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Notes -
How does a social progressive respond to the Amish Question, namely that the Amish have a better quality of life according to nearly all objective indicators? (Including but not limited to: lower suicide risk, greater longevity, lower female depression risk, greater sense of purpose, greater community, lower cancer and diabetes risk, negligible drug and alcohol use, lower carbon footprint, and lower income inequality)
I live near Amish and the amount of genetic deformities in them is quite higher than normal. I've seen a guy with a messed up hand, and a guy who walked really funny with one nearly useless arm along with a contorted face. This is more of a minor point, but they're always buying ice cream and paying for rides from non-Amish and borrowing people's generators and phones and other various modernities that they apparently need, despite their religion forbidding them for their own personal ownership.
That's not to diminish their successes, which are numerous. But genetic deformities, hard work, genuine faith, and voluntary (sometimes hypocritical) giving up of modern pleasures is a high price to pay.
It would be staggeringly difficult to try to engineer that sort of thing among normies. The genie is out of the bottle for genuine faith for most people, and once people have been raised up in the usual environment, they're not going to want to give everything up unless they're crazy. The Amish are an oddball group that arose organically. I don't think it's possible to emulate them in any meaningful way, and so it's useless to even pose The Amish Question in the first place. On a nation scale, why would you want to encourage it? Imagine if everyone went and became Amish.
While the Amish do have a higher genetic predisposition to certain birth defects, this is more than compensated for by their -50% resistance to cancer stat and their +10% longevity racial passive. In any case, nothing they are doing now is causing their greater risk for eg dwarfism, that has to do with the founder effect from their original colony, so it is only an aside to the question.
But the studies show greater health and happiness and social life, which are terminal values (goods unto themselves). Certainly it would be difficult to adjust, but it appears to be the rationally preferred lifestyle.
Patriarchy, gender norms, media restrictions, simplicity, social competition predicated on virtue, increased exposure to nature and an emphasis on tradition can all be emulated. Farming is really the only impossible thing to replicate for an entire population, but note that as much as 90% of Amish are not farming today.
What if those aren't really what make the Amish special, and you've invested all that energy, but your daughter turns out to be Aella, or the lady who wrote Quivering Daughters, or Samantha? It's not like traditional, strict, "umbrella of protection" patriarchal Protestantism has not been tried recently.
I mean, to be clear, quiverfullism was very much a fad in fundamentalist Protestantism and isn’t necessarily a better representation than the Amish. Most Protestants who agree with the core theological points don’t identify as quiverfull- iirc the duggars fall into the category of being quiverfull in belief and practice but strongly disidentifying with the movement.
I suspect that you’d need need to compare proxies and/or better organized representative groups to get data on the fundamentalist Christian lifestyle. Last time I saw any data on religious stay at home moms with 5+ children they were extremely happy and reported a high percent of their children in the same denomination. Selection effects galore, obviously, but the same can be said for self-described quiverfulls.
Sure, I suppose I was mostly responding to the first two items on the list being "patriarchy, gender norms." I grew up in a conservative homeschooling community, and the families that were more serious about patriarchy and gender norms (also very heavy on "cheerful obedience") than about the other items experienced some poor results. The families that were more serious about the exposure to nature part through small agricultural operations run by the mother and children generally seemed happier.
I can believe that- I live in a conservative homeschooling community- although I’m curious what you mean by ‘other items’.
So I guess looking at Coffee Enjoyer's list:
media restrictions -- common and generally seems like a good idea. Even secular academics like Jonathan Haidt are now advocating for this. I'm unsure how much I want to apply it personally, though -- so far very little.
simplicity -- I'm not sure that I've seen this seriously attempted, or what exactly it means in most contexts. For instance, look at a grown up homeschooler Paula at the Cottage Fairy Youtube channel. In general, I like her, and she likes to talk a lot about simplifying her life and home, and about "simple living," but actually, she's always buying craft kits off of Etsy, filming complex shots from multiple angles, moving her artwork around, and dusting the bundles of dried herbs artfully decorating her wall space. I sort of get what she means (contrasted with a complex social and work life in a city, more or less), but also somewhat don't (contrasted with playing DnD with friends once a week in the city? Going to bars? I'm not actually completely sure) People in Bronte novels sometimes advocated for it seriously, and they seemed to mean only owning three dresses, all of them grey, keeping one's hair in the same basic bun every day, without curls or lace, and only leaving the house to go to church. This has been found undesirable and left untried in my circles.
social competition predicated on virtue -- I'm not very clear on this one, either. It seems to depend somewhat on the virtues that are most focused on. The people I most genuinely respect seem to be the "beauty will save the world" sorts. The ones who were eventually disgraced, their daughters prostitutes, their wives divorced, focused very hard on controlling other people in their household, to get them to act virtuous for social credit. Mostly, the men seemed fine and stable, but often boring and bored. There were a few years where several of them got really into Wild At Heart, with not only book studies and conferences, but also a salmon fishing trip and beating on drums in the forest. Our church bought the pastor a claymore sword. The men occasionally got a beer together, despite mostly not drinking. It seemed interesting sociologically, related to contemporary alienation. Several of these men worked a engineers at a missile company, and came home every night to their two to six basically fine children and an expectation to "give everything to God," but it's still important to provide for the children, so nothing too wild is on the table, really.
emphasis on tradition -- I suppose that the people I grew up with were mostly in the American Evangelical tradition, where it is traditional to talk a lot about the unimportance of following traditions of man, and then there are traditions like giving testimonies and going on mission trips. I did traditional to my family things like reading George MacDonald and complaining about Calvinism. Then I was Orthodox, so of course there are general traditions, much talk about Tradition vs traditions, and some people went around checking out the different cultural traditions and cobbling things together. This is all a worthy project, but fairly complex in America, in a way I don't think Coffee Enjoyer is representing realistically.
I mean, given what you’ve listed, emphasis on patriarchy and gender norms sounds like the norm and more emphasis sounds like an obsession that probably betrays mental illness or an unstable personality.
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Worth noting that this only applies to a specific, small subgroup of Amish, and even the group of Amish in the next county north don’t benefit from the same good genes. That aside, I agree that genetic issues are a red herring, since they have nothing to do with the Amish lifestyle itself.
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The doctor tells you that in order to live an extra 5 years, you need to give up beer, take up broccoli, and start jogging every once in a while.
What's many people's response? Hell no. They say they'd rather live fast and die hard than to give up all these things. I've seen people on this site echo similar sentiments last time I posted about coffee. And this is much more than just eating a piece of broccoli every so often, for once in your life. This is a fundamental upheaval of most people's styles of living. Even if there are benefits to your health, it's not rational to do it, because it would mean basically giving up your current personality and identity. A spiritual death.
But they aren't, and can't be, unless you happen to run a cult and get a bunch of broken dysfunctional people that are easily manipulated into whatever shape you desire. This is kind of like Esperanto -- all the aspects of human language can be emulated, so why not craft your own conlang and then it can be everyone's second language, or even first language, and far easier to learn? Despite all this, nobody learns Esperanto. No momentum. No natural evolution. No reason to take it up.
Another explanation is that beer and sedentary vices are a poor man’s substitute for whatever the Amish are doing. Because it’s not just longevity, it’s lower suicide rate and lower depressive scores as well, see this overview (and ctrl-f “lower” or “higher”). This is a compelling hypothesis, because we don’t just have more vices, we have more suicide and more mental illness and substance abuse is correlated to both. Does the opiate addict love opiates just that much, or is there also an element of his life missing something which would replace opiates? research suggests social ties and social identity are protective against substance use problems.
Why not? We can certainly start government initiatives and charities with the express purpose of promoting this lifestyle. This may be the best choice for increasing the wellbeing of men and women, morally obligatory even. The hardest part would be to get the “social progress crowd” on board, who would be hindering… social progress.
For that matter, have you considered that The Motte is a poor man's substitute for whatever the Amish are doing? Have you considered joining them yourself? I hope you don't look at this as a sneer; I am asking in the hopes that you can potentially see the barriers or incentives to not join the Amish. Maybe one of them is that they would probably be pretty reluctant to let an outsider like you in.
Government initiatives seem to be pretty poor at getting people to make lifestyle changes. You can throw all the government initiatives you like at the obesity problem, with nothing to show for it.
Do I think I would be happy adjusting to an Amish life? Insofar as the adjustment is gradual, yes (any “clean break” from one life to another is extremely painful). Would I, if given the opportunity? My hesitancy would be that I’m forbidden from reading all day; I don’t want to give this up because I think it can actually promote greater happiness (for instance, the very question of why the Amish are happier may be verboten among the Amish, involving an atheistic framework). For that reason I would probably not join an Amish-like group, even if permitted to; but if I felt like I had done all the reading and sensemaking that I could already, then I would probably try to join.
There are also two significant problems with the Amish that are unrelated to their happiness: lack of military defense and scientific development. If those could be secured, it would be hard not to call the society perfect. I do think there are ways to incorporate Amish lifestyle without sacrificing defense or science. I don’t think they are fully mutually exclusive.
As for why Amish don’t recruit outsiders, it makes a bit of sense, they appear to be preoccupied at all times and have lots of kids. I don’t think this really affects the question though; even if Amish hated outsiders out of racism, we can imagine a non-racist Amish possible world.
So your idea is that Amish life is better than the median American life, but not the best lifestyle possible? Why not do government initiatives for something that doesn't self cripple by forbidding modern technology use (like tractors)? Maybe a government initiative for Motteposting.
I think the fact that they don't use anything invented in the last 200 years is also a significant problem with the Amish. America is America because of its tremendous industry. Amish people have their niche in this, but it would not bode well for the country if everyone was Amish.
No doubt another reason the Amish doesn't recruit outsiders is because no outsiders are interested. You have to be born into it to even want it in the first place. If that's not rational, then I'm sorry, because humans aren't rational (excepting us rationalists, who are very rational).
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What’s the comparison between Amish and members of tech savvy high-demand religions?
Which ones did you have in mind?
Mormons are probably the easiest comparison, but my understanding is that aside from eschewing technology Amish have similar lifestyle rules and social organizations to other Christian fundamentalist groups in the US and Europe.
How much of it is technology vs how much of it is the lifestyle rules and community organization suggests a natural comparison.
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