter – in his own home – with another man.

Closer to our home, the victim, her family and all decent British Columbians are still reeling from the case of a Pitt Meadows girl who was allegedly drugged with the so-called “date-rape drug” and photographed being gang-raped, after which the digital evidence was distributed over Facebook.

Since the dawn of technology, we have been warned by well-intentioned figures like Mary Shelley to beware of its potential. Yet successive hysterical warnings from Chickens Little, particularly after the advent of television, that media would destroy our souls and corrupt our children, led many of us to stop paying attention.

But there is hardly a doubt among parents today that texting and the frenetic barrage of images available online have reduced the attention span of the current

generation of young people. Of course, there is not a doubt among grandparents today that television has done the same thing to those who are today’s parents. Whither the days when young people spent hours upon hours studying – Torah or trigonometry – without the interruption of technology?

Technology, it cannot be denied, has an impact on our character, intellect and, yes, we see, our morality. Studies have suggested that the pings or pop-music strains that alert us to a new text, call or voicemail are having a Pavlovian psychological effect similar to that experienced by the problem gambler when s/he hears the ka-ching of the slot machine.

Suffice to say, we all have our vices, regardless of our age or degree of hipness. But these latest stories of abuse of technology should be the proverbial wake-up call, like that North America heard 46 years ago when Kitty Genovese died.

On March 13, 1964, in a neighborhood of Queens, N.Y., 28-year-old Catherine Genovese, generally known as Kitty, was repeatedly stabbed while at least 38 witnesses in surrounding apartments did nothing to intervene, even simply to call the police. Genovese’s repeated cries – ‘’Please help me! Please help me!’’ – were ignored, evidently for reasons expressed by one do-nothing witness, who would later utter the infamous defence: ‘’I didn’t want to get involved.’’

Today, the moral descendants of those who ignored Genovese’s pleas for help have taken social decline to new levels. Not only did the perpetrators of the Pitt Meadows offence not assist in preventing the attacks – indeed, some of them may have participated – they went so far as to distribute the evidence of the crime on their Facebook pages. In the New Jersey case, the action of streaming live video was deliberate and publicized on Twitter.

The moral decline seems beyond imagination. Forty years ago, bystanders ignored cries for help; today, we post photos of the crime, pornographic in the most vile sense, on what amounts to the contemporary town bulletin board. And not as a caution against what can happen at unmonitored teenage parties or in remorse for not acting in defence of the victims, but as – what? – a laugh? A trophy? A score caught on film?

The misuse of new technologies (are we still calling the Internet and streaming video “new” technologies?) has been a topic of concern for some time, but the misuse of these now-ubiquitous tools, leading to suicide in New Jersey and the celebration of gang-rape in British Columbia, has got to be a turning point in our culture, just as the deplorable depths that could lead a witness to murder four decades ago in New York to claim “I didn’t want to get involved” helped a society recalibrate its moral compass.

Because it would be foolhardy to make assertions of the “it couldn’t happen here” sort, it is important to acknowledge that our own community has been proactive in teaching our young people about the dangers and powers of the online world.

As part of a broader approach to morality and ethics, Vancouver Talmud Torah teaches students to use the Internet critically. Vancouver Hebrew Academy has a Middot Minder program that encourages students to improve their middot, character traits, to model moral behavior. Richmond Jewish Day School and all the other part-time and full-time educational options in our community emphasize Jewish ethics and values, encouraging young people to challenge and question their own senses of right and wrong.

At a time in humankind when such incomprehensible events take place, we are reminded – not in a self-satisfied way, as we would be foolish and hypocritical to assume our children are incapable of error – that, perhaps more than ever before, the world is filled with moral ambiguities and it is, in the end, the role of parents, schools, clergy and community to convey to young people the often very clear line between right and wrong.

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