What We Can Learn From the Amish



While I am not Amish, and I haven’t even ever lived in Amish or Mennonite areas of the world, I have had a chance to learn a little more about them and their philosophy on life in general. It seems that many people use the Amish as an example of what can happen if you don’t adopt to new technology –you get left behind. You seem antiquated and old fashioned. You are “out of touch” with reality. But is this really what occurs? Do Amish people feel their lives are less valuable than the high-speed, technologically-driven ones of the modern industrialized man? It seems to me that the answer is “no”.

Technology and the modern day hustle and bustle seem to be things that are actually the easy way –the default. The latest fashions, TV shows, food fads, celebrity gossip, igadgets, and E-magic keep us constantly striving to be on the edge of the wave. And it costs a ton of money to stay current. Just waiting even a few months might save you hundreds of dollars but by then there is another cool thing. “Cool” is a constantly moving target. We can tell how out of touch you are by a hair style or song or movie. And the bigger the city, the faster this seems to change. Life is all about chasing your own tail, around and around the rat race.

But for the Amish people, they have somehow managed to turn off the noise. The blinking lights, the jingling sounds, the glaring advertisements of our day are for the most part silenced. They have managed to live in relative peace amidst an increasingly violent nation and world. They live in the midst of the wealthiest, loudest and most powerful nation in the world as quiet, agrarian, salt of the earth people. How have they done this?

It is not by accident that their lives are radically different than the average American. In fact, it takes a lot of will and strength to stand up to the pressures of the modern day world. They have chosen what they bring into their lives based on criteria of whether or not it brings their family closer, whether it upholds their religious beliefs, whether it brings peace or conflict. Most Amish groups have a council who reviews various aspects of the modern world, especially technology, and they determine its utility on these and other strict standards. Some groups are more lenient (relatively compared with other Amish people) and others are stricter with new technology (called “Old Order”), but each council thoughtfully reviews these new innovations before adopting any of them.

And for the most part, things move a lot slower. Fashions, hair styles, furnishings, hobbies, entertainment, music, manners of worship, food, language and other usually fluid cultural trends stay relatively unchanged unless it has been decided to move forward. Sometimes the only signs of the time are discretely added. For instance, some Amish groups might allow a single telephone (maybe even a cell phone) in a community area for everyone to share, but will not allow them in individual homes. Or perhaps they will have a weather radio. Maybe they will allow rides in cars, but cannot own one.

The activity or product will be weighed by its purported benefits and its possible or known detriments. For instance, if they decide they are to have a communal telephone maybe they decided that the benefit of staying connected to ill family members was worth having one phone, but that the detriments of constant interruptions, rushed activities, worries over news you cannot control or other things such as these meant it would not be good to have it in the house. Usually before making a big change, such as a communal telephone, the technology would have existed for a long while before so that they could have all the information about its detriments. They are not going to be the guinea pigs of some technological experiment. They do not ride the waves of time’s trends.

Probably the biggest piece of technology that they are known for rejecting is the car. In its stead, they have a horse and buggy. They have determined that their self-sufficiency and self-reliance is more important than the supposed freedom of flashing down a freeway for hours every day, and then turning around and doing it again. They found that cars moved much too fast and only took people farther from their families, friends and loved ones. They separated people from where they truly should be, and wanted to be. So, they do not own cars, but many aren’t afraid of cars or against taking a possible ride in a moving vehicle. It is the intent behind the technology or product, not the product itself that determines its place in the Amish world. Because of these early insights into the modern automobile, they have never had to worry about an oil crisis or shortage, costs of gasoline or whether or not the salary increase of a job would be offset by the maintenance to a car. Not to mention that the Amish-style transportation doesn’t release pollution or emissions.

Other forms of technology may be adopted if, after careful review, it is found to bring families together. I read in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver that one group recently decided that electric cow-milkers would be allowed instead of only hand-milking the cows because it was determined that this piece of technology would bring more time with family members and help get the cows back to pasture more quickly with less pain (probably in the more lenient groups rather than the Old Orders). Still, this would not have been without some discussion about the size of the operation. (You can imagine the council discussing whether or not Farmer Brown should have 20 or 100 cows and how that would affect his quality of life with his family.)

The philosophy of self-reliance goes further than just their transportation and food though. They have also decided that they would never need to buy health insurance (or other forms of government help including Social Security, you can read more here and here) and that if they ever had to go to a doctor for something that they could not treat within their community (through knowledge that is passed from generation to generation), that they would pay cash (from items that they sell like hand-made furniture and farm products). If an individual family did not have enough, the community would come together to help pay the bill. In fact, they were exempted from the recent Health Care Reform rules because of these cultural and religious views.

Overall, it may seem like a radical lifestyle to most people who go through life just picking up any and every random thing that is sold (in both senses of the word). And there may be some arguments that the Amish are doing a disservice to their children if they ever want to have a job in the corporate world. But this doesn’t seem to faze them. They are not interested in the corporate world, or the political world, or the fashion and technology world. They are interested in their family, their friends, and their farms. Most of what they do is based on a way of life they believe God intended them to live. They are interested in living a life of hard work where their efforts can be seen in their hands, not just in abstract terms. While they are not interested in “public options”, they are interested in the community’s well-being.

They have not just randomly been left in the past, they have purposefully created a life with meaning –and a future. They understand what the “outside world” holds for them and they conscientiously choose to leave it behind. They have done the cost-benefit analysis and the rushed lifestyle that most people live is not worth it to them, even if they could have more worldly goods, this does not seem to matter.

While I do not think we have to live by all the rules of the Amish to find this peace, I do think there is a lot we can learn from their way of life.