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Comment by zkmon | Hacker News Reader

> But it became harder and harder for some members to keep refusing modern conveniences

I read about Amish people and I have very high respect for their traditions. Sometime I believe that's exactly how the society should be guided. It's not about getting harder and harder to keep refusing the modern practices. It is about slowing the adoption of such practices to ensure that the community still stays above the individual. I hope they can slow it down as much as possible.

"Individualism is frowned upon" - that's a great way to keep the community stronger. I experienced this in my community from South India. People are hardly known by their own names. Everyone was called by their family name only or something like "grandson of XYZ".

"Too much education causes separation" - another true observation, affects Indian families a lot. Each generation is alienated from its previous generation, only because of education, jobs and foreign living.

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One of my perennial essay ideas, something I've tried to express well (and mostly failed) for decades, is this... Here goes again, I guess.

Immigrants coming to a new culture face hard choices about which customs to keep, and which to let go. If the culture is different enough, they often straight up refuse, and try to hold on to everything they can. This doesn't work. If they try this, from what I've seen their children will probably adopt the worst aspects of both the old culture and the new. What is needed is a conscious choice, about what's important and why, and even more crucially, what's not important.

I tell the story with immigrants because it's easier for people to see it in others. But really, all of us face the same choice, because culture is always changing. We all have to decide what really matters in our culture, what's worth passing on - and what to let go. If we never go against the stream, we end up at the same common low point. But if we always try to go against the stream, we fail.

I think Amish have mostly succeeded in keeping their culture because consciousness about the "why" of their rules is usually (not always!) at front. And they don't reject everything modern, and they're not static in response to a changing world (as this article is a good example of).

The idea of keeping their culture, especially focusing on Amish, is not as rigid as many think. Many forget that the Amish, as a split off group from the Mennonites already had an immigration phase before going to the US. They came from Switzerland and north-eastern France and were forced to settle into southern Germany because of repressions.

Oddly enough they chose to assimilate with the local populace or at least transplant the ideals of anabaptism, thus adopting the local rhine-frankish dialect, instead of keeping the romansh or french dialects. They specifically chose to not repeat that when coming to America, for whatever other reasons they had.

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