Yes, it's all very quaint, except that they're denying their children opportunities in the real world by not having computers around the house. Nobody can leave the community of farmers and woodworkers because they're so dependent on it and they've never known anything else. In particular, I can't imagine how horrible it would be to be an atheist in that community.
Its not so much different than living in a city then and denying children the ability to learn to be farmers. it is easier to learn a computer for the first time as an adult than learn how to run a farm. Amish take varying attitudes towards technology like computers. The more progressive Amish now have computers but no Internet access. It is a community that takes a very slow and deliberate approach to technology. They debate how technology will affect society before adoption instead of adopting and seeing what happens.
It is within the range of known opportunities for people in a city though. Whereas growing up in an isolated society doesn't exactly give you much exposure to develop interests.
(Not to mention "contributing to technological progress" is a subjective value. I'm pretty sure most Amish value instead "contributing to community connectedness", and I bet some find it disconcerting that most non-Amish are not raised to further this end.)
From the article, it sounds like they're contributing to technological progress in some pretty remarkable ways. Their pneumatic diesel-powered factories sound incredible. They're not necessarily any better than your standard factories, but from an engineering perspective these sound like fascinating research laboratories.
Of course, these research laboratories are churning out a lot of high-quality modern furniture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tool
"Air tools were formerly unpopular in the DIY market, but are becoming increasingly popular, and have always been ubiquitous in industrial and manufacturing settings."
Its sad that my statement is being down-voted without being refuted in any way.
This is a loaded phrase which makes some unwarranted assumptions. Are Ikea desks that can be made at 1/5th the cost but last 1/10th as long representative of the forefront of technology? I'd argue when it comes to furniture manufacturing, the Amish actually are at the forefront of technology. The Amish are Apple and Ikea is Sony.
> at least extremely sub-optimal.
This doesn't matter. Laboring under the assumption that tools X, Y, and Z are indispensable makes your average shop much less likely to discover tool Q that does all three jobs at once for a quarter of the effort and practically for free. The best technology often looks like nothing at all because you don't even know it's there.
> Pneumatic power tools are nothing new
Neither are computers. Your entire arguments are based on the unstated assumption that electricity and computers are required to make anything that is on the forefront of technology - this is not true. Electricity and computers are all well and good. There's nothing wrong with specialization.
If you look at things from the "good of scientific progress" perspective, it's a great thing that we have people like the Amish who arbitrarily cut off ties to certain technologies but not others. By necessity, they become the absolute experts at the technologies they keep. To us the better pneumatic drill is worthless, but it's still valid technological progress.
>Are Ikea desks that can be made at 1/5th the cost but last 1/10th as long representative of the forefront of technology?
I refuted the example of technological progress being use of pneumatic tools, just look at car manufacturing, they're are an essential tool.
>Your entire arguments are based on the unstated assumption that electricity and computers are required to make anything that is on the forefront of technology.
No, my basic assumption is that education and freedom of thought are required for progress. The Amish have neither.
I'm not saying that they're the only people using pneumatic tools out there, I'm saying that they're building new pneumatic tools every day, and some of them probably are pneumatic tools no one has ever built before. That's valuable to society at large if engineers from your car factories are visiting the Amish and swapping ideas.
Yeah, the Amish themselves aren't going to reap any benefits, and they probably aren't going to work as fast as people in a fancy lab, but they're also likely to find some one-in-a-million ideas you would never come up with in a fancy lab.
The article describes in detail how the lack of technology inspires and encourages an inventive spirit. He calls them "hackers" because tinkering and inventing is so prevalent in the group as a whole.
It may not fit your own definition of technological progress, but it's true all the same.
The phrase "re-inventing the wheel" comes to mind, the definition of progress is moving forward from the current, not artificially handicapping oneself the past and then working back towards the current. My statement is extremely easy to refute, but I see no examples in the article which show they have advanced the forefront of technology.
There is no doubt that these people are creative and tinker, it just seems to me that their efforts are wasted, or at least extremely sub-optimal.
There is a difference between being exposed to the outside world and being given the tools to successfully navigate it. Given their limited education, it's hard to imagine many Amish being successful in modern society.
I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, and this guy gets lots of credit for attending/transferring to Columbia w/o a high school diploma. But that just underscores how difficult the transition can be.
Out of curiousity, how do you define "real world"? The one that's lived on Facebook?
Is it about relationships? I'd consider theirs more real than mine or those of an average Western citizen. They're developed through conversations and interaction, not texts.
Is it about society? It seems to me that more or less every life story is about being raised by a community, spending a lifetime working in that community, and eventually dying. Is that less real when the community is a village, instead of a globe?
It's hard to criticize their approach without putting unsubstantiated weight on subjective values, like global integration, or contribution to technological progress. That those are worthy virtues is not a given.
But you're right, it would be difficult to be an atheist in that community because it's first and foremost a religious community. I don't see why that would be surprising. Most atheists don't find it very comfortable to be part of a church community either. They leave.
You are not allowed to be Amish except by choice after experiencing the world. Their kids are not Amish until being baptised, which usually doesn't happen till after the age of 18, which is fairly rare among religions.
