Look Who's Talking (continued)

Amos, like many other Amish craftsmen, uses electricity in his workshop for certain tools. But the electricity does not come from public utility lines. Amos runs a diesel generator to charge a bank of 12-volt batteries. The batteries' DC charge is then sent through a converter to create homegrown 110-volt "Amish electricity." To generate more, he has to haul the diesel fuel in from town on his horse-drawn buggy.

To the obvious question why allow Amish electricity but not public electricity, Amos answered slowly and deliberately, "The Bible teaches us not to conform to the world, to keep a separation. Connecting to the electric lines would make too many things too easy. Pretty soon, people would start plugging in radios and televisions, and that's like a hot line to the modern world. We use batteries and generators because you can use the batteries for only a short time and because you have to fuel and maintain the generator yourself. It's a way of controlling our use of electricity. We try to restrict things that would lead to us losing that sense of being separate, to put the brakes on how fast we change."
 
 

"Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?" is the question bishops ask in considering whether to permit or put away a technology.
Despite the reputation today's Amish have as old-fashioned diehards, their departure from Europe several centuries ago was driven by their success as innovators. They started out as radical religious libertarians - at a time when the price of religious radicalism was martyrdom. Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in a major religious war, but both sides took a serious dislike to these defiant theological purists, known at the time as Anabaptists, for their emphasis on adult baptism. (Today, every Amish household has a copy of Martyrs' Mirror, a text of more than 1,000 pages that details the excruciating and humiliating public executions suffered by Anabaptist martyrs in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland.) The Anabaptists developed a soil technology based on crop rotation, planting clover in their pastures, and sweetening their earth with lime and gypsum; they dramatically increased the yield of their land, and some of them became wealthy.

Ironically, those same Anabaptists helped set the stage for the fast-paced changes of modern life that today's Amish reject. It was the widespread adoption of Anabaptist practices that eventually produced enough food to free other agricultural laborers, creating the workforce that would be needed for the industrial revolution.

Toward the end of the 17th century, one of the Anabaptist leaders, Jakob Ammann, decided that his Swiss brethren had not been radical enough. Ammann and his followers, who came to be known as "Amish," broke with traditional Anabaptists, moved to the New World, and started farming in Lancaster County in 1710.

In today's Pennsylvania Amish country, a group of 20 to 30 families who live near one another constitute a "district." Each district has a bishop, and the bishops get together twice a year to discuss church matters. This includes raising the recurring questions about which technologies should be permitted in the community, and which banned or regulated.

While the say of the bishops is binding, the Amish come to their decisions quite consensually. New things are not outright forbidden, nor is there a rush to judgment. Rather, technologies filter in when one of the more daring members of the community starts to use, or even purchases, something new. Then others try it. Then reports circulate about the results. What happens with daily use? Does it bring people together? Or have the opposite effect?

Despite the almost organic ebb and flow of this evaluation process, the common goal is constant submission to the judgment of one's peers. On my visit, I was constantly struck by what seemed an alien conception of community. As a kid I was encouraged to "do my thing" while being nice to others; I've lived in five states and dozens of neighborhoods. Amish communities are not just tightly knit and immobile, they're authoritarian.

Yet there is some room for disagreement; consider how the bishops judged the automobile in the 1960s. Typically, the Amish have large extended families; most have dozens of cousins within walking or buggy distance. Every other Sunday, instead of attending church, the Amish are encouraged to visit relatives and the sick. Over time, it was felt that the automobile was enlarging people's traveling radius too far beyond their extended family, to diversions and recreations not related to the community, decreasing the social cohesion and personal connection the Amish so cherish. Some bishops accepted the use of the automobile under certain conditions, while others rejected it outright. The Amish are now split into traditional "Old Order" Amish who still stick to horse and buggy, "New Order" Amish who approve use of telephones and powered farm equipment but shun public electricity, and "Beachy Amish," named for the '20s liberal leader Moses Beachy, who permit both public electricity and automobiles.

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