Amish and Mobile Phones

In 1999, Kevin Kelly sent me to Amish country near Lancaster, PA, to investigate rumors that the famously technology-avoiding Amish were using mobile phones. What I found was a community with a sophisticated understanding of how to evaluate technologies in the context of their own values.

Look Who's Talking (Wired, 1999) 

__ 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.

In the  middle of Amish country, it occurs to me that Internet culture itself  grew out of a kind of virtual Ordnung - the norms of cooperation,  information-sharing, and netiquette taught to newbies by the first  generations of users. The celebrated "anarchy" of the early days was  possible only because of the near-universal adherence to largely  unwritten rules. But the Internet population has grown fast - so fast  that the sudden influx of tens of millions of newbies has overwhelmed  the capacity of the old-timers to pass on the Ordnung. In the process,  the Internet loses its unique hallmarks, coming to resemble and reflect  the rest of contemporary culture.

__  "Instead of a telephone shanty, some Old Order Amish leave their cell  phone overnight with an English neighbor, who recharges it." __

"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 PC.

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."

__  Is the family meal enhanced by a beeper? Who exactly benefits from call  waiting? Is automated voicemail a hint about how institutions value  human life? __

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 pissed off when you interrupt  the conversation. No matter how absorbing the flame war of the moment  might be, I make a point of suspending online communication when someone  in my presence attempts to talk with me. 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?