The Amish Among Us
It has been a hot day in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where strangers are kind and beauty is overflowing.
A myriad of social arrangements are largely coherent from within and resistant to some amount of destabilising forces from without. As a result, a myriad of social arrangements co-exist, often with quite little regard for each other and especially in the lands brave enough to be free. Each of these societies holds on to its own peculiar set of beliefs and performances that help hold the social fabric together. These beliefs and performances tend to be quite different across the societies and, by implication, need not be true in any objective sense. It is therefore useful to be reminded of the possibility that one’s own beliefs and performances may be arbitrary whenever one encounters a society whose preoccupations strike one as quite different and rather peculiar.
The reverence that the Indiana Amish show to the customs of yore and the readiness with which the Twitter crowd pounces from one Current Thing to another must appear to be mutually incomprehensible to the respective communities. Most people may hear more about, and rally around, one group’s views (e.g., those of the Twitterati) not because this group’s views are inherently more meritorious but because these views are better heard, either because they are inherently louder or because its adherents are louder. There are quiet societies just as there are quiet souls.
Societies that thrive tend to be comprised of members who work hard, not least because hard work makes the members indispensable to each other and binds the society together. To this end, hard work is more important than productivity. Adoption of new technology, which would make everyone more productive, would only raise the bar for the profits one must collect in order to gain recognition from one’s peers.
As one traverses societies, one wonders: are eight hours spent on Twitter quite as honourable an occupation as working sixteen-hour days on the farm in scorching heat? The former sure looks much easier and less socially valuable than the latter. And yet, the former concerns with production of nonrival goods (tweets), whereas the latter deals in rival goods. Nonrival goods are potentially much more valuable due to their scalability. Similarly, an hour of work on the set of Back to the Future has quite possibly brought more joy to the world than an hour devoted to polishing a railing in someone’s summerhouse. One should be neither unduly humbled by, nor a priori disdainful of, the work people outside one’s in-group do.
Is modernity making the physical reality slowly drift away and disappear behind the horizon thanks to the steady reallocation of resources towards the creation of (nonrival) ideas and away from the production of (rival) stuff? It is probably an illusion that it does. Mass-produced physical stuff is distributed more equally and more abundantly today than ever before. One no longer needs men to man factories; shepherding men away from factory floors and farm fields and towards cubicles and open-plan offices should have no negative consequences for the bounties of physical reality. So what is this whooshing sound I hear?
Thank you kindly.
