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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.
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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