Look Who's Talking (continued)

"When I started this business in 1970," Moses said, "it wasn't accepted to have a telephone in the building, even in a business. But the telephone began to be accepted through popular disobedience. More businesses put them in and the bishops didn't stop them."

Will the bishops also eventually allow phones in the home? I asked.

"When the telephone first came out here, people put them in their homes," explained Moses. "But they were party lines. One time a woman overheard two other women gossiping about her. She objected. That wasn't what we wanted for our families or our community, so the bishops met and home telephones were banned."

Is the family meal enhanced by a beeper? Who exactly benefits from call waiting? Is automated voicemail a hint about how institutions value human life?
I had heard the same story from several other Amish - in fact, this story seemed to be a key part of community mythology. A writer named Diane Zimmerman Umble, who grew up in Lancaster County and had family roots in the Plain orders, traced the story to its origin, a 1986 memoir written by an Old Order Amishman born in 1897. As a graduate student, Zimmerman Umble started investigating Amish community telephones for a course on contemporary social theory, and ended up writing a book on the subject, Holding the Line: The Telephone in Old Order Mennonite and Amish Life. Among her findings was the power of anecdote in the Amish decisionmaking process.

Anecdote, of course, is a key currency on the Internet, so I asked Moses if he'd heard stories about it. Although he used a computer in his business, he didn't believe the Internet as currently constituted would ever be permitted. Based on anecdotal evidence, he said, "It's too unregulated, there's too much trash, and there's a worry people will use it for purposes unrelated to work."

I asked another Amish workshop owner whom I'll call Caleb what he thought about technology. He pulled some papers out of a file cabinet, handed them to me, and said, "I share some of this fellow's opinions," pointing to a magazine interview with virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier. Asked for an opinion he shared with the dreadlocked-and-dashikied Jaron, he replied, "I agree with his statement that you can't design foolproof machines, because fools are so clever."

Caleb also discussed the Amish resistance to becoming "modern." They're not worried about becoming people without religion or people who use lots of technology, he explained; rather, the Amish fear assimilating the far more dangerous ideas that "progress" and new technologies are usually beneficial, that individuality is a precious value, that the goal of life is to "get ahead." This mind-set, not specific technologies, is what the Amish most object to.

"The thing I noticed about the telephone is the way it invades who you are," Caleb said. "We're all losing who we are because of the telephone and other machines - not just the Amish."

In Holding the Line, Zimmerman Umble writes: "Some Old Order people feel that relaxation of telephone rules reflects a movement toward an 'uncontrollable drift' which must be halted. Others see these steps as pragmatic choices necessary to hold the community together economically. The paradox in the Old Order story is that the telephone does both: It holds people together by making communication among community members possible, and it separates them from the world and from each other. The telephone is both evil and good."

Donald Kraybill, who is also provost of Messiah College, on the outskirts of Amish country, believes taboos about telephones are "a symbolic way of keeping the technology at a distance and making it your servant, rather than the other way around."

Can they make the cell phone a servant? My questions on this score were answered mostly with anecdote. I heard of one Amish man who was going to be late to a chiropractor appointment, so he pulled out his cell phone and called the receptionist from the bus he was on. Zimmerman Umble heard of a Plain order businessman who called his stockbroker from his company car phone, pushing three taboos at once past their boundaries.

Zimmerman Umble pointed out that part of what makes cell phones so handy - the lack of a wire - also poses a special challenge for the Amish. "In the early part of the community discussion, electrical and telephone lines carried substantial symbolic freight," she said. The wires meant that anyone in the community could easily see who was using electricity and phones. "But now, in the absence of the line, behavior can't be monitored in the same way. It is harder to maintain separation between home and business when you have a cell phone in your pocket. In that sense it tests the community consensus about what is allowable."

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