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The Ends Meet in the Middle. It’s Complicated.
I took off the week of Independence Day (I refuse to call it the Fourth of July). My Dad and I went back to Morgan County, Ohio, to visit friends and family. I grew up on a hog farm. We used draft horses for the fieldwork, and most of our neighbors were Amish. So many of my old friends are Amish. So last week, I was sitting on a wooden chair in the living room of my old friend “Eli.” We had a wonderful visit. I have no pictures, of course, because Amish don’t like to have their pictures taken.
Or, at least, the older sects don’t. Which is what we have in Morgan County. Even the most liberal Amish in Pennsylvania won’t drive cars like the Mennonites. Amish tend to hang on to the old way of doing things as best they can, and they look askance at modern innovations, like rubber tires on wagons. It seems silly, and perhaps it is, but they’re doing the best they can to remain true to their God and their principles. While struggling to keep their lifestyle sustainable in the modern world. And Eli is stressed out about that. It’s complicated.
He raised sheep and sold grade-B dairy, but he also ran a harness shop to sell and repair harnesses for his neighbors. He’s in his 80s now, and he’s started raising produce to sell at the local bulk auction each week. His boys are grown, he’s getting old and weak, and he can’t do what he once did. So he does what he can to get by. His world is changing. And the world around him is changing. It was fascinating to hear his perspective:
I asked if he had any new harness orders. He laughed. “This Englishman comes down from Columbus.” (NOTE: To the Amish, there are Amishmen and Englishmen. Anyone who is not Amish is English.) “This guy runs restaurants in Columbus, but he’s found the earth or something, and he wants to farm with horses. The guy has no idea what he’s getting into.” Eli shakes his head.
He said the guy drove two hours from Columbus and spent four hours at Eli’s farm.
I’m sure he was amazed. Most people have never been on an Amish farm. How do you do anything without electricity? He was probably fascinated.
But to Eli, this is no hobby. And he was mystified as to why this wealthy hippie (as he called him) would do all this when he could buy a tractor. Or better yet, just go to the grocery store.
But those are Eli’s customers now.
He was clearly frustrated, so I tried to change the subject. I asked how his produce business was going.
He laughed again.
He said, “Field work is hard. The produce is easier, but it’s still a lot of work. So most of the people selling produce at the bulk auction are Amish. It’s hard work, and we’re ok with hard work. Anyway, the bulk auction was bought a few years ago by these two gay men who say they’re married, and their floor worker is a black lesbian who has absolutely no idea how a farm works. One of the men thinks he’s a woman! He’s a grown man, and he’s not sure if he’s a man or a woman! Can you imagine! So you have these head-in-the-clouds hippies working with a bunch of straight-arrow Amishmen. Nobody understands anybody. We all used to understand ourselves, and we used to understand each other. But now, it’s just ridiculous.” He shakes his head.
So Eli is frustrated with the starry-eyed hippies who are the new market for his wares. But he’s even more frustrated by some of his Amish friends. His fifty-something daughter “Hannah” is a dwarf, has never married, and still lives with her parents. She told a remarkable story:
“So I’m up in Holmes County visiting a friend, and later in the evening I need to use the restroom. He says he has an indoor toilet. His wife walks me back to this little room, she throws a switch, and the light is just blinding! I couldn’t see anything! I mean, it’s night-time – just a lamp is fine, right? But he had indoor electric lights! As I walked back to the sitting area, I saw a whole wall of car batteries. He had solar panels up, and was running electric into his house! Can you imagine!?”
I pointed out to Hannah and Eli that this Amishman was using solar power to get electricity, which was ok. But getting electricity from the power pole at the end of his driveway was bad. Eli’s eyes lit up and he pointedly said to me, “If you figure out the difference, let me know, huh?”
Again, I know that a lot of this doesn’t make any sense to most of us. Why are the Amish so particular about holding on to their old ways? Even the ways that seem distasteful to us, like the fact that he uses an outhouse and that his daughter couldn’t marry, so she’s stuck living with her parents. Not all of this is good, in my view. There are many things about the Amish lifestyle that many of us would find hopelessly out of date. But on the other hand, there is much to admire, as well. It’s complicated.
But that’s not my point. What I’m trying to get at is that I find it fascinating that the most hip and progressive among us – wealthy urban gay restauranteurs, for example – find themselves drawn to the Amish traditions. And the most traditional Amish are finding themselves drawn to modern innovations like electric lights and indoor bathrooms.
Suppose you chart out the most progressive cultures to the most traditional cultures. You would draw a bell-shaped curve, with most of us falling in the middle of the curve somewhere.
But to me, I think you could wrap that curve around a cylinder, and I think the ends would meet in the middle of the back of the cylinder somewhere. The ends are not far, far apart. I think the further you get out on the ends of these curves, the closer you get to the other end. Like wealthy urban gay hippies and southeastern Ohio Amishmen. They sort of meet in the middle, somehow.
I think.
Eli probably would disagree. He would laugh, and shake his head. But this is his world now.
It may be good. Partially, at least. I’m not sure.
But Eli’s world is changing. Whether he wants it to or not. Maybe it’s good that he’s being dragged into the modern world. Maybe.
Our world is changing, too. Maybe it’s good that we’re being dragged into the modern world of socialism and wokeism. Maybe.
Or maybe there is value in the old way of doing things. Maybe we should be careful what we destroy. Maybe we should be more reluctant to criticize the “other” way of doing things, and be more eager to meet in the middle. Maybe some things should be beyond debate. Maybe we should agree to tolerate minor transgressions while agreeing to be intolerant of evil. But what is evil?
It’s complicated.
Eli, my Dad, and I had a wonderful visit. Like the old men that we are, we reminisced about old times. Much of those old times could be improved upon.
But some of it shouldn’t be trifled with. I think.
Which part is which? Hard to say.
What’s odd is that if you asked an Amishman, and a wealthy urban gay restauranteur, you might get similar answers. To some of it. The ends meet in the middle. I think.
It’s complicated.
Published in General
Was Eli’s remark for the use of solar electricity or against it? Did he think it was wrong?
Perhaps the pictures which you have so beautifully drawn with your words, Doc, show us that the extremes inevitably will fail the test of time. At least, that is the way it seems to me.
The Amish, or some of them anyway, do not want to be beholden to the power company.
When the power grid collapses, Eli gets the last laugh.
I used to live in central Pennsylvania, and always found the Amish to be interesting. Their theology is complex and interesting, in terms of how they deal with modernity.
I had assumed that an Amish farm would look pristine and neat, but many of them are not that way. I’ve seen many farm houses that are in serious need of a coat of paint, for example.
They won’t run electricity or have a phone in their house or business, but they will do all the work from a pay phone at the end of their driveway. (This solution has probably moved past a pay phone to some kind of shared cell phone.)
The Amish furniture shop uses the most advanced woodworking tools available. But they take the electric motors out, and drive the machines with belts from a common rotating shaft that may be driven by a gasoline engine.
Many PA Amish profit from growing and selling tobacco they will not use.
PA Amish are, I have to say, notorious for operating the worst kind of “puppy mills” for low grade pet stores.
If you grow up Amish, you can test out the outer world during rumspringa, and then decide whether to be in or out of the Amish world.
My take on this is that the Amish are very practical and adaptive people who work out ways to interact with and profit from “the English” without being a part of the modern world.
Mrs. Tabby and I visited both Holmes County (OH) and Lancaster County (PA) quite a bit, and many Amish were settling in the New York Finger Lakes near where we then lived in Rochester (NY). During our visits we were told that many of the “rules” dealt with maintaining community and not becoming too entangled with outsiders.
Once the solar panel is installed, the generating and delivery of electricity is self-contained. The problem with the power pole is its line is connected to some anonymous system run by people with whom you have no hope of having a real relationship.
Motor vehicles are prohibited because they tempt people to interact with people at great distances and reduce interactions with immediate neighbors (the local community). Rubber tires on horse drawn vehicles also tempt the driver to travel greater distances, thus reducing the ties to the people of the local community. I’m told this is why a few Amish groups permit gasoline or diesel powered tractors for farm work but require steel wheels (no rubber tires) so the farmer is not tempted to use the tractor to travel longer distances than he would with a horse drawn vehicle.
“Maintaining a close local community” as an overarching goal did help me understand some of what we saw. In many ways, at the beginning of the 20th century the Amish did not look that different from other rural Americans. At that time an American interacted over a lifetime with about the same number of people many of us deal with each year, with our extensive travel and communications networks. Because we interact with so many more people, those interactions tend to be more superficial.
2 Corinthians 6:14:
If they have a powerline coming to their house, they are yoked to unbelievers.
The Amish use wind power for other things, no? Would they be okay if somehow a windmill created light in the bathroom, without it being electricity in between?
Different groups (congregations) have different views on such things. I saw some that were OK with a gasoline generator creating electricity (they were using the electricity for a sewing business; I don’t know if it went to the house). One group used electricity from the grid and even the internet and a website for the business (a retail store) but not for the house or the farm.
As the doctor said, it’s complicated to determine where and how new technology is going to be a net benefit or where its downsides outweigh its benefits.
Way back when I served on the student council in my undergraduate college (in the late 1970s), I was the farthest right wing person on the council. It amused me that often I was collaborating with the most left-wing guy on the council, usually on some free speech issue as the council was often trying to tamp down alternatives to the standard mushy conventional leftwing message.
I like this part, Doc. On some issues, maybe the extremes do meet, in a way. Perhaps at Kooky?
I especially like this part, though I don’t think that everything is complicated. Some things are complicated. It’s probably complicated to figure out what is complicated, and what is not.
Personally, I’m increasingly happy following the Good Book.
The Amish are strange cats. I always tried to imagine that moment when one of the religious leaders had a psychotic break and yelled, “Damn this modern world! We go no further!” And that moment was the invention of the telegraph in 1837.
We’re surrounded by them in my neck of the woods. They’re hard working people and they coexist with “the English” by selling their wares to them and tolerating the yokel tourism.
A local osteopathic hospital used to cater to them until it fell on hard times and closed. They even purchased a house across the street and outfitted it with hitching posts and a small stable. The nursing staff hated them. Something about their attitude and personal hygiene made it difficult.
The have diseases unknown to the general population. Among those is Crigler-Najjar syndrome. It’s genetic and comes from generations of inbreeding. It affects the body’s ability to breakdown bilirubin and is treated with a narrow wavelength of blue light. They get a religious exemption to install the lights (usually powered by a generator). We call it “The Amish Glow” when we drive at night through Holmes and Wayne Counties.
Well, as for the appeal to the wealthy hippie type, I recognize that from way back –> late 60s and early 70s, Mother Earth News and The Whole Earth Catalog were being scoured for inspiration by city-dwelling hippies while in their air conditioned apartments they were fantasizing in their pothead dreams of “getting back to the land.” As if.
IIRC Bernie Sanders was kicked out of a hippie commune because he wouldn’t do his share of the work. ‘Twas ever thus.
Anyone who’s seen Star Trek knows that.
Mentioned here:
https://ricochet.com/podcast/goldberg-long-podhoretz/extreme-affectation/
My all-time favorite Onion headline.
Shades of Rod Dreher’s old “crunchy con” idea.
Here you go: (let me know if I accidentally missed any of it) (I enlarged the photo to fill in the ad space)
Yes. Their congregations each decide what technologies to adopt, weighing the costs and benefits, and comparing notes with neighboring congregations. They don’t use a new technology just because it’s there.
Yeah, the Amish in Wells and Adams counties (Indiana) will use tractors and other powered farm implements, and will ride in cars to worksites, but will not own cars. They have internet connections. In a shed or barn, not in the house, and with strict content filters. When I had to get an MRI in Fort Wayne in 2019, half of the people in the waiting room at the radiology department were Amish with work injuries. I find the cautious attitude toward technology understandable, just overdone.
My mother’s denomination, the Apostolic Church, has some similarities and there are members of that church that have “gone Amish”, mostly by dint of marriage. And one of my father’s closest friends in his last years was a young Amish fellow named Daniel Stelter, with whom I got to speak some Pennsylvania Deutsch. Well, Daniel did. I spoke Hochdeutsch with Bavarian influences, but we understood each other. So, thanks to Dr. Bastiat for setting off trips down multiple memory lanes. Great post.
Certainly the enemies of personal freedom, communists and fascists, have a great deal in common. Reduced to practice, they are both familiar.
The same is true today when it comes to individual privacy. Big Government and Big Tech (and Big China) share the insatiable desire for comprehensive information on every person. Did you see that Meta obtained tax filings for most Americans? Is there even a belief in privacy rights any more?
They did? How did you find this out? Where can I read about his?
My father used to sell machine tools to the Amish in Ohio. The sect would not allow electricity of any kind. My dad was trying to sell a big lathe that had variable speeds to an Amishman who really wanted it. He got the engineers to design it so that he would not have to connect it to the electrical grid. It could use water power from the mill the Amishman owned. The Amishman was ecstatic! He could have this powerful machine.
But he had to get the approval of the elders of the community. The elders were very clever with their questions. They asked if it ran on electricity. No, it used water power. Then they asked if it had an internal electric motor to produce the variable speeds. Yes, it did. The lathe still needed electricity to run. That was the dealbreaker. The Amishman, and my father, were disappointed.
That was almost 50 years ago. The Amish seem to be loosening up a bit. The reason that the Amish do not used electricity is so that they are never dependent on the outside world. It is NOT because they think that using electricity is itself a sin. We should not be confused about that. Therefore, it should have been fine to use that lathe and today to use a solar panel.
Not the Bee has a quick summary, but it is all over the web.
What exactly do you mean by happy? From what I have read of you, you seem to delight in G-d condemning the vast majority of humanity into eternal hellfire. Is your happiness like aschadenfreude thing?
I disapprove of the Amish committing so much incest. They will eventually die out if they continue to abase their genetics.
Yes, they are always changing and there are some, usually of the older generation, who compare with the way things were done by their own parents and who fear whether the younger generations are losing their way.
In most communities I bet that would be fine now. In the northern tiers of Indiana counties, the Amish are more conservative in technology and fashion the further east you go. Near Elkhart and South Bend you’ll find some variations in color in the homes. Thirty years ago you’d see more use of electricity in the barns (not the homes) and more people mowing their lawns with gas-powered mowers. Two years ago I spent a few days bicycling from an AirBnB just to the south, and for the first time saw an Amish man tooling down the road on a rubber-tired tractor. It was an older tractor like you might have seen in the early 60s, but the Amish didn’t used to take their tractors outside of their fields, and a lot of them didn’t use tractors at all. A few days later I rode further east and came to a community where the tractors still had all-steel wheels. To cross the paved roads from one field to another they laid down what looked like huge leather strips to protect the roads from getting chewed up by the treads on the steel wheels. No problem riding over those on my bicycle.
Sergei “Sputnikoff” of the Ushanka Show YouTube channel tells how in the mid 90s, he used his time in America to work for a local farmer on weekends to earn money beyond what he earned at the summer camp that brought him and some other Ukrainian and Russian young people to the U.S. This was in southwest Michigan in the fruit-growing regions, and after the camp season was over the farmer he worked for invited him to come along on a delivery run to an Amish farm in Indiana. (You think those fruit preserves you buy from the Amish or the dessert you order with your meal at the big Amish restaurant on U.S. 20 are made from fruits grown by the Amish? Not necessarily.)
Anyhow, the Amish family invited Sergei and his employer to stay for dinner. Sergei was used to primitive rural ways from the summers he spent with his grandparents in a village very near the Belarus-Russia border, which to this day has electricity but no running water. So when he asked to use a toilet he expected to be directed to an outdoor outhouse. But instead he was directed to an indoor bathroom with all the modern conveniences. He credits that incident with doing a lot to convince him which country he wanted to live in permanently.
There are some large concentrations of Amish on the Michigan side of the Indiana border, too, and they also tend to get more conservative as you go further east. I find it amusing that the Amish in Hillsdale County, home of a well-known conservative college that has no connection with the Amish, are at least to outward appearance some of the most conservative Amish around.
The ones south of Fort Wayne described by @Hartmannvonaue are different altogether. In some ways they are even more conservative than the others in southern Michigan and northern Indiana, and their language is a bit different, having come to the U.S. in a completely different migration. We’ve heard of a mixed marriage between one of them and the more “liberal” Amish that didn’t go over so well in the local community, where a woman-owned business was something that was just not done.
But what I really wanted to mention was an e-mail that I got from the CEO of Gab a day or two ago, with the subject line: “The Neo-Amish Movement.” Maybe some of you received that mailing, too. (I don’t use Gab, though I may have an account there. Normally I don’t pay much attention to their e-mails, but the subject line on this one caught my attention.)
You must be happy with great complications, then!
https://notthebee.com/article/report-three-major-tax-prep-companies-sold-sensitive-personal-financial-information-to-meta-so-that-zuck-could-target-facebook-and-instagram-users
Wouldn’t using solar panels, for example, be dependent on the outside world for repair or replacement?
They do all sorts of things that are dependent on the outside world. They couldn’t survive in a world that was all Amish. They’ve drawn the line where they have, though, and sometimes even adjust the line a bit.
That does seem to be the main problem. To me, that disproves the theory. No different really than if all boys grew up to be cowboys and all girls grew up to be ballerinas. At least up until the 90s or so, whenever so much production/manufacturing was outsourced, the US could have been self-sufficient even if the rest of the world didn’t exist.