The Amish are famous for shunning technology. But their secret love affair with the cell phone is causing an uproar.
________
Technology is my native tongue. I’m online six hours a day. I have a cell phone, voicemail, fax, laptop, and palmtop. I’m connected - and lately, I’ve been wondering where all this equipment is leading me. I’ve found myself asking a question that’s both disquieting and intriguing: What kind of person am I becoming as a result of all this stuff?
Of course, I’m not the only one asking. And a while ago it occurred to me that, in addition to measuring my reactions against those of others in comparable circumstances, I might learn something entirely new by looking at a civilization of which I am not a member. The Amish communities of Pennsylvania, despite the retro image of horse-drawn buggies and straw hats, have long been engaged in a productive debate about the consequences of technology. So I turned to them for a glimpse of the future.
Amish settlements have become a cliché for refusing technology. Tens of thousands of people wear identical, plain, homemade clothing, cultivate their rich fields with horse-drawn machinery, and live in houses lacking that basic modern spirit called electricity. But the Amish do use such 20th-century consumer technologies as disposable diapers, in-line skates, and gas barbecue grills. Some might call this combination paradoxical, even contradictory. But it could also be called sophisticated, because the Amish have an elaborate system by which they evaluate the tools they use; their tentative, at times reluctant use of technology is more complex than a simple rejection or a whole-hearted embrace. What if modern Americans could possibly agree upon criteria for acceptance, as the Amish have? Might we find better ways to wield technological power, other than simply unleashing it and seeing what happens? What can we learn from a culture that habitually negotiates the rules for new tools?
Last summer, armed with these questions and in the company of an acquaintance with Amish contacts, I traveled around the countryside of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Everywhere, there were freshly planted fields, farmhouses with handsome, immaculate barns and outbuildings. At one farm we passed, a woman was sitting a hundred yards from her house on the edge of a kitchen garden. She wore the traditional garb of the conservative Old Order - a long, unadorned dress sheathed by an apron, her hair covered by a prayer bonnet. She was sitting in the middle of the garden, alone, the very image of technology-free simplicity. But she was holding her hand up to her ear. She appeared to be intent on something, strangely engaged.
“Whenever you see an Amish woman sitting in the field like that,” my guide said, “she’s probably talking on a cell phone.”
“It’s a controversy in the making,” he continued. A rather large one, it turns out - yet part of the continuum of determining whether a particular technology belongs in Amish life. They’ve adopted horses, kerosene lamps, and propane refrigerators; should they add cell phones?
Collective negotiations over the use of telephones have ignited intense controversies in the Amish community since the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, a dispute over the role of the phone was the principal issue behind the 1920s division of the Amish church, wherein one-fifth of the membership broke away to form their own church.
Eventually, certain Amish communities accepted the telephone for its aid in summoning doctors and veterinarians, and in calling suppliers. But even these Amish did not allow the telephone into the home. Rather, they required that phones be used communally. Typically, a neighborhood of two or three extended families shares a telephone housed in a wooden shanty, located either at the intersection of several fields or at the end of a common lane. These structures look like small bus shelters or privies; indeed, some phones are in outhouses. Sometimes the telephone shanties have answering machines in them. (After all, who wants to wait in the privy on the off chance someone will call?)
The first Amish person I contacted, I reached by answering machine. He was a woodworker who, unlike some of his brethren, occasionally talked to outsiders. I left a message on his phone, which I later learned was located in a shanty in his neighbor’s pasture. The next day the man, whom I’ll call Amos, returned my call. We agreed to meet at his farmstead a few days later.
I couldn’t help thinking it was awfully complicated to have a phone you used only for calling back - from a booth in a meadow. Why not make life easier and just put one in the house?
“What would that lead to?” another Amish man asked me. “We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a telephone. It’s not just how you use the technology that concerns us. We’re also concerned about what kind of person you become when you use it.”
The Amish are famously shy. Their commitment to “plain” living is most obvious in their unadorned clothing - Old Order Amish even eschew buttons, requiring humble hooks instead. Any sign of individuality is cause for concern. Until fairly recently, Amish teachers would reprimand the student who raised his or her hand as being too individualistic. Calling attention to oneself, or being “prideful,” is one of the cardinal Amish worries. Having your name or photo in the papers, even talking to the press, is almost a sin.
Like most modern Americans, I assume individuality is not only a fundamental value, but a goal in life, an art form. The garish technicolor shirts and hand-painted shoes I usually wear sometimes startle business audiences who show up for my speaking engagements. My reasoning: If I think for myself, why not dress for myself? Dye technology has given us all these colors, so let’s use ‘em! Still, I didn’t want to make my idiosyncrasies the focus of my visit to Amish country. So I bought a plain blue work shirt, dark blue gabardine pants, and brown shoes. I hadn’t traveled so drably in many years.
Amos runs a factory of sorts in the vicinity of three memorably named Pennsylvania towns: Bird-in-Hand, Paradise, and Intercourse. The sun was setting as I drove slowly down his unpaved driveway. I found myself inside a tableau that must have looked almost exactly the same 200 years ago. Several men and young boys in identical black trousers, suspenders, and straw hats were operating horse-drawn equipment in the fields beyond. One of Amos’s grandsons pointed me to a plain wooden building beside the barn.
The aroma of cows gave way to the pungent smell of diesel fuel and wood chips as I entered the workshop. The whine of a wood-milling machine made it futile to talk. This was not the serene place the words “Amish woodshop” conjure up. My host finished cutting a 12-foot-long plank before we greeted each other. He then lit a kerosene lamp in the small office next to his workshop and invited me in. The office had no modern technology in it, but railroad posters were tacked on the walls, and wooden locomotive models sat on the shelves.
Amos had sawdust and hydraulic fluid in his beard. His blue-gray eyes fastened on me as he bounced back his own questions in reply to my queries. He had received the same eighth-grade education that all Amish youth are given, but it was obvious that Amos did some outside reading. When I asked him to describe his sense of community, he started out, “Hmm, how do you pronounce s-c-e-n-a-r-i-o?”
Amos runs a successful business crafting wooden furniture, which he sells throughout Pennsylvania and beyond - primarily to the “English” (the Amish term for non-Amish). It’s a trade more and more Amish are getting into. Inside Amos’s home there are no telephones, radios, televisions, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, or other electrical appliances. In his shop, routers, mills, and sanders are powered by specially adapted hydraulic mechanisms connected to a diesel engine located near a large open door, exhausting outside the building.
This was a good case study in Amish reasoning: Far from knee-jerk technophobes, these are very adaptive techno-selectives who devise remarkable technologies that fit within their self-imposed limits. The price of good farmland and the number of Amish families are both increasing so rapidly that in recent decades they have adopted nonagricultural enterprises for livelihood - woodworking, construction, light factory work. This, in turn, has forced the Amish to adopt technologies that can enhance their productivity. And the interface with the English brings its own set of demands: When the State of Pennsylvania refused to certify Amish-produced milk unless it was stirred mechanically and refrigerated according to state health codes, the Amish installed stirring machines and refrigeration - operated by batteries or propane gas.
Amos, like many other Amish craftsmen, uses electricity in his workshop for certain tools. But the electricity does not come from public utility lines. Amos runs a diesel generator to charge a bank of 12-volt batteries. The batteries’ DC charge is then sent through a converter to create homegrown 110-volt “Amish electricity.” To generate more, he has to haul the diesel fuel in from town on his horse-drawn buggy.
To the obvious question why allow Amish electricity but not public electricity, Amos answered slowly and deliberately, “The Bible teaches us not to conform to the world, to keep a separation. Connecting to the electric lines would make too many things too easy. Pretty soon, people would start plugging in radios and televisions, and that’s like a hot line to the modern world. We use batteries and generators because you can use the batteries for only a short time and because you have to fuel and maintain the generator yourself. It’s a way of controlling our use of electricity. We try to restrict things that would lead to us losing that sense of being separate, to put the brakes on how fast we change.”
Despite the reputation today’s Amish have as old-fashioned diehards, their departure from Europe several centuries ago was driven by their success as innovators. They started out as radical religious libertarians - at a time when the price of religious radicalism was martyrdom. Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in a major religious war, but both sides took a serious dislike to these defiant theological purists, known at the time as Anabaptists, for their emphasis on adult baptism. (Today, every Amish household has a copy of MARTYRS’ MIRROR, a text of more than 1,000 pages that details the excruciating and humiliating public executions suffered by Anabaptist martyrs in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland.) The Anabaptists developed a soil technology based on crop rotation, planting clover in their pastures, and sweetening their earth with lime and gypsum; they dramatically increased the yield of their land, and some of them became wealthy.
Ironically, those same Anabaptists helped set the stage for the fast-paced changes of modern life that today’s Amish reject. It was the widespread adoption of Anabaptist practices that eventually produced enough food to free other agricultural laborers, creating the workforce that would be needed for the industrial revolution.
Toward the end of the 17th century, one of the Anabaptist leaders, Jakob Ammann, decided that his Swiss brethren had not been radical enough. Ammann and his followers, who came to be known as “Amish,” broke with traditional Anabaptists, moved to the New World, and started farming in Lancaster County in 1710.
In today’s Pennsylvania Amish country, a group of 20 to 30 families who live near one another constitute a “district.” Each district has a bishop, and the bishops get together twice a year to discuss church matters. This includes raising the recurring questions about which technologies should be permitted in the community, and which banned or regulated.
While the say of the bishops is binding, the Amish come to their decisions quite consensually. New things are not outright forbidden, nor is there a rush to judgment. Rather, technologies filter in when one of the more daring members of the community starts to use, or even purchases, something new. Then others try it. Then reports circulate about the results. What happens with daily use? Does it bring people together? Or have the opposite effect?
Despite the almost organic ebb and flow of this evaluation process, the common goal is constant submission to the judgment of one’s peers. On my visit, I was constantly struck by what seemed an alien conception of community. As a kid I was encouraged to “do my thing” while being nice to others; I’ve lived in five states and dozens of neighborhoods. Amish communities are not just tightly knit and immobile, they’re authoritarian.
Yet there is some room for disagreement; consider how the bishops judged the automobile in the 1960s. Typically, the Amish have large extended families; most have dozens of cousins within walking or buggy distance. Every other Sunday, instead of attending church, the Amish are encouraged to visit relatives and the sick. Over time, it was felt that the automobile was enlarging people’s traveling radius too far beyond their extended family, to diversions and recreations not related to the community, decreasing the social cohesion and personal connection the Amish so cherish. Some bishops accepted the use of the automobile under certain conditions, while others rejected it outright. The Amish are now split into traditional “Old Order” Amish who still stick to horse and buggy, “New Order” Amish who approve use of telephones and powered farm equipment but shun public electricity, and “Beachy Amish,” named for the ‘20s liberal leader Moses Beachy, who permit both public electricity and automobiles.
While all orders now allow diesel engines in the barn to blow silage, their use is still resisted in the fields - the bishops don’t want increased efficiency to interfere with the practice of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, working together with horse-drawn machinery and handheld implements. Notably, some Old Order Amish allow some diesel-powered equipment in the fields - if it’s hauled by animals. “Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?” is the primary question the bishops ask in considering whether to permit or put away a technology.
The bishops’ rulings can take decades. In daily life, the Amish take their directions in dress, thought, behavior, and custom from a body of unwritten but detailed rules known as the “Ordnung.” Individuals and communities maintain a separation from the world (by not connecting their houses to telephones or electricity), a closeness to one another (through regular meetings), and an attitude of humility so specific they have a name for it (“Gelassenheit”). Decisions about technology hinge on these collective criteria. If a telephone in the home interferes with face-to-face visiting, or an electrical hookup fosters unthinking dependence on the outside world, or a new pickup truck in the driveway elevates one person above his neighbors, then people start to talk about it. The talk reaches the bishops’ ears.
“The Amish employ an intuitive sense about what will build solidarity and what will pull them apart,” says Donald Kraybill, author of THE RIDDLE OF AMISH CULTURE. “You find state-of-the-art barbecues on some Amish porches. Here is a tool they see as increasing family coherence: Barbecues bring people together.” Asked what kinds of questions the bishops will likely raise about cell phones, Kraybill replies, “Are cell phones being used ‘to make a living’ or just for gossip and frivolous chatter? Will permitting cell phones lead to having phones in homes, and where will that lead ... to fax machines and the Internet?”
“We don’t want to stop progress, we just want to slow it down,” several Amish told me. Conversations about technology often turn on where to “hold the line” against the too-rapid advance of innovation. Riding in automobiles to work, but not owning them, putting telephone shanties in fields, requiring battery power instead of electrical lines are all ways of holding the line.
And clearly a lot could be learned about the Amish hold-the-line philosophy by looking at those who either crossed the line or pushed it further out. So I sought out several of the more boldly experimental members of the greater Plain community (Amish and Mennonites and other religious groups sharing a kindred commitment to plain living). In ranging from farmers who ran small enterprises in barnside sheds to well-equipped machine workshops and multimillion-dollar crafts factories, I soon was directed to Moses Smucker, who runs a harness shop in Churchtown, Pennsylvania.
Moses is an early adopter. He didn’t mind if I used his real name, a liberty that has made him the subject of a few other journalists’ stories. When I arrived at his manufacturing headquarters, I took a look at some of the harnesses on display - one of them had a price tag of $12,000. If you’ve ever seen the Budweiser Clydesdales Christmas commercials, you’ve seen harness bells from Moses Smucker’s Churchtown workshop.
In the back of the store, more than a dozen young Amish men were working at modern machinery powered by hydraulics and diesel-generated electricity. Upstairs, I saw a woman in traditional plain clothing seated in front of a personal computer.
Moses Smucker might look like Abe Lincoln, in his black suit and mustache-free beard, but he bore the same time-is-money air of any factory manager taking a few minutes out of a busy day to talk to the press. Where Amos was rough-hewn and wry, Moses seemed shrewd and slick. His office was certainly in a different century from Amos’s. An electronic rolodex and an electric calculator sat atop an old roll-top desk. I noticed a clock in the shape of a horse and buggy. The whip ticked back and forth.
“When I started this business in 1970,” Moses said, “it wasn’t accepted to have a telephone in the building, even in a business. But the telephone began to be accepted through popular disobedience. More businesses put them in and the bishops didn’t stop them.”
Will the bishops also eventually allow phones in the home? I asked.
“When the telephone first came out here, people put them in their homes,” explained Moses. “But they were party lines. One time a woman overheard two other women gossiping about her. She objected. That wasn’t what we wanted for our families or our community, so the bishops met and home telephones were banned.”
I had heard the same story from several other Amish - in fact, this story seemed to be a key part of community mythology. A writer named Diane Zimmerman Umble, who grew up in Lancaster County and had family roots in the Plain orders, traced the story to its origin, a 1986 memoir written by an Old Order Amishman born in 1897. As a graduate student, Zimmerman Umble started investigating Amish community telephones for a course on contemporary social theory, and ended up writing a book on the subject, HOLDING THE LINE: THE TELEPHONE IN OLD ORDER MENNONITE AND AMISH LIFE. Among her findings was the power of anecdote in the Amish decisionmaking process.
Anecdote, of course, is a key currency on the Internet, so I asked Moses if he’d heard stories about it. Although he used a computer in his business, he didn’t believe the Internet as currently constituted would ever be permitted. Based on anecdotal evidence, he said, “It’s too unregulated, there’s too much trash, and there’s a worry people will use it for purposes unrelated to work.”
I asked another Amish workshop owner whom I’ll call Caleb what he thought about technology. He pulled some papers out of a file cabinet, handed them to me, and said, “I share some of this fellow’s opinions,” pointing to a magazine interview with virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier. Asked for an opinion he shared with the dreadlocked-and-dashikied Jaron, he replied, “I agree with his statement that you can’t design foolproof machines, because fools are so clever.”
Caleb also discussed the Amish resistance to becoming “modern.” They’re not worried about becoming people without religion or people who use lots of technology, he explained; rather, the Amish fear assimilating the far more dangerous ideas that “progress” and new technologies are usually beneficial, that individuality is a precious value, that the goal of life is to “get ahead.” This mind-set, not specific technologies, is what the Amish most object to.
“The thing I noticed about the telephone is the way it invades who you are,” Caleb said. “We’re all losing who we are because of the telephone and other machines - not just the Amish.”
In HOLDING THE LINE, Zimmerman Umble writes: “Some Old Order people feel that relaxation of telephone rules reflects a movement toward an ‘uncontrollable drift’ which must be halted. Others see these steps as pragmatic choices necessary to hold the community together economically. The paradox in the Old Order story is that the telephone does both: It holds people together by making communication among community members possible, and it separates them from the world and from each other. The telephone is both evil and good.”
Donald Kraybill, who is also provost of Messiah College, on the outskirts of Amish country, believes taboos about telephones are “a symbolic way of keeping the technology at a distance and making it your servant, rather than the other way around.”
Can they make the cell phone a servant? My questions on this score were answered mostly with anecdote. I heard of one Amish man who was going to be late to a chiropractor appointment, so he pulled out his cell phone and called the receptionist from the bus he was on. Zimmerman Umble heard of a Plain order businessman who called his stockbroker from his company car phone, pushing three taboos at once past their boundaries.
Zimmerman Umble pointed out that part of what makes cell phones so handy - the lack of a wire - also poses a special challenge for the Amish. “In the early part of the community discussion, electrical and telephone lines carried substantial symbolic freight,” she said. The wires meant that anyone in the community could easily see who was using electricity and phones. “But now, in the absence of the line, behavior can’t be monitored in the same way. It is harder to maintain separation between home and business when you have a cell phone in your pocket. In that sense it tests the community consensus about what is allowable.”
Calling around cell phone outlets in the Lancaster area, I found a merchant who has been selling cell phones to Plain folk for years. “A great percentage of my customer base is Amish and Mennonite,” the merchant told me. “More Amish than Mennonite. We opened our cellular system 12 years ago. Within the first year, I had an Amish customer. He first called from his neighbor’s house. He owned a painting business and told me he wasn’t allowed to have a cell phone personally, but his bishop said he could buy one for his foreman to use in the company truck. It didn’t take too long before I started getting quite a lot of telephone calls from the Amish.”
This raised quite a few interesting consumer technology questions. Ordinarily, for example, one needs a credit card (and good credit) to secure a cell phone. “The Amish pay in cash,” explained the merchant, who, along with most Amish-friendly shopkeepers, didn’t want his name used. “We normally ask for a driver’s license for the purpose of identification when we activate cellular service - of course, the Amish don’t have driver’s licenses. They weren’t able to get phones for several months, since we weren’t allowed to open accounts without driver’s licenses. So we had to make a policy change to accommodate them. We ended up asking for another form of identification. But the Amish don’t believe in photography, so we couldn’t get a photo ID. Eventually we told them to get Pennsylvania state IDs without photographs.
“I’ve sold hundreds of cell phones to them, primarily business phones,” the merchant continued, adding a few details about how the phones were used. “Some Old Order Amish leave their cell phones in their shanty. Some leave the phone overnight with an English neighbor, who recharges it for them; then the Amish pick up the phone in the morning.”
It’s a pretty safe prediction that when the bishops get around to their formal ruling, cell phones will not be deemed appropriate for personal use. In the 1910s, when the telephone was only beginning to change the world at large, the Old Order Amish recognized that the caller at the other end of the line was an interloper, someone who presumed to take precedence over the family’s normal, sacred, communications. Keeping the telephone in an unheated shanty in a field, or even an outhouse, was keeping the phone in its proper place.
Though the Amish determination to allow phones at work but ban them at home might seem hard to accept, I appreciate the deliberation put into their decision. In fact, similar reflection might highlight conflicts between our own practices and values. How often do we interrupt a conversation with someone who is physically present in order to answer the telephone? Is the family meal enhanced by a beeper? Who exactly is benefiting from call waiting? Is automated voicemail a dark hint about the way our institutions value human time and life? Can pagers and cell phones that vibrate instead of ring solve the problem? Does the enjoyment of virtual communities by growing numbers of people enhance or erode citizen participation in the civic life of geographic communities?
“What does the Old Order story have to say to members of postmodern society?” asks Diane Zimmerman Umble. “The struggle of Old Order groups to mold technology in the service of community provides a provocative model of resistance for those who have come to recognize that technology brings both benefits and costs.... Their example invites reflection on a modern dilemma: how to balance the rights of the individual with the needs of the community. For them, community comes first.”
Indeed, what does one’s use of a tool say to other people, particularly loved ones, about where they stand in our priorities? In my own house, we decided to get a rollover to voicemail instead of call waiting - experiences on the receiving end of call waiting convinced us that both parties on the other end of the line get irritated when you interrupt the conversation. And I’ve come to believe that face-to-face conversation should outrank disembodied conversation via cell phone or email.
I never expected the Amish to provide precise philosophical yardsticks that could guide the use of technological power. What drew me in was their long conversation with their tools. We technology-enmeshed “English” don’t have much of this sort of discussion. And yet we’ll need many such conversations, because a modern heterogeneous society is going to have different values, different trade-offs, and different discourses. It’s time we start talking about the most important influence on our lives today.
I came away from my journey with a question to contribute to these conversations: If we decided that community came first, how would we use our tools differently?
________
Howard Rheingold (hlr@well.com) is the author of VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE VIRTUAL COMMUNITY and editor of the MILLENNIUM WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.
