5 ms·

The Amish aren't really about rejecting technology just to be luddites, but rather to about trying to preserve their traditions and culture. One of the ways the

The Amish aren't really about rejecting technology just to be luddites, but rather to about trying to preserve their traditions and culture. One of the ways they do that is to avoid adopting new things (technologies, processes, etc) until the community leadership agrees to it. There are Amish that have cars, electricity and computers because their communities have determined that those technologies are acceptable in certain situations and allowed them. Seen that way, electric bikes may not be a big change from the regular bikes some communities already allow for transportation. Appearance is a very significant part of Amish culture though, and changing those norms just to fit a technology is exactly what they don't want to do.

itake 3y ago
I wonder if this change is economically driven: if electric vehicles and tools allow Amish to produce more, then their churches benefit from higher tithes.
- bbatha 3y ago
  To some degree yes the Amish are most likely to use modern technology in business contexts. On the other hand if economics were the sole factor they’d all have robot tractors and the other multitude of productivity enhancing tools that have been developed for agriculture that have been developed over the last 200 years.
- bruce511 3y ago
  It's interesting to me that you pose this question. I would suggest that this says more about the culture you live in than the culture the Amish live in. (No offence intended.) My hypothesis is that you live in a primarily material culture (safe bet, since we mostly all do.) Thus most of your life decisions surround money. What can you afford, how to get more of it, how to spend less of it and so on. Again, z safe bet, since that's true for most of us in general, and is emphasised especially in the US. Most of this is just baked in, so when we look at alternative lifestyles we can assume that they make decisions as we do. That can be a mistake simply because its hard to conceive the way others live. For example it's common for Europeans to get over 30 days paid leave a year. In the US most shift workers get none. In Europe salaried workers work fixed hours, then go home. In the US they stay late, do emails all night, and so on. Neither approach is right or wrong, they're just different. And it's easy to put my motivations on another group, send then see their decisions as crazy.
  - itake 3y ago
    Gentrification and inflation are real and they are coming for you if you fall behind. The Amish try to be self-sustaining, but it is extremely hard to not participate in modern society, especially considering healthcare. If Grandma is sick, do you let her die or do you pay $100k for cancer treatments? If you have 7 or 8 kids, then where does the land come from to house them? Europe is a great example of a region that hasn't had a significant technology breakthrough in decades. (I'm less familiar with healthcare tech, but most engineering products have come out of the USA and Asia). The impact is real: the pounds and euro have fallen in value to the dollar.
    - fennecbutt 3y ago
      A-are you serious? You've never heard of ASML? And that's just one example. Gonna write you off as just trolling lmao.
      - itake 3y ago
        I am sure you can name a small number of examples that came out of Europe (Mistral, Spotify, Siemens, etc.), but the fact is the US and Asia generate way more value than Europe has in the last few decades. ASML is half the size of TSMC, by marketcap.
        fennecbutt 3y ago
        We were talking about technological breakthroughs/inventions, not market cap. Plenty of technological progress and research comes from Europe. Of course China and the US have larger, higher value _market_, that's well known but Americans in particular seem to love swinging it around. And idt it's fair to compare a couple hundred million people to four and a half billion people in the case of EU vs Asia.
        itake 3y ago
        Europe has 510m people and the usa has 370m. The USA is doing more with less. In 2008, the USA and EU had comparable GDP, but today the gap is 57%.
hgomersall 3y ago
Slight aside, but that was the position of the luddites too.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  > The Amish aren't really about rejecting technology just to be luddites, but rather to about trying to preserve their traditions and culture. One of the ways they do that is to avoid adopting new things (technologies, processes, etc) until the community leadership agrees to it. Neither feels right to me. The Luddites and Amish share a common thread, which is that of ownership and control and ability to set one's own course. I don't think the Luddites agreed that preserving traditions and culture was what drove them. They wanted mechanization to serve us all, to not be used to control them. They resisted the mechanization of the human spirit. The Amish have their own culture & tradition, but I think again what's afoot here is also in part about control & ownership, at least as much as it is tradition & culture. To call this just tradition & culture ignores & skips over what's really at stake, which is control & ownership. Whether we have the ability to use technology on our own footing, or whether it is an injected force that shapes and molds us. Is tech soft and malleable, or is it hard & unyielding, forcing humanity to change itself?
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Smashing looms was their tactic, not their goal. Their actual goal was to own the looms (to the exclusion of the factory owners). The original Parliamentary compromise regarding the introduction of looms was that skilled weavers would get first dibs on using them. A bunch of factory owners said "Fuck that" and just started using them anyway. Parliament not only didn't punish them for breaking the law, they passed even more laws to criminalize machine breaking on pain of death so that the Luddites couldn't protest anymore. Then they made up a story about them irrationally hating machines so they could paint organized labor as regressive. The Amish reject technology that ties them into a centralized society because they think decentralized, off-the-grid living makes you closer to God. The Luddites did not reject technology, they destroyed it as a tactic to bring capital back to the negotiating table. They're closer to the artists naming-and-shaming AI art users: few if any of them are Dunepilled[0] enough to actually want, say, a ban on computer programs that create art. What they want is protection against being economically replaced. [0] We must destroy the machines that think.
wkat4242 3y ago
I couldn't imagine a community 'leadership: telling me what to do and wear :( Of course we in the modern world are also a bit limited in terms of what we can buy but I often make my own pretty extravagant stuff to wear. Not always appreciated by conservatives but I couldn't care less. Ps nobody in the Netherlands wears helmets on bikes and we don't really need to. But I guess collisions with cars are more common in areas where bikes are less common. I've fallen many times but I always had my arm protecting my head in reflex even though it happened so fast I didn't even realise. The thing is that we don't view bikes as an exercise or sports thing you gear up for but just a convenience thing you grab for the 500m run to the shop. Besides having to put it on you'd be stuck having to carry it as well. And bikes are kinda the king of the road in Holland anyway. If you get hit by a car it's automatically their fault so they're really careful.

itake 3y ago

I wonder if this change is economically driven: if electric vehicles and tools allow Amish to produce more, then their churches benefit from higher tithes.

bbatha 3y ago
To some degree yes the Amish are most likely to use modern technology in business contexts. On the other hand if economics were the sole factor they’d all have robot tractors and the other multitude of productivity enhancing tools that have been developed for agriculture that have been developed over the last 200 years.
bruce511 3y ago
It's interesting to me that you pose this question. I would suggest that this says more about the culture you live in than the culture the Amish live in. (No offence intended.) My hypothesis is that you live in a primarily material culture (safe bet, since we mostly all do.) Thus most of your life decisions surround money. What can you afford, how to get more of it, how to spend less of it and so on. Again, z safe bet, since that's true for most of us in general, and is emphasised especially in the US. Most of this is just baked in, so when we look at alternative lifestyles we can assume that they make decisions as we do. That can be a mistake simply because its hard to conceive the way others live. For example it's common for Europeans to get over 30 days paid leave a year. In the US most shift workers get none. In Europe salaried workers work fixed hours, then go home. In the US they stay late, do emails all night, and so on. Neither approach is right or wrong, they're just different. And it's easy to put my motivations on another group, send then see their decisions as crazy.
- itake 3y ago
  Gentrification and inflation are real and they are coming for you if you fall behind. The Amish try to be self-sustaining, but it is extremely hard to not participate in modern society, especially considering healthcare. If Grandma is sick, do you let her die or do you pay $100k for cancer treatments? If you have 7 or 8 kids, then where does the land come from to house them? Europe is a great example of a region that hasn't had a significant technology breakthrough in decades. (I'm less familiar with healthcare tech, but most engineering products have come out of the USA and Asia). The impact is real: the pounds and euro have fallen in value to the dollar.
  - fennecbutt 3y ago
    A-are you serious? You've never heard of ASML? And that's just one example. Gonna write you off as just trolling lmao.
    - itake 3y ago
      I am sure you can name a small number of examples that came out of Europe (Mistral, Spotify, Siemens, etc.), but the fact is the US and Asia generate way more value than Europe has in the last few decades. ASML is half the size of TSMC, by marketcap.
      - fennecbutt 3y ago
        We were talking about technological breakthroughs/inventions, not market cap. Plenty of technological progress and research comes from Europe. Of course China and the US have larger, higher value _market_, that's well known but Americans in particular seem to love swinging it around. And idt it's fair to compare a couple hundred million people to four and a half billion people in the case of EU vs Asia.
        itake 3y ago
        Europe has 510m people and the usa has 370m. The USA is doing more with less. In 2008, the USA and EU had comparable GDP, but today the gap is 57%.

hgomersall 3y ago

Slight aside, but that was the position of the luddites too.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
> The Amish aren't really about rejecting technology just to be luddites, but rather to about trying to preserve their traditions and culture. One of the ways they do that is to avoid adopting new things (technologies, processes, etc) until the community leadership agrees to it. Neither feels right to me. The Luddites and Amish share a common thread, which is that of ownership and control and ability to set one's own course. I don't think the Luddites agreed that preserving traditions and culture was what drove them. They wanted mechanization to serve us all, to not be used to control them. They resisted the mechanization of the human spirit. The Amish have their own culture & tradition, but I think again what's afoot here is also in part about control & ownership, at least as much as it is tradition & culture. To call this just tradition & culture ignores & skips over what's really at stake, which is control & ownership. Whether we have the ability to use technology on our own footing, or whether it is an injected force that shapes and molds us. Is tech soft and malleable, or is it hard & unyielding, forcing humanity to change itself?
kmeisthax 3y ago
Smashing looms was their tactic, not their goal. Their actual goal was to own the looms (to the exclusion of the factory owners). The original Parliamentary compromise regarding the introduction of looms was that skilled weavers would get first dibs on using them. A bunch of factory owners said "Fuck that" and just started using them anyway. Parliament not only didn't punish them for breaking the law, they passed even more laws to criminalize machine breaking on pain of death so that the Luddites couldn't protest anymore. Then they made up a story about them irrationally hating machines so they could paint organized labor as regressive. The Amish reject technology that ties them into a centralized society because they think decentralized, off-the-grid living makes you closer to God. The Luddites did not reject technology, they destroyed it as a tactic to bring capital back to the negotiating table. They're closer to the artists naming-and-shaming AI art users: few if any of them are Dunepilled[0] enough to actually want, say, a ban on computer programs that create art. What they want is protection against being economically replaced. [0] We must destroy the machines that think.

wkat4242 3y ago

I couldn't imagine a community 'leadership: telling me what to do and wear :( Of course we in the modern world are also a bit limited in terms of what we can buy but I often make my own pretty extravagant stuff to wear. Not always appreciated by conservatives but I couldn't care less. Ps nobody in the Netherlands wears helmets on bikes and we don't really need to. But I guess collisions with cars are more common in areas where bikes are less common. I've fallen many times but I always had my arm protecting my head in reflex even though it happened so fast I didn't even realise. The thing is that we don't view bikes as an exercise or sports thing you gear up for but just a convenience thing you grab for the 500m run to the shop. Besides having to put it on you'd be stuck having to carry it as well. And bikes are kinda the king of the road in Holland anyway. If you get hit by a car it's automatically their fault so they're really careful.