Cross at Cross Currents #929173
Shorter Eytan Kobre: We conservatives love the free market -- so long as it’s not the free market of ideas, you’re talking about
... from an authentic Jewish perspective, ought one not also be saddened by the introduction of brazenly immodest Western styles and the devaluation of women’s dignity and the trampling of deeply important notions of modesty and restraint that ensue therefrom.
No Eytan. We ought not be saddned therefrom. I'm not saddened at all, in fact, and here's why: If your ideas about women are the right ideas (as I think they are, mostly) they will prevail in the free market of ideas.
I don't think the Torah's ideas are bad ideas, so they have nothing to fear from a free and open society. When something is suppressed it does not go away. It just takes on a romantic underground life and flourishes rather than being brought to the light of day where it might be refuted. Let the truth meets its enemies unencumbered in the free market of ideas, and truth will out: the best argument always wins; and when the truth wins on its own merits it acquires a legitimacy and a permanence that can never be artificially imposed.
Shorter Yitzhak Alderstan: I hate TV; but boy oh boy do I love myself.
On the other hand, there was pressure to segregate the kids from the “better” homes (i.e. ones without TV) so that they could achieve more of their potential without being subject to the educational drag of children from less spiritually rarified families. (The assumption was a gross generalization, but it harbored a good deal of truth.)
No it didn't harbor any truth, it just fed into your pre-existing prejudices. Educational drag? Do you really believe that the best and the brightest grow up without TV? Name any scientist or any scholar at any University, and I guarantee you he had a TV in his house when he was young. What happened to the "educatonal drag?"
But of course you don't mean that kids with TVs are less bright (though that's what you said.) What you mean is that kids with TVs are less holy, and that, too, is laughable. How many of us know kids who grew-up in the "spiritually rarified" air of homes that had no TVs but overindulged the moment they could? As one of your own commenters said, "The problem is not television. It’s bad television. If you restrict your kids... television can be a good influence." To which I'll add, lousy parents can ban their kids from watching TV, and if they are lousy parents the kids will still turn out bad. TV is not inherently evil