Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
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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