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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've lived and worked around Amish and Mennonite communities my entire life. I admire their lifestyle, their community, and their philosophy. I think the world has a lot to learn from the Amish, especially in terms of the communal decision to adopt technological standards. I buy my produce from Amish farms whenever possible, I have worked alongside Mennonite contractors, I grew up around scoutmasters and farmers and distant uncles with PA dutch accents, I would guess that my interactions with Amish-and-adjacent folks is probably top-5 on this forum at the very least. I know and admire the hell out of the Amish, I highly recommend Knock's essay Utopia in Pennsylvania. That said, the refutation to the Amish question is pretty thorough and not particularly difficult:
They're essentially parasitic on the USA. The Amish have no defense policy, they don't even really have a police force or a court system. They rely on the English for any of those things when they become necessary. Their safety from external threats is entirely dependent on the broader American nation. It's not really a scalable solution. Somebody needs to do all the things that allow the systems to exist by which Amish communities are protected, allowed to function.
As a comparison they suffer from the Private School problem: private schools can expel students more or less at will for behavioral problems, while public schools have to educate every student. Amish communities don't have lots of drug use because if you start using drugs, you're cruisin' for a shunning. Assuming that the kind of person who wants to do drugs wouldn't simply leave the Amish community of his own accord. If you allowed any town to simply exile anyone who refuses to obey social rules, the statistical outcomes for the remaining residents would improve.
The whole theological concept of Anabaptism is built on the core idea of informed adult choice, they reject infant baptism because they believe that people should choose to enter the faith in a fully informed way. All Amish have total free choice to stay or leave at any time, the only thing holding them there is social pressure. Statistics show that between 90-97% of Amish kids return from Rumspringa and join the church. ((I haven't dug into the statistics deeply, but I'm told that the stricter the community the more kids tend to leave permanently)) Imagine what NYC or SF or Seattle or your nightmare modern progressive hell-hole of choice would look like, if the bottom 3-10% of worst-behaved least socially adapted kids just left town at age 18 and never came back. Short of a federal prison, if you took the 3-10% of people who were most prone to choose something other than a peaceful happy life, whether in a slothful or a Faustian fashion, and removed them from the population, you would see massive improvements. Being Amish isn't just a status one is born into, it is also a set of choices one has made. If you narrowed the subset of the population in your statistics to people who have chosen to remain in the religion of their forebears, chosen to remain in their hometown, gotten married and had kids, had solid employment, I would bet the statistical gap narrows significantly.
@f3zinker 's frank The Grand Inquisitor style elitism is probably not all that uncommon. Yes, all these things might be bad for the population but not for me. This is visible in the fact that there are very few converts. While it would be difficult to enter some of the more strictly closed communities, there are Mennonite churches where outsiders are welcome to worship, and over time if one bought a nearby farm converts are welcomed to join the community over time if they show good faith. We don't see that happening at scale. People, who have the option to live this way, mostly don't.
From a progressive perspective: what about the oppressed within Amish communities? I've never met a gay affirming Amish community, though they'll deign to sell a gay couple some pies or quilts they're not about that kind of life. So what's a gay amish kid to do? The Amish are a community founded on religious dissent, but how does the religious dissenter fare? Where does the beaten Amish wife flee? Amish life is a mold by which most people who fit can be made happy, but some people by bad luck will not fit. What do they do? Where do they go? Well the answer in a world where the Amish community is parasitic upon the English community is: they leave the Amish. In an Amish world, that question may be more difficult to answer.
On 1) this is quite literally the historical default relationship between peasant communities and their lords. Peasants pay taxes, generally don’t have much say in the decisions of the lords but are entitled to protection and a certain amount of justice enforcement, and the two otherwise mostly ignore each other. This isn’t parasitism, and it also isn’t an argument against a 90% Amish country either- a country that’s 90% Amish and 10% modern American could in theory survive and still protect the Amish and enforce justice- although it would take heavy conscription from that 10% to fill the ranks of the military and police. That arrangement is the historical default of governance(although probably cushier for both sides).
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The Amish are not parasitic for the simple reason that they pay more than they take out. This makes them less parasitic than other groups. They pay taxes, except social security, because they do their own thing for that, and they pool money for healthcare expenditures. They don’t really need roads in perfect conditions, they don’t spend a lot of time in jails, they don’t require a lot of policing, they don’t go into troublesome college debt, etc. They have solved the criminality problem without need for the military or police. And what makes them much less parasitic than normal American culture is that they don’t wastefully spend resources on fleeting pleasures. When a normal American makes a lot of money they might waste that money for their own pleasure; when an Amish makes a lot of money more of it goes into their community because they don’t do a lot of consumerism or debauchery.
The military point misses something important. There’s something called IW alternative service where conscientious observers aid the country in non-violent ways and the Amish used this during the Korean/Vietnam war. So the labor they would have spent as soldiers may be spent as factory workers. The economy does not stop when war occurs, even the deadliest wars need people to work factories, which the Amish work without committing to crimes or vice — possibly the best possible factory worker profile.
I found this study on Amish criminality and genetic selection . It argues that the Amish criminality rate is too low to be explained purely by criminal gene outflow and that there is also an element of cultural transmission. Another way we can measure this (which I don’t think has been done) is to search for homicide offenders in Ohio and filter for Amish-associated first and last names, as well as birthplace location. My intuition is that there are not a lot of formerly Amish homicide offenders.
Note that the question of gene outflow must answer to how America receives criminals. The Amish ostracize their criminals; were they the only people in America, the ostracized criminals would have to live in a makeshift criminal colony far away from Amish areas. If America lacks a solution to criminality like the Amish solution, that’s not an Amish problem, that’s again an America problem.
This is entirely explained by the lack of knowledge about Amish QoL. People don’t move to countries without knowing the job market and quality of life, neither do they buy kale without information about its health benefits. The average American might find the Amish quaint and cute, but they absolutely do not know how successful they are in terms of generating a high quality of life. (I, a 99th percentile Amish aficionado, was myself greatly surprised when I began checking all the metrics of Amish QoL. For instance, that the women are quite happy, feminism not included.)
Re: 5, I imagine the gay Amish can’t have sex and instead have to rely on loving platonic friendships with their male friends. Even so, we can imagine an Amish possible world where the gays get to form couples. My post is not intended to imply “let’s copy Amish 100%”, but rather to imply that all of our social progress since 1710 has not allowed us to live as good as our friends stuck in the past. In fact, it makes us and our progress-worshipping seem pretty silly and backwards. How much money and talent has been wasted on feminism when this does not appear to be a requirement for female happiness?
if population density was allowing it, but if not, they would pretty soon get the need to have a prison system.
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Yes but who's really 'full Amish'? Many Amish (and similar communities like Hutterites) won't forgo obvious modern medical treatment, they won't starve themselves if a harvest fails to yield, and they share all of the other benefits of living in a modern society, like a police force etc. Of course some are more adherent to the lifestyle than others, but when crisis strikes all bets are off...
More power to them of course, but they're enjoying the benefits of the wider organized society.
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I think I am a social progressive by virtue of being a libertarian? In that I know X,Y,Z is good for the individual and society and yada yada, but the state shouldn't stop you from doing !X,!Y,!Z either. Or do I actually have to believe X,Y,Z is bad and actively oppose them?
Anyways, because I am not average. Whats good for the 100 IQ bugman isn't good for me. I can handle more freedoms. You can make cheating on your partner the most socially acceptable thing in the world, and I still wouldn't do it. You can hand out heroin like candy at the grocery store, I won' t take it.
I greatly enjoy large cities with cuisines from all over the world, with things to do, and places to be. I enjoy my career in Machine Learning and not buggy making or quilting or marmalade making. You get the point.
Why do you expect people to hold policy positions they themselves as individuals don't want?
I know this doesn't answer your question, but there is no "minimize all types of errors and maximize all the metrics" ideology out there. You actually have to pick and choose your metrics, and choose the distributions. Its all aesthetics anyways.
I wonder what % happiness increase is due to eating ethnic food. I can’t imagine it ever being a prescription for depression (“patient is to the one plate of Chinese, two plates Indian, and one Cambodian weekly”). If ethnic food and the big city were instrumental to happiness we should see young urban white collar people in cities happier. My intuition is they are not, at least not in such a way that is expected given their social status. There’s probably a study on that but I’m too lazy to look right now.
Does the patient want to swallow the bitter medicine because he enjoys the taste or because he knows the results are superior? So it would be for the Amish. Consider: by raising your kids Amish you are vastly decreasing their risk of depression, suicide, drug use, and violence.
No, I'm not. My life expectancy, suicide likelihood, and propensity for violence are all far, far below both the general population and the Amish. I'm also much richer and simply prefer my lifestyle to either the general population or the Amish. Shifting from being an addled junkie or criminal lowlife to being Amish would be an improvement on these metrics, moving from my own life to Amish would not be.
This is the same kind of silly stuff that makes people say that owning a firearm makes you more likely to commit suicide. No, I actually know myself, and I simply won't kill myself. I understand the objections to this and they are simply wrong in my individual case.
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No I am not! That's my whole point. What works on aggregate populations doesn't necessarily mean it works for the non average.
My kids are not going to be average. They will most likely inherit my +2sd IQ and >90th percentile trait openness and <20th percentile trait neuroticism. Subjecting them to the Amish life would be abuse.
I can also vastly decrease all the problems you discuss by not giving them a smartphone till they are pre-teens, making them play sports and feeding them good food, etc, etc.
If you don't understand the notion that you can't craft individual prescriptions from group aggregates, I don't really know what to tell you. You are also maximizing the likelihood without the conditional priors.
Also if those things are the only things you want to optimize for, then sure go Amish and argue for it. But I think having Internet, supply chains, cars, airplanes, and technology is also something to optimize for.
I will go as far as to say, optimizing for all things considered, cities are probably the best place to live. Especially if you are high performing and highly agentic. You can have all the things the Amish have and a thousand more things. The high performance and highly agentic part is load bearing though. Not all people fit into that category, but I am not them, and don't care for them.
I’m not sure if you can craft any advice for outlier cases, but as someone so preternaturally predestined for success as yourself, you would have to compare to the most successful Amish lifestyle. This would include:
Overseeing a huge tourism industry, one of rhe largest Amish businesses, or even directing the Amish to a new industry
Acting as an elder to your clan, advising their political and social concerns with loving patriarchal tenderness
The formation of a dynasty, which you oversee like a medieval King, sending your Sons to various parts of America to operate and enhance your family name
It is not without its own glories and rewards.
I don't think I am that successful yet but I do think I can't thrive to the extent I can in a city in an Amish community. Do note that doing many of the things you suggested, they wouldn't remain Amish for long.
The Amish can greatly increase their yields using modern farming equipment...
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This is like the advice to not own guns because you'd be decreasing the odds of encountering gun violence. The effect of following such advice is vastly decreased if you're already the kind of person who would follow such advice.
Besides, I can also reduce all risks my children would face to 0 by not having them. This is an exaggeration, but in my (admittedly very distanced) view Amish exist more so than live. Even the context they're mostly discussed in betrays that - that their largest/only advantage is their demographics, not their lifestyle but its robustness. I'm reminded of the "roaches will survive a nuclear war" factoid - sure, but that doesn't endear me to be a roach. They may have their simple joys but they're way too simple for me.
If you mean, “the kind of person who follows advice regarding raising children well will already reduce all problems in their children such that their QoL indicators are as optimal as the most optimal community in America”, that is so unevidenced as to constitute magical thinking. It’s not as if children of the upper class stave off all depression, drug use, etc in their children. Or parents who read parenting guides. I know children of upper class who have had such problems. Jeeze, my (randomly assorted) first roommate in college was a literal heroin addict yet from a 0.01% income household. And if we are comparing top 5% normal households to top 50% Amish, that’s also a bit silly because even though there is less Amish stratification there is still going to be differences in QoL according to income.
If this were so we would we see more suicides, at the very least depression, and we would see a high amount of leavers during mandatory Rumspringa. They haven’t exactly built a Berlin Wall around Berlin, Ohio.
Without commentary on the Amish specifically, this isn't true. Animals don't really kill themselves much. Lacking introspection is a good start for not killing yourself.
Certainly the quality of living well would protect against the desire to cease living. This is historically considered one of the benefits of introspective philosophy, and IIRC there’s even a study showing that reading philosophy leads to a happier old age. If your introspection leads to a desire to stop living, that means you are neither living well nor introspecting well.
As for whether the Amish lack introspection, I’m pretty sure they have a practice of introspecting their sins.
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Probably that it's not super relevant to other groups, like noticing that Bhutan is doing well on some indicators. It's not like either joining the Amish or replicating their community structure is a real possibility for most people at this point.
It’s not a feasible possibility in the short term, but there’s no reason to assume it isn’t feasible in the longterm. If Real Progress actually consists in going back to an ananaptist 1710 and incorporating such things into modern life, that’s important to know for policy prescriptions, voting preferences, and political theory. I mean, otherwise we don’t really care about progress (making human life better), right?
Everyone would have to do it all at once or the Amish are going to get crushed by people who retain modern technology. It's not stable for some people to retain modernity and some to go without.
Uh, then how have the Amish managed to survive so far?
A relatively tiny enclave of Amish can survive and keep their ways of living under the protection of a country like USA. Perhaps a relatively tiny country like the Switzerland or Monaco could survive being Amish while living under the protection of modern EU (and USA). Can anyone bigger do it and not become thirdworldized? Doubt.
A couple of points. First, although I suppose it wasn’t clear, I was responding to RandomRanger’s last sentence, which I do think is wrong. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a group that is more stable than the Amish, even though they have opted to go without modernity to some extent (the extent varies by Gemeinde).
Secondly, going back to coffee_enjoyer’s comment, I didn’t take him to be saying that we would need to adopt the Amish life wholesale, but instead that we could carefully pick and choose which parts we wanted to adopt (“incorporating such things into modern life”), just as the Amish carefully decide which parts of modernity they want to adopt. Some kind of synthesis between the two cultures would probably be a net gain over the current state of the modern West. If nothing else, I think the average modern person would benefit massively from the strong sense of community that the Amish have.
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My understanding of the progressive position is that it isn't necessarily the case that the same social constraints will make different groups happy, hence the stuff about "white culture" like following strict schedules and reading a lot or whatever the things were, and that it isn't necessarily a good idea to pick the most stable happiness producing white Christian social system and try to get everyone else to progress towards it. Hence, tossed salad theory replacing melting pot theory.
That doesn't seem completely unlikely. I'm basically willing to believe that different groups have slightly differentiated teloi. I realize that isn't necessarily compatible with Disparate Impact, but I would also strongly prefer a telos oriented way of thinking about social groups to an Equity based one. Everyone knows it's silly to ask why Amish aren't producing their fair share of programmers, and I would prefer a world where we talked less about demographically proportionate FAANG jobs, and more about who the best adjusted, happiest, best liked members of a given group are, and how to get more of that.
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While I am not a progressive, I kind of suppose that they'd start with the same answer I would - neither of us wants to be Amish, so it doesn't really matter if some Amish outcomes are quite good. At most, one could learn a couple lessons, but if you're not actually willing to replicate the lifestyle those are going to be limited.
My other answer is going to hinge on this:
I would recommend that everyone do the same. When it comes to health outcomes, I would want to start with just moving around more before I gave much consideration to wearing old-timey clothes, growing a beard, and scrapping electric. I would expect marriage and community to be incredibly helpful as well, but from an individual perspective, my suggestion would be to just go ahead and start moving around more and see where you wind up. If you pick a decent movement-based hobby, you're apt to discover some community and improve your marriageability along the way anyhow.
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They’d probably argue that the aspects of Amish society that work (being out in nature, strong multigenerational families living in close proximity, interactions with friends and neighbors, walking instead of driving everywhere, community responsibility, recycling and reuse instead of buying more stuff that gets dumped in landfill) are progressive goals against the impersonal urban capitalist wage slave nuclear family that they hate.
Amish are far group for libs, they may not like aspects of the trad lifestyle but there are a lot of things they’d at least conversationally agree with.
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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.
What if those aren't really what make the Amish special, and you've invested all that energy, but your daughter turns out to be Aella, or the lady who wrote Quivering Daughters, or Samantha? It's not like traditional, strict, "umbrella of protection" patriarchal Protestantism has not been tried recently.
I mean, to be clear, quiverfullism was very much a fad in fundamentalist Protestantism and isn’t necessarily a better representation than the Amish. Most Protestants who agree with the core theological points don’t identify as quiverfull- iirc the duggars fall into the category of being quiverfull in belief and practice but strongly disidentifying with the movement.
I suspect that you’d need need to compare proxies and/or better organized representative groups to get data on the fundamentalist Christian lifestyle. Last time I saw any data on religious stay at home moms with 5+ children they were extremely happy and reported a high percent of their children in the same denomination. Selection effects galore, obviously, but the same can be said for self-described quiverfulls.
Sure, I suppose I was mostly responding to the first two items on the list being "patriarchy, gender norms." I grew up in a conservative homeschooling community, and the families that were more serious about patriarchy and gender norms (also very heavy on "cheerful obedience") than about the other items experienced some poor results. The families that were more serious about the exposure to nature part through small agricultural operations run by the mother and children generally seemed happier.
I can believe that- I live in a conservative homeschooling community- although I’m curious what you mean by ‘other items’.
So I guess looking at Coffee Enjoyer's list:
media restrictions -- common and generally seems like a good idea. Even secular academics like Jonathan Haidt are now advocating for this. I'm unsure how much I want to apply it personally, though -- so far very little.
simplicity -- I'm not sure that I've seen this seriously attempted, or what exactly it means in most contexts. For instance, look at a grown up homeschooler Paula at the Cottage Fairy Youtube channel. In general, I like her, and she likes to talk a lot about simplifying her life and home, and about "simple living," but actually, she's always buying craft kits off of Etsy, filming complex shots from multiple angles, moving her artwork around, and dusting the bundles of dried herbs artfully decorating her wall space. I sort of get what she means (contrasted with a complex social and work life in a city, more or less), but also somewhat don't (contrasted with playing DnD with friends once a week in the city? Going to bars? I'm not actually completely sure) People in Bronte novels sometimes advocated for it seriously, and they seemed to mean only owning three dresses, all of them grey, keeping one's hair in the same basic bun every day, without curls or lace, and only leaving the house to go to church. This has been found undesirable and left untried in my circles.
social competition predicated on virtue -- I'm not very clear on this one, either. It seems to depend somewhat on the virtues that are most focused on. The people I most genuinely respect seem to be the "beauty will save the world" sorts. The ones who were eventually disgraced, their daughters prostitutes, their wives divorced, focused very hard on controlling other people in their household, to get them to act virtuous for social credit. Mostly, the men seemed fine and stable, but often boring and bored. There were a few years where several of them got really into Wild At Heart, with not only book studies and conferences, but also a salmon fishing trip and beating on drums in the forest. Our church bought the pastor a claymore sword. The men occasionally got a beer together, despite mostly not drinking. It seemed interesting sociologically, related to contemporary alienation. Several of these men worked a engineers at a missile company, and came home every night to their two to six basically fine children and an expectation to "give everything to God," but it's still important to provide for the children, so nothing too wild is on the table, really.
emphasis on tradition -- I suppose that the people I grew up with were mostly in the American Evangelical tradition, where it is traditional to talk a lot about the unimportance of following traditions of man, and then there are traditions like giving testimonies and going on mission trips. I did traditional to my family things like reading George MacDonald and complaining about Calvinism. Then I was Orthodox, so of course there are general traditions, much talk about Tradition vs traditions, and some people went around checking out the different cultural traditions and cobbling things together. This is all a worthy project, but fairly complex in America, in a way I don't think Coffee Enjoyer is representing realistically.
I mean, given what you’ve listed, emphasis on patriarchy and gender norms sounds like the norm and more emphasis sounds like an obsession that probably betrays mental illness or an unstable personality.
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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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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.
For that matter, have you considered that The Motte is a poor man's substitute for whatever the Amish are doing? Have you considered joining them yourself? I hope you don't look at this as a sneer; I am asking in the hopes that you can potentially see the barriers or incentives to not join the Amish. Maybe one of them is that they would probably be pretty reluctant to let an outsider like you in.
Government initiatives seem to be pretty poor at getting people to make lifestyle changes. You can throw all the government initiatives you like at the obesity problem, with nothing to show for it.
Do I think I would be happy adjusting to an Amish life? Insofar as the adjustment is gradual, yes (any “clean break” from one life to another is extremely painful). Would I, if given the opportunity? My hesitancy would be that I’m forbidden from reading all day; I don’t want to give this up because I think it can actually promote greater happiness (for instance, the very question of why the Amish are happier may be verboten among the Amish, involving an atheistic framework). For that reason I would probably not join an Amish-like group, even if permitted to; but if I felt like I had done all the reading and sensemaking that I could already, then I would probably try to join.
There are also two significant problems with the Amish that are unrelated to their happiness: lack of military defense and scientific development. If those could be secured, it would be hard not to call the society perfect. I do think there are ways to incorporate Amish lifestyle without sacrificing defense or science. I don’t think they are fully mutually exclusive.
As for why Amish don’t recruit outsiders, it makes a bit of sense, they appear to be preoccupied at all times and have lots of kids. I don’t think this really affects the question though; even if Amish hated outsiders out of racism, we can imagine a non-racist Amish possible world.
So your idea is that Amish life is better than the median American life, but not the best lifestyle possible? Why not do government initiatives for something that doesn't self cripple by forbidding modern technology use (like tractors)? Maybe a government initiative for Motteposting.
I think the fact that they don't use anything invented in the last 200 years is also a significant problem with the Amish. America is America because of its tremendous industry. Amish people have their niche in this, but it would not bode well for the country if everyone was Amish.
No doubt another reason the Amish doesn't recruit outsiders is because no outsiders are interested. You have to be born into it to even want it in the first place. If that's not rational, then I'm sorry, because humans aren't rational (excepting us rationalists, who are very rational).
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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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This would seem like a question not only for progressives but pretty much every other ideology in society as well, considering that approximately none of them are striving to replicate the Amish lifestyle, and whatever back-to-landers there are tend to be eclectic enough to not fall into readymade progressive-conservative categories.
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Accuse them of not providing honest data, or of being too brainwashed to meaningfully answer relevant questions, or of the data being somehow low-quality?
Or bite the bullet, admit that they're better on those metrics, but stand fast and declare that it's not worth the restrictive gender roles and religious indoctrination.
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