In Amish Country, the Future Is Calling
mobile.nytimes.com
mobile.nytimes.com
Of course I love technology, the internet, etc and couldn't imagine my life without all that, but yes I am addicted to my phone and being able to look up anything whenever I want. This is extremely powerful, but this quote gives me something to think about as I type this at my desk job:
“If you can just look it up on the internet, you’re not thinking,” said Levi, another woodworker. “The more people rely on technology, the more we want to sit behind a desk. But you can’t build a house sitting behind a desk.”
Err... Many of them have a phone house, though some use a privy. They leave their phone in there, be it landline or mobile.
In fact, one of my most bizarre experiences was spending a year or two regularly conversing with a couple of Amish people. Why was that strange? It was on IRC. They were both away at college and, during that time, made free use of certain tech, because it didn't diminish their concept of family.
Not yet, but we're pretty close with 3d printing.
You'll love Low Tech magazine then: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/
I really do not see how having instant access to information precludes you from thinking. Au contraire, it probably gives us more time to think and it allows our minds to branch out into much more interesting places. I think it's fine that we can just look things up. Even Albert Einstein seemed to think so:
“Never memorize what you can look up in books”
p.s. For the picky the real quote is:
“[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. He also said, “…The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”
There are two ways in which writing dulls the critical faculties rather than enhances them:
First, writing is necessarily a one-way monologue, not a dialogue. The reader, the consumer of information is unable to probe the author to assess credibility and veracity of information. You also have no way to assess if you have correctly learned the information. As a result, it is all too easy to see misinformation, not information, get spread. This is not an idle concern--an awful lot of history turns out to be very old lies that have been retold so often in this manner that they have come to be treated as truth.
A second issue that readily arises is that, when information is readily available at your fingertips, you're less likely to recall the information to find relevant comparisons. A lot of productivity in science or the humanities is in being able to draw parallels and synthesize similarities between rather disparate-seeming topics.
The Amish seem to pride themselves on their ascetic use of technology - it sounds like they believe in the discipline, patience, and lack of distractions that come with a disdain for tools which have not yet been refined by a long history of use.
Why does nobody take that attitude with the production of say, bipolar transistors instead of wood stoves? Why don't we have any community-run film deposition machines? Throw together a cruelty-free hand-milled pressure chamber, a bespoke hand-wound HV transformer, an artisanal gluten-free vacuum pump, and you've got yourself a stew!
I don't think Jeri Ellsworth counts as a prophet quite yet, but I might read that sort of holy book. The article mentions the Amish's occasional use of personal solar cells and batteries for household electricity despite a prohibition of connecting public utilities to a house; wouldn't it be more kosher to make the solar panels and batteries yourselves? We ARE getting to the point where 'electricity' is a tried-and-true, fundamental human tool. Why is say, a metal-air battery particularly different from a saw or a hammer or a match?
Thanks for the links!
The Amish are not isolationists. They are fine with trading with non-Amish communities. They just want to preserve their communities and values, and believe that they may have trouble doing so if they become too dependent on non-Amish communities.
From what I've read, the reason most Amish communities do not connect to the public electrical grid is that they believe that would make them too dependent. In most places there is only one grid provider and so you are putting all your eggs in one basket if you become dependent on electricity and you get it from the grid.
If you use electricity but get it from solar cells or batteries or a gas/diesel/LNG/propane generator, you generally have multiple sources. It is still a dependency, but it is just a general trade dependency rather than a dependency on a single source.
> wouldn't it be more kosher to make the solar panels and batteries yourselves?
Amish generally are fine with using things that they did not make themselves. They use metal tools, but generally don't mine the metal themselves. They wear cotton clothes, but generally don't grow the cotton themselves or weave the fabric themselves.
For a good look at the Amish approach to technology, see the article "Amish Hackers" [1].
As others have pointed out, technology more likely to be accepted so long as it doesn't threaten the cohesion of the community.
An uncharitable person might call that disdain parasitic, inasmuch as technological advances in the last couple of centuries have proceeded to a large extent through consumerism. The Amish feel free to use the resulting innovations, but because they themselves refuse to be a consumerist society they do not contribute to the process that sustains and brings forth those innovations.
Personally, I'm not a Marxist, but I think he was right about this.
Whatever that intangible human aspect it is he was talking about -- At some point tech and science is probably sufficiently abstracted from normal human experience such that this concept is no longer relevant.
Also, on this topic I really recommend reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a thought-provoking book on quality of life in our age of human interaction with technology.
After growing up in the modern world under constant surveillance, housing prices out of reach, taxes for wars abroad I don't want, and "Equihacks" I find myself yearning for the days of old.
(Would keep the antibiotics of course.)
How far back?
50% of your children dying before 4 back?
No antibiotics back?
No dentists all teeth gone by 35 back?
Slavery is legal back?
We as humans have a very good skill at seeing the good things about past times and glossing over the not so good parts.
For another, they don't pay much in taxes. My relatives in PA get red in the face whenever you bring up the Amish, because in that area the county relies heavily on taxes levied on your electric bill. The first thing the Amish do when they move into the neighborhood is rip out the electric.
The other thing is there are dozens of sects people lump together as The Amish, and they all have different doctrine. Sometimes very different.
Two, $50/month is a lot of money in rural PA.
Sure they should pay for public services they use, but what more are you asking?
It is funny you say that because the Amish and Old Order Mennonites in my area are moving away because farmland is out of reach for them.
* Farmland saw the perfect storm of record high food prices and record low interest rates around the end of the 2000s, so people went spend-crazy, resulting in as much as 500% growth in price in the last decade. They haven't yet come back down from that.
* That, of course, also brings out the speculators, so it is not just farmers who are buying.
* Certain types of farmers are given special market advantages by my country's government, so they tend to make more money than most other farmers, providing them with more money to put into land.
It is tough for the Amish to compete with any of that.
In my experience, outsiders get too hung up on perceived conflicts with the Amish community.