Notes on Amish Culture

This post is part of Agora Road's May 2024 Travelogue.

Preface

Last week, I found out about a man called Titus Morris through a video made by Peter Santello. Titus is man living off the grid. While he does not identify as an Amish, his lifestyle is obviously very similar to the members of this group. After seeing the video linked, I decided to do some research about the Amish to see what their life is like.

It should be noted that I am not an authority on this subject. Those are just my personal observations.

I first heard about the Amish on Agora Road back in 2022. It was in a thread about someone's eyes implants becoming obsolete. Amongst talk of dystopia, someone said that they would like to go live with the Amish if they were not so hostile to outside. Another user jokingly replied, "Just start your own Amish enclave.". As I had never heard about them before, I did a quick Google search and moved on with my life.

Until very recently, I pictured the Amish as being a group of people that defined their culture by the opposition of technology. I figured those hyper-conservative people started doing that shortly after the Industrial Revolution. The reality is way more nuanced and interesting than I initially thought.

History

According to this website, back in the 16th century. From a very quick glance, it seems like some Christians thought that everyone else were not "true Christians" and thus decided to start their own branch of Christianity. The Anabaptists essentially made a gatekeeped community made of "true christians" whose core value was self-sustainability and keeping the influence of the "fake christians" out.

As it turns out, the definition of a "true Christians" is highly subjective. As such, there were many disagreements. This led to the creation of many different types of Anabaptists groups such as the Old Order, the New Order, the Swartzentruber, the Beachy Amishs and the Mennonites. I will refer to all those groups as "the Amish" to keep this article simple.

To further muddy the water, two Amish communities may have two different sets of rules despite being technically united under the same exact belief/denomination.

The main take away from this is that humans tend to disagree with each other a lot - even when following a highly organized belief. This reminds me on how there is many different Linux distros because everyone has a different philosophy on how to do things.

Modern Interest

At first, the Amish were not known as being "those who do not use modern technology" because said modern technology did not exist yet. It is only as time moved forward that they started getting more attention.

Their lifestyle stands in stark contrast with modern society. As of 2024, pretty much everyone agrees that something went very wrong with our world in recent times (the post 90s world). Many are quick to blame social media and/or smartphones. Needless to say that the optimism of the early 2000s about a "bright future with technology" is completely dead.

While many argue that technology is tearing society apart, the vast majority of people seems to believe that it is only certain technologies that are problematic. I certainly never heard anyone complain about the invention of the toilet, running water and electricity.

When people picture the Amish, they think of people refusing to use all technology. This mostly true for the Swartzentruber group, but more liberal branches exist.

Beachy Amish Culture

The Beachy Amish is by far the group that fascinate me the most. From what I can tell, they use most modern technologies, the only notable exception being radio and television.

The following are images of a Beachy Amish house (taken from this video):

As you can see, their lifestyle is pretty close to us. The household shown almost seem like a gaze into a utopian timeline where nothing went wrong.

A subject of interest for me is how they reacted to the existence of the internet and smartphones. I assume most Amish alive as the writing of this were born after the ban on television on radio was agreed upon. The internet is however, a recent invention. It's not like The Bible has a verse that says "Thou shall not use the Internet". As such it was up to the communities to decide how to deal with it.

Some allow internet usage as long as pornographic sites are blocked with an app. Others have smartphones programmed to only be able to only make phone calls and texts. I was surprised to find out that online Amish newspapers are a thing. I saw The Budget being cited a lot, but their website seems down at the moment.

Takeaways

The biggest takeaway I got is that the Beachy Amish show that technology is not inherently bad. It seems that most Amishs want to minimize the influence of the outside world as much as possible and they seem to be far happier because of. I note that their belief is similar to my hypothesis of "toxic knowledge".

Another aspect I glossed over is that those people have actual communities. Such companionship is severely lacking in the non-Amish society, hence the loneliness epidemic we are experiencing right now.

This research provided me with lots of valuable data for my research on the "darkness of the world". Such isolated communities gives me lots of perspectives to work with. It's like having eyes in parallel universes. In the end, the transience will reveal the configuration required for eternity.

Written by manpaint on 13 May 2024.