Plain control freaks
I’ve been reading Plain Secrets, Joe Mackall’s account of his friendship with his Amish neighbors. Here I’d like to focus on one particular issue, namely the use of the bright orange triangle, the “slow-moving vehicle” sign, on Amish buggies. Amish life has a lot of rules, called the Ordnung, set by the church. Different churches have somewhat different rules.
Mackall’s Amish friends belong to a church that does not allow its members to put the orange triangles on their buggies. This is a serious enough matter that anyone who uses the orange triangle is excommunicated and has to join a different church. It’s serious enough that a man from the orange-triangle church can’t marry a woman from the no-orange-triangle church. (There is a parallel issue regarding lights on buggies; some Amish will use battery-powered lights, others will use kerosene lanterns. The Amish who use the kerosene lanterns tend to the be the same ones who don’t use the orange triangles.)
Meanwhile, one to the main causes of Amish mortality is… buggy accidents, typically when a fast-moving car runs into a slow-moving buggy. The Amish attitude is that the accidents are God’s will.
My view is that orange triangles should be a matter of individual choice, neither forbidden nor required by the community. I suppose that would be almost incomprehensible to the Amish. Maybe, just maybe, the church could change the orange triangles from forbidden to mandatory. After all, the church ten miles down the road did that, so it’s possible. But people thinking for themselves and making decisions on their own? First it’s orange triangles, then it’s belts instead of suspenders, and pretty soon the community falls apart.
February 1st, 2008 at 4:16 pm
I would guess that the reason orange triangles and battery powered lanterns are anathema is that they are modern. I have read, however, that some Amish have adopted cell phones (because they allow greater communication within the community). Has this caused a similar split? A second question, do the Amish abhor modern conveniences for some theological reason? Or is it simply sociological (a way to keep the Amish distinct)? And if the latter, then one can understand the objection to orange triangles and battery powered lanterns, as absurd as that may seem to us non-Amish.
February 1st, 2008 at 8:00 pm
1. Regular telephones allow just as much communication. The advantage of cell phones is that there is no wire leading into the house that the neighbors can see.
2. The stated reason is theological: the Amish want to live apart from a sinful world. Although I suppose there is not much distinction between the theological and sociological from their point of view.
February 1st, 2008 at 10:44 pm
1. Question to Dan. Is this your conclusion? Or is it from the book about the Amish? Curious. It is pretty hard to hide cell phone usage. Imagine an Amish meeting with cell phones going off playing the latest iTunes ring tones. Amish with iPhones? What a wonderful image.
2. I guess that the Amish thought the 18th (or 17th or 19th) century that they choose to adopt the technology of was less sinful than the 21st? Guess again, Amish.
February 2nd, 2008 at 8:27 am
Soooooo…..I take it the courts have carved out a religious exemption for the Amish and a few others so they don’t need to use basic safety equipment on road vehicles.
I’m curious tho: if the greatest threat to Amish lives is collisions with fast moving vehicles which the Amish have chosen to hide from, why don’t the drivers of those vehicles rightly think the Amish are deliberately posing a deadly threat to car drivers and their passengers?
Sort of like a guy who thinks he has a right to store 30 tons of dynamite in his row house in NYC so long as he doesn’t intend to detonate it there. Or our neighbor, who used to store gasoline in multiple 55 gallon drums in his yard because it was cheaper to buy by the drum.
The Amish may be committing physical threats to the neighbors by acts of ommission, while my examples are acts of commission, but the threat to other people is real in all cases. The car drivers can end up just as dead as the Amish.
February 2nd, 2008 at 9:29 am
1. The observation about cell phones is from a different book about the Amish. Cell phone usage is easy to hide. Don’t take it to church. Use it in the barn. A landline from a telephone pole to the house is visible to every buggy that drives by.
2. The issue is not technology, but involvement. Grid electricity is an ongoing relationship with the electric company, and a physical connection to the outside world. Batteries for flashlights can be bought one by one. Of course there are all sorts of slippery-slope arguments here.
3. The Amish buggies are flimsy compared to a car and they don’t have seat belts and air bags. The casualties are pretty one-sided.
4. My impression is that there is plenty of anti-Amish sentiment over things like this, but after an Amish man is fined for not having safety equipment, after he spends a few weeks in jail for not paying the fine, the authorities decide that some sort of accommodation is more practical than putting all the Amish in concentration camps.