I’m currently reading and enjoying Running with Sherman which is a book about running with a donkey. It is as deep as it sounds. But the author lives in Amish country and he takes a little pause to share what he sees in the Amish way of life. Taking health, happiness and security as the measuring stick McDougall says what he sees.

Health & Security

The Amish don’t go hungry, homeless or broke, because they’ve created their own little semi-socialist Scandinavian paradise right in the heart of red-state America. They adopt one another’s children, care for their old folks at home, build and pay for their own schools, and take in the needy. The Amish dodged the whole subprime mortgage fiasco by avoiding banks and shady brokers, relying instead on ‘Amish Aid’ a community pot that provides loans and homeowner’s insurance. Likewise, the Amish essentially created their own universal healthcare a long time ago, paying out of pocket for medical costs and helping their neighbours cover hospital bills by raising funds through auctions, donations and sales of chicken pot pie.

p.124 (bold added)

That’s worth just reading again because the Amish are a Christian community and these values and practices are informed primarily by their faith. Through the eyes of, I think, a non-believer you read a description of something that sounds suspiciously like the early church.

But of course they come into health care with one big advantage: better health. The Amish are six times more active than the average American, and half as likely to suffer from cancer or diabetes. They don’t smoke, drink, fight, or mess with drugs. They don’t get fat (the Amish obesity rate is a nearly non-existent 4% versus almost 40% for the rest of us) or fool with guns (which kill or injure some 100,000 Americans every year)..They age gracefully, with far superior late-life mobility and overall health. The Amish rarely harm themselves, or anyone else. Their suicide rate is 70% lower than ours, and there has been exactly one Amish murder in all of American history, and that by a delusional psychotic.

p.124-125 (bold original)

McDougall points out that there decidedly old-fashioned way of life has a better retention rate than Netflix with roughly 90% of Amish adults choosing to stick with what they know. After their traditional rumspringa where Amish youngsters try the world on for size, ‘the majority decide. Meh, not so great after all.’

On adopting technology

The Amish aren’t perfect, they know it and so does McDougall and some of their decisions seem oddly anachronistic but he digs a little deeper and his observations are worth noting.

Most of us whipsaw back and forth all day, racing to save time so we can sit around and waste it. The Amish are sceptical of speed, so before accepting any new technology, they question whether it makes life better, or just go by a little faster. They don’t automatically reject new things; instead, each Amish district debates for itself whether this new thing will help them learn patience, self-control, and empathy. If not, maybe the smart play is to avoid it.

p.127 (bold added)

There is a difference he notes between ‘rules that hold you back and rules that help you grow’ and that’s a point well worth remembering. He closes the section with a memorable little anecdote worth remembering.

Amos, our closest neighbour over the hill, dropped in one evening while friends were over for dinner. “This is wine?” he asked, never having seen it before. “Can I try?” Before I could reach for the bottle, he’d filled a water glass to the brim. He drank it off like it was lemonade, then set off to walk tipsily home in the dark. “Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be having that again,” Amos told me the next day. “Not enough evenings in life to spoil another one.” The Amish aren’t closed to the world, he’s saying; they’re just a little more goal-oriented about how much of it to let in.

p.128 (bold added)

There are only so many evenings in life and we should be discerning about how much of the world we let in. Perhaps we would be wise to adopt, if not the exactly the Amish approach to life, the asking of questions around what we will adopt and what we will not.