History and Culture (continued)
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The Amish person enjoys temporary relaxation from routine, and this may be momentarily experienced when he rides in an automobile with an outsider. The destination matters a little. What matters is the excursion, the new scenery, the gratifying experience, and the exchange of words and gestures with another human being. The outsider is typically a person from “urban” world who relishes temporary relief from the complex, competitive struggle in the industrial world. For the outsider, “an Amish experience” constitutes an ahistorical moment, a moment that denies the actuality of the present; it may approximate a religious experience. For the Amish person, who is “touring” the outside world, it is a moment of illusion; it is for him a reality without community and therefore without spirit.

The Amish are intuitively aware of the danger of large-scale enterprises. Bigger machines will involve larger instruments and concentrations of economic power. They will do violence to the environment and hence conflict with the Amish feeling of closeness to the soil. Limitless technology is, for them, greed and denial of wisdom. Amish economic thinking is subjected to traditional wisdom requiring the restraint of selfishness, greed, leisure, and expansionist thinking. The ideal is not to be done with it, but to utilize it in giving every member an opportunity to develop his faculties. The future of the Amish will be determined not solely by technology, or the means to life, but by the definition they themselves give to life.

Amish communities have preserved some of the qualities the larger American society once had, and now seeks to regain: intimate family and community relationships, respect for children and grandparents, religion as a way of life, mutual help in times of crisis, the use of restraints to control the influence of technology, and a dignified way of dying without going broke.

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