On Amish Time
avidly.lareviewofbooks.org
avidly.lareviewofbooks.org
> Since almost all Amish descend from about 200 18th-century founders, genetic disorders that come out due to inbreeding exist in more isolated districts (an example of the founder effect). Some of these disorders are quite rare, or unique, and are serious enough to increase the mortality rate among Amish children. The majority of Amish accept these as "Gottes Wille" (God's will); they reject use of preventive genetic tests prior to marriage and genetic testing of unborn children to discover genetic disorders.
We might be happier living more simply in small communities, but the Amish are a terrible example to follow. They reliably inflict needless suffering upon themselves and their children. And even if such a lifestyle was more enjoyable, it would only be available to a select minority. To feed over 7 billion human beings, we need mechanized agriculture and chemical fertilizers.
If you hit your dog, it's animal abuse.
If you hit your spouse, it's domestic violence.
Even drill sergeants aren't allowed to hit recruits.
But if you hit your children– people who can't possibly defend themselves, people who depend on you to survive... it's allowed. It's even encouraged by a significant fraction of parents today. To me, this seems like a glaringly immoral exception to a general rule: only use violence in defense of self or others. After all, pets can be controlled without hitting. Why can't kids?
Nope, they sure don't. Don't need to - the institutionalized psychological attacks and tearing down their worldview to replace it with the army's is much more effective than any physical reprimand could be.
> After all, pets can be controlled without hitting.
And how is this done? With pinch collars, crates, kennels, leashes, shock collars, staking them out, fences, rubbing their noses in their feces...
I'd rather the odd corporal punishment to being treated like a "pet".
Yes, we used the crate in order to speed up her housebreaking (working with her natural instincts), but she would also regularly use her crate (with the door open) on her own. Now, we've built her a little pseudo crate with a dog bed under a high-legged dresser. She goes there in any big thunderstorm still and will sometimes sleep there when the house is full of visitors.
I'm in favor of controlling dogs with appropriate use of crates/kennels, leashes, and fences. OTOH, I've never hit my kids, not because I think it's inherently wrong, but because I think it's a terribly slippery slope, especially given the inherent stresses in raising an infant through toddler.
My parents and my (private Christian K-5) school both used corporal punishment on me, and I have to say that I don't feel harmed nor scarred/scared by it. Looking back on the few instances that I specifically recall, it was done with positive intent and was basically effective.
I'm uncertain as to whether it's inherently wrong categorically, or whether it's just wrongly used by lazy parents in >99% of the instances. (There's no doubt that it has an immediate effect. A parent could be quite easily tempted to use that shortcut in an almost addictive fashion.)
Now, you can do real violence to your children. Hit them until they're black and blue and sore for days. Or you can do trivial violence: smack your kid on the bottom with your hand and make it sting a little bit, for a fraction of an hour.
Maybe you could do this violence as an outlet for the rage, frustration, and anger in your life. Maybe you do this routinely. Maybe you're an alcoholic. Alternatively, perhaps you've found your children willfully doing something very wrong or incredibly irresponsible, substantially endangering someone's life or property.
These are substantially different applications of violence. We should use caution about talking like they're the same.
"To me, this seems like a glaringly immoral exception to a general rule: only use violence in defense of self or others."
One premise of punishing your children -- in ANY way -- is that you're defending your children's future. You hope afterwards that they will be a better person, capable of self-discipline, unlikely to engage in self-destructive behavior or violence against the world at large. And as they are not yet mature -- mentally, emotionally, physically, or in the eyes of the law -- and as they are your responsibility, substituting your judgement for theirs is a thing that you do, and you can in fact defend them from themselves, for a while at least. (It is a different situation with your wife, or at least it damn well ought to be.)
In that case, the question becomes whether the punishment is actually an effective and humane means to those ends -- physical or otherwise. After all, children can be traumatized with routine verbal abuse as well as physical.
"After all, pets can be controlled without hitting. Why can't kids?"
Pets have substantially different brain structures and the ability to learn from negative feedback of any sort is highly variable. My understanding is that dogs can learn from it, but do best if the feedback is immediate, otherwise they're at risk of just feeling randomly attacked, and they start getting pretty neurotic. But birds can just about never learn from negative feedback. And, of course, we have substantially different sets of expectations for humans than we do for pets.
For that matter, the other two "liberal" methods you mentioned, shaming and time out don't work either. I believe what you are attempting to discredit is known as positive discipline. That traces its roots to Alfred Adler, with the date being 1964 when he first mentioned it. That's hardly liberal. However, if you actually study positive discipline, it's nothing more than taking the ideas of Dale Carnegie and applying them to children. And Carnegie freely admits his ideas were drawn from the Bible and other religious texts.
They are hardly liberal or conservative.
I agree. That said, I think it's worth reminding ourselves that there are a lot of cruel and inhumane things that we do to ourselves, too.
Absolutely. The Western civilization is ignorantly missing things like the incredible cultural value of sexual abuse ( http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=316371 , http://legalaffairs.org/issues/January-February-2005/feature... ) or the beautiful parenting experience of raising children with nephropathic cystinosis (not to mention the happy lives of the children!) with that feeling of inner peace brought to you by knowledge that God wanted it like that. Open those closed, narrow minds of yours, people!
The article also failed to mention the reason there are so many German Anabaptist sects in America: they got kicked out of Europe when they couldn't find a home sympathetic to their hyper strict version of Christianity. These sects were often started by lay-people who disagreed with the lack of beatings being dolled out by their church leader.
I grew up around a lot of Amish people. At least when it comes to dealing with "the English", they are vain, sanctimonious assholes. I see little difference between them and the fundamentalist sects of Islam that we get forced in our faces by the news to paint all of Islam with the same brush.
I'm surprised how often liberals turn out to be such a totalitarians. It makes me sad.
Dislike to all other lifestyles than a liberal one. Attack any religion or ideology that doesn't put humans and their lives on the pedestal. I.e. Amish put there their God. It goes right against the liberal values (i.e. human life and rights are the most important thing not some imaginatory "God").
I like pluralism. I like to live in a country where people believe in different things and are free to express it.
Liberals made the US a bit totalitarian in a sense that you can get fired for petty remarks about gay or races. It almost feels like in a few more years we will have Jacobins with guilottines beheading everyone who doesn't want to be a liberal or cultural marxism proponent.
Very funny how you pretend you don't see it. That's what we call left-wing hypocrisy: you are becoming exactly this what you originally wanted to fight: injust totalitarian crushing anyone not agreeing with your worldview.
Do whatever you want. But don't claim that gives you the right to harm others.
You mean the ex-employee was harmed as he lost his employment because 1st Amendment doesn't protect him anymore?
Do you think that we got 1st Amendment to talk about whether while drinking tea? No! We got them to ask hard questions. Like why blacks are 75% + od the prison population even though they are only 15% of the general population? `i won't get honest answer to this by anyone because you guys don't believe in human rights (right to free speech) and killed them.
on the western side there is inherent disbilief in technology and what it will do for the society. In popular litterature evil will often come from human hubris who defies god.Technology will go berserk, the robots will kill us all. And so much romantizing of the good old days, the eden, the tropical beach where we all play naked and innocent.
I can't believe the USA have earthquakes on the west side, drought, -40C winters, hurricanes and floodings on the other parts, and still have this idealized idea of a low tech heaven on earth. Or does this view only hold off on mildly nice temperatured places ?
I contrast this to Japan because without cleverly engineered houses and buildings you're probably dead within 10 years. One can still build a house structure solely from wood, heavily relying on traditional arts, but interestingly enough these builders are super knowledgable, have a very broad knowledge of architecture and materials, just as much as any architect has, and improve on the traditional formulas wherever it makes sense. Quite the opposite of "let's gather the neoghboors and build some stuff"
I think both approaches need to exist for diversity, but my heart goes to the ones trying to make the world better one bit of knowledge at the time, more than the one closing in their time shells.
On the other hand, America is a rare society where Amish phenomenon is possible. Because in most of the world it won't. Such a way of life will be either ruined by economics or by regulations.
If I draw a parallel between this conversation and managing an IT project, it appears most of you would be in favor of a "complete rewrite" as opposed to spotting the problem areas and focusing attention on those and fixing the existing code base.
There's nothing inherently wrong with the way Amish people decide to live. Many on this thread seem to think that's not the case.
Are there edge cases? Sure. But in general I think the basic premise that they wish to avoid too much technology in their lives is not necessarily flawed. It's simply a more extreme version of "don't bring your cell phone to the dinner table".
Also I should mention that even though they represent a tiny fraction of the overall world population, there is a huge amount of diversity even among Amish communities. So the idea that someone can generalize about how "all amish" live their lives is patently false.
The Amish system seems rather vile, but unless you totally take away people's right to associate and indoctrinate children I don't see how we can ethically eliminate it. I suppose mandatory education that includes proper science and so on might be a good first start.
They use technology but are quite selective about what will benefit them and what will interfere with their way of life too much to become a part of it.
It's true that the gap between the Amish and the communities surrounding them is ever expanding but they're definitely not standing still in time, just moving at a much slower pace.