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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.
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.
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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