Individuals concerned with the unprecedented changes the earth community is undergoing tend to venerate America’s Amish for their simple, earth-based lifestyle of frugality and solid commitment to caring for the other members of their community. There is much we have to learn from them, but more recently, there is yet another lesson they offer, and perhaps, not one we expected.
A Wall St. Journal article, July 1 entitled, “A bank run teaches the ‘plain people’ about the risks of modernity“, by Douglas Belkin, reports the challenges the Amish have confronted in the past decade, specifically those having to do with economic collapse. In 1993, Northern Indiana Amish established the Tri-County Land Trust, not unlike lending arrangements set up in many other Amish communities. Not insured by FDIC and based on its own bylaws, the trust now has about $40 million in assets. Until November, 2008, the land trust offered low-interest loans and provided other financial support for Amish homeowners and proprietors of small businesses. However, it suspended lending and has not yet resumed. Add to this the fact that, this past spring, the Land Trust literally had a bank run because the Amish began to experience the same consequences of economic collapse as the rest of the nation did. According to the Wall St. journal story, “…the Amish in northern Indiana edged into the conventional economy, lured by high wages of the recreational vehicle and modular home industries. And they wound up experiencing the same economic whiplash millions of other Americans did.”
As almost everyone knows, it is exceedingly challenging to sustain privately-owned family farms. The Amish did it for centuries until the latter part of the twentieth century when they began taking jobs off the farm where they made good money, but many also became seduced by consumerism. They gradually spent more money, allowed themselves some of the conveniences previously shunned in order to live more simply, and found themselves caught up in spending more money and buying things they didn’t need-things like bigger weddings, vacation homes in other states, model train and truck hobbies, and even hiring taxis to go on extended shopping trips.
You may wonder if I’m really talking about the Amish. Indeed I am.
This story hits close to home for me because my grandmother was Amish as a young child until her parents left the sect to become Mennonites. I have a number of Amish relatives and had the opportunity to visit a few last summer. In fact, I wrote an article subsequently entitled “North America’s Amish Community: Least Likely To Be Devastated By Collapse.” What I did not see at the time, certainly not among the families I visited, was the extent to which some members of the community had become seduced by the capitalist economic system.
The Tri-County Land Trust is minutes from where I grew up in Northern Indiana and very close to my home town of Elkhart which earlier this year had the highest unemployment rate in the nation. Unfortunately, that city had based its entire economy on the RV, modular home industry where it employed hundreds of Amish workers, most of whom have since been laid off. Perhaps the most noticeable difference between the Amish who lost jobs and the unemployed of the non-Amish community is that among the Amish, there is much more mutual support and a sense of caring for each other in tough economic times.
The good news in the Northern Indiana Amish community this summer is that a new back-to-basics movement appears to be flourishing. The Amish are increasing and expanding their gardens and eating less in restaurants than previously. Similarly, many Amish men have started new home businesses selling products locally and from home.
Why is any of this important? Simply because of how easy it is to become deluded by and entrapped in the values of empire. Whereas in many cases, it has been essential for Amish men or women to work outside the home in order to survive, in many cases it wasn’t-at least not if those families are committed to the values that underpin every aspect of their culture. Thus, if a culture with values of radical simplicity can be seduced by the economics of civilization, how much easier it may be for those of us who purport to deplore those economics to find ourselves repeatedly ensnared by them.
I could not help connect Belkin’s Wall St. Journal article with Nicholas Kristof’s latest New York Times article “When Our Brains Short-Circuit” which sheds even more light on this issue by noticing the extent to which the human brain “misjudges certain kinds of risks.” It appears that evolution has wired us to be alert to immediate survival risks such as snakes and nasty looking people with clubs, “but we aren’t well prepared to respond to dangers that require forethought.”
I believe that this may be a fundamental reason why we are so pathetically slow as a species to respond to the terrible consequences of Peak Oil and climate change-and, why we are so easily enticed into civilization’s consensus trance.
Kristof suggests that even as we acknowledge our “neurological shortcomings”, we can compensate by strengthening our rational analysis, that is to say, critical thinking or “the head” in the Transition Town model of head, heart, and hands. In addition, I would argue that a shift in human consciousness (heart) is likely to be one of the most profound results of civilization’s collapse, and may, in fact, engender a quantum leap in the evolution of the human brain. Likewise, the challenges of reskilling or learning new/old skills (hands), rather than moving us backward in the evolutionary process, are likely to enhance the development of both reason and consciousness.
Indeed the Amish have a treasure trove of values and skills to teach us, as well as the reality of our common humanity and how an economy based on cheap fossil fuel, rampant technology, debt, speed, consumerism, and so-called “progress” damages and deceives us into betraying our essential nature. Or as one Amish man comments on the need to return to basics: “We were all going way too fast. This has made everybody stop and realize we’re just pilgrims here…”
