AlieNation: Installment 11

"Our fear of collective values, practices, and systems of justice is the same fear that keeps us beholden to political and economic systems that are deeply harmful to most people . . . "

Chapter Eight

I need to back up in time. Some other important things were happening just before and during my pregnancy and the birth of my first daughter.

One afternoon in late October, just a couple of weeks before the mill was scheduled to close for the winter, I was sitting with my feet up next to the wood-fired pot-belly stove in the mill’s office reading. No one had been in the mill all day because it was a weekday and cold and pouring down rain. I’d finished all my work and, due to my pregnancy, was happy to get off my feet for a bit before closing time.

Over the sound of rain drumming on the roof and slashing against the windows, I thought I heard a different sound in the cobblestone breezeway, a covered area next to a wide sliding door we always kept open during working hours where, in the old days, horse-drawn wagons would have pulled up with their loads of grain. I left my cozy spot and walked out to the sliding door and there was a man tying up his horse. I wasn’t sure what to do. We didn’t allow traffic – including horse traffic – in the breezeway, but the rain was unrelenting and the hitching posts we provided for Amish visitors to tie up their horses were exposed to the weather and several hundred feet away. The breezeway was maybe four feet below the loading dock where I was standing and, when the man saw me there, he easily leapt onto the dock and took off his hat for a moment to shake off the water, then crammed it back on his head. He smiled shyly but seemed confident of his welcome, moved past me into the mill. He introduced himself as Daniel Yoder, said he’d been working a construction job nearby and had to quit due to the weather. He’d always wanted to see Bonneyville, had never been even though he lived less than eight miles away, and so he’d ridden his horse down.

It was a little strange. It is fairly rare to see Amish riding horses which are trained primarily for pulling buggies. Why hadn’t he brought the buggy? I’m also pretty sure I had never seen an Amish person alone before, which made me wonder about the job he was working on and what had happened to the rest of the crew. Still, I offered to show him around as I would have for any other visitor and he followed me down to the basement to start the tour at the turbine wells. Through my descriptions, demonstrating the grinding stones, climbing the stairs to see the upper stories, he remained attentive but said very little. I provided lots of openings for questions or for him to share something related, but he had nothing to add. We returned to the main floor just as Max was coming in from whatever he had been doing outside and he and Daniel traded introductions and then dove into an animated conversation. It was only then that I realized why Daniel hadn’t communicated much with me, a woman.

I learned the story about Daniel from Max afterwards. He was doing construction work by necessity, but his main interest was to find a way to make his small farm economically sustainable. He described the challenge for Amish farmers whose properties were often divided among the children of their large families, the plots getting smaller and smaller and providing less and less opportunity for support. At the same time, many Amish farmers, and Daniel in particular, were deeply concerned about the community losing its connection to the land, the exigency (and desire) of younger members to leave the land for cash work in factories, on construction crews, and in trades. But Daniel had a plan. He was convinced that organic crops could save Amish farms. Vegetables grown intensively and with the higher returns of organic prices could make those smaller plots profitable while fulfilling the call to stewardship so important to Amish religion and culture. We didn’t, at the time, know where Daniel’s ideas were coming from, only later learning of several books and pamphlets written by primarily Amish or former Amish farmers, mostly in Pennsylvania, on this topic. Regardless, Daniel had already begun to put his plan into motion. In his search for potential organic markets, he had contacted the only food co-op he had somehow learned about, in Ann Arbor, MI. We, of course, knew exactly how far away Ann Arbor was and were a bit surprised to discover that the “co-op hippies”, as Daniel called them, were exhilarated to hear from him and assured him they would have no trouble driving down to pick up any produce the community could provide.

Ironically, Daniel’s plan was not dissimilar from our own. While I was still in college, we’d casually begun to look for a small plot of land to purchase. At that time, before the Internet, extensive listings of property for sale, mostly local but covering neighboring states as well, could be found in a regional farm newspaper called The Farmer’s Exchange. We’d followed up on a couple of listings, even bidding once at an auction, and finally found a 4-acre plot, with a 1903 farmhouse and large glazed-brick barn, located right on the edge of our own town. All of his life, Max had maintained a close relationship with a great aunt, his mother’s mother’s sister. Aunt Mae and her husband had never had kids and Max’s mom was her favorite among her three siblings’ offspring. When I knew her, Mae had been a widow for more than a decade. She and her husband had both worked their entire careers at a metal stamping factory where her husband’s specialty was the metal plating process. He’d used his skills on the side to upgrade antiques, adding fresh plating to lamps and housewares and toys and furniture, and had also employed the toxic brew used in the process as a potion to end his life. It was a gruesome story and provided some perspective on the kind of life Mae must have led as the wife of a troubled and sometimes violent man (he’d apparently once threatened her with a shotgun and she’d had to hide in the barn until Max’s dad happened to stop by and rescued her). In the same way that her demeanor gave no indication of her personal history, her tiny apartment and frugal lifestyle camouflaged the fact that the antiques she and Ray had sold over the years had made her a relatively wealthy woman. When Max told her about the little farm we’d found, mentioned the cost ($39,000, which would be about $175,000 today), she took out her checkbook. We paid her back, and then her estate after she died in 1984, just a month before our daughter was born (Max’s mom was the beneficiary) $100 per month, no interest.

When Daniel Yoder came to the mill that day, we’d owned our farm for almost five years. We’d planted huge gardens each year, put in blueberries, raspberries, grapes, and a couple of fruit trees, filled basement shelves with jars of homegrown tomatoes, beans, pickles, beets, jams and jellies I’d learned to can from my mother-in-law, and a chest freezer with corn, peas, spinach and various fruits we bought in quantity. Occasionally, I’d washed and packaged extra produce and dropped it off in the cooler at the food co-op in town, one that Daniel Yoder hadn’t yet learned existed and was more than 100 miles closer than the co-op in Ann Arbor.

Daniel told Max that they’d formed a group of interested farmers and invited him to come to a meeting. He gave him the date and the address of the next gathering and Max said he would come. I was to understand that I wasn’t invited.

I don’t know how many meetings Max attended before I couldn’t stand it anymore. Why couldn’t I come, I wanted to know. Max said it was the way the Amish did things, that decisions were made by the men. He suggested that I’d be bored, that I’d feel uncomfortable, intimated that I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to contribute, didn’t have enough experience. He may have believed that he fit in due to his own Anabaptist background (his father was Church of the Brethren and his aunts still wore dark dresses and head coverings, only a few decades removed from horse farming and transportation, and still committed to a simple lifestyle.) He may not have said it aloud, but I interpreted his resistance as embarrassment. He thought I couldn’t adapt myself to the rules, couldn’t be as invisible or as quiet or as compliant as I needed to be. I heard, even if he didn’t have to say it, that I was too much. Some of that had to do with La Leche League. Our daughter had been born the spring after that initial meeting with Daniel. Though Max wasn’t opposed to breastfeeding, he couldn’t quite see my enthusiasm for the women I’d met, the meetings I was attending. He also worried that I was spoiling our daughter, was suspicious of the group’s influence on me. I don’t think he liked how infant care dominated my attention, my body. I think, in his mind, I had meetings he wasn’t allowed to go to and so this was only fair. The things he said, and the things he didn’t say and probably had no capacity to own up to, made me even more determined. Besides, he already had a job (I’d quit Bonneyville when our daughter was born). If anyone in this family was going to be a farmer, it would be me.

So, I said, there are no women there? Well, he had to admit, the women were there. They mostly stayed in the kitchen, didn’t sit down at the table where the men were meeting. Okay, I said. I’ll stay in the kitchen.

Maybe it would have been different if I hadn’t arrived with a baby in my arms.

The first meeting I attended was at a farm in Bronson, MI, about 45 miles away. We were a little late – it was hard to find – and when we arrived, the men were already seated on long benches at the huge table. Max was right, the women were mostly milling about in or near the kitchen but, when we walked in, space was immediately made for both of us at the table and I was herded into a spot on the end of the bench. That was the first lesson that the Amish don’t expect English (us) to act like them. I’d barely settled in place when multiple arms were reaching to take the baby from me. I wasn’t sure how to respond. Hardly anyone besides me ever held her. I wasn’t sure how she’d respond. I must have hesitated because the several women who had approached stepped right back, the smiles on their faces growing even wider. I guess I’d passed the first test.

I remember almost nothing about the meeting conversation, but I remember the talk afterwards. Talk, talk, and more talk. I’m sure it was well after midnight when we finally left. The women wanted to know everything. Had I had her ‘natural?’ How was breastfeeding going? Did I stay at home with her? Was I planning to have more children? Everyone got a chance to hold her then – she’d always been a night owl – and gushed about her fat cheeks and her soft hair and her delighted smile. “So healthy,” they kept saying. “So happy.” It’s amazing how much you can learn about people and their values by the way they respond to babies.

In some ways, Max’s fears were not completely unfounded. My presence did change the growers’ meetings. I’m not speaking from a place of ego, just substance. At the very next meeting, held in Daniel’s ‘neighborhood’ where pretty much all of the eventual participants would be from, the women all sat down at the table. By the following spring, when planting would begin, it was clear that most of the initial growing would actually happen in the gardens, areas where the women were primarily responsible. Some of the men were not quite ready to commit actual farmland to the venture. Some were not yet willing, or didn’t have enough land, to give up on field crops like hay and corn that were used to feed their livestock. The garden areas seemed achievable. They could either devote space to producing a few select crops or expand a bit for some commercial growing in addition to the vegetables they were already raising for their families. Some men probably wanted to see how it would go, let any initial failures fall on the shoulders of their wives. A couple had a bit of trouble with the organic concept, though we hadn’t made that part of things official with written standards and inspections – that would come a bit later. One farmer was actually a dealer of a product that was touted as being organic, and that many of the farmers in the neighborhood relied on, but contained urea formaldehyde, a synthetic nitrogen source and thus not organic. With the strong urging of his wife, he agreed to let her grow her garden without it, but he refused to stop using it in the field (he eventually did.)

Over that winter, the topic of markets was on everyone’s minds. Could they rely on the Ann Arbor hippies? Where else could they sell organic produce and receive the premium price Daniel had promised? The area offered numerous sale barns and produce auctions but they were notorious for lowballing farmers and often refusing their products during the peak of the season due to glut. I had to smile to myself, remembering Max’s feeling of special attention being invited to the grower meetings. I knew clearly by then that when Amish see English, they are pretty much always thinking “transportation.” Still, that was fine with me. I offered to speak with the managers at the food co-op in our town and the idea was enthusiastically received.

The next day I stopped in at the co-op to speak to our very own “co-op hippie” manager. He started laughing the minute I described why I was there. He’d just heard earlier that week that the co-op in a neighboring town was closing and he’d been debating whether he should try to get some of their equipment. He knew they had a produce cooler and he promised to call about it as soon as our conversation was over. We talked for a while about where an 8-foot produce cooler would fit in the crowded space, what else we might need for a full-blown produce department. As I was leaving he called out, “And I guess you have a new job.” I frowned and he laughed again. “I just hired you as the new produce manager.” I did that job for 11 years.

Over the next seven or eight years, and for no less than six months of the year, our rounds of Amish farms to pick up produce for the co-op – sometimes as often as three times a week during the peak of the growing season – dominated our family life. When Max got home from work, we’d head out, our family packed into the cab of our pickup truck, visiting all the farms in the network that had something to send, stopping first at the farm everyone agreed they would get their messages to. Our farm had a walk-in cooler so we’d store the produce overnight and then the kids and I would do any necessary prep and make a trip to the co-op in the morning. Max would often stop by the co-op on the way home from work to compose a list of whatever had sold that day and what would need to be restocked.

Some farms were a quick stop and load, others we had trouble getting away from. My children knew every farmer, which kids might have time to play, which farms had new baby ducks or maybe a cow they could help milk, a dog that bit. For me, it never really got old though I wasn’t completely disappointed when the network expanded into larger markets such as Whole Foods and produce got dropped off at our co-op as part of the hired delivery service the farmers contracted with. The pick-ups gave me a chance to see the gardens and fields, talk to farmers about what was coming next, what they might be planting for fall. Every farm had its own character, every farmer his or her aptitudes and quirks.

Still, I think I loved the late-winter planning sessions the most, when everyone would sit down together to talk about vegetable farming, what had done well last year, what they wanted to test out next year. We tried to plan well so that everyone could grow what they wanted to and we’d have the right amount of everything. Wilma (Roy) Miller, whose husband had been the one to resist giving up his fertilizer, grew amazing sweet corn. Lizzie (Franz) Bontrager grew a white variety of sweet potatoes that had been handed down in her family and that sometimes got too big to be entirely practical. Martha (Ernie) Slabach specialized in lettuce varieties, grew several heirloom types of what she called “deer tongue” that were speckled with shades of purple and green like a Jackson Pollock painting. Nobody had ever grown anything but English peas, the kind you shell, but Alice (Isaac) Martin agreed to try both snow and snap peas and we ended up having to bring her banana boxes for her incredible harvest. The sun of our little grower solar system, though, was David Bontreger and his family, including his wife Ruth and their eight children. David was one of only a couple full time vegetable farmers, having converted everything but his pasture and land for livestock feed into organic production. We got to know everyone in the group well but David and Ruth were the mainstays, both reliable farmers and close friends. David had a somewhat unique history. When the Vietnam War draft began scooping up young men, David had registered, as most Amish and Mennonites did, as a conscientious objector. For his service, he was sent from his home in Ohio to work for a Mennonite family near our town who ran a fairly large poultry operation. In addition to the meat they produced for government purposes, the farmer also made weekly trips to Chicago with live chickens to sell at the southside markets that were still a major source of food in those neighborhoods. David talked about seeing and interacting with Black people for the first time, reading the Chicago Tribune as they waited for customers, eating barbecue and collard greens at a restaurant with his host father after their chickens were sold. He was exposed to many things his own upbringing had prohibited: cars, electricity, telephones. Yet, he always insisted that none of those things tempted him. In fact, the experience, while making his understanding of the world significantly broader and more cosmopolitan than that of most of his neighbors, just confirmed his commitment to the Amish lifestyle, and to the stewardship of the natural world he believed himself responsible for nurturing. David had a scientific mind and applied it to his growing practices. He taught himself how to grow extra-large green peppers that would turn red earlier in the season, kind of apprenticed himself to an English farmer who had developed varieties of seedless watermelon and learned the very specific and somewhat tedious details of producing acres of that unique crop. He was nearly compulsive in his efforts to maintain uniformity in crops like zucchini and carrots that he understood to be essential to the American produce market and was usually the first farmer to volunteer to grow something new. His knowledge, professionalism, and temperament made him indispensable both as a producer and a leader/teacher to the other growers. Plus, we all loved their farm. Ruth’s flower gardens would have impressed the most dedicated botanist and anything that came from her vegetable patch was impeccable. Her family provided an age mate for every one of my kids and though the older girls often had chores to do and weren’t able to play, they’d usually find an opportunity at some point to sneak up to the loft of the barn where my oldest daughter read books she’d packed in a bag just for that purpose to the younger kids. (The book bag was actually an amusement for lots of the Amish families. Once, at a growers meeting, the bag, unbeknownst to me, contained a peek-a-boo book in which a lever on each page revealed something underneath. On one page, the lever moved a small boy’s shorts aside to reveal his naked bottom. I saw the book being passed from hand to hand, the women giggling into their fingers and leaning into each other’s shoulders. Once I’d figured out what was going on, I was afraid they might be embarrassed or even angry, but they loved the book – more the adults even than the children – and often asked to see it again. It wasn’t unusual, when the children asked my daughter to read, for the women to also gather around.)

I think those planning meetings stick in my memory because they were the rare occasions I got to see everyone together, to experience the sense of community so intrinsic to Amish culture. The rest of the group, of course, convened regularly in church, at community events, at weddings and funerals. I never saw those gatherings, which spoke eloquently to my outsiderness. And it’s true that our other relationships could have been conducted purely transactionally. I was essentially a buyer of their products, though I’m convinced that none of the farmers I knew would have described it that way. The fact that I, too, was a farmer might have minimally impacted what could have been seen purely as a business arrangement. Maybe I’m deluding myself, but I am proposing that the very nature of Amish culture prevented our interactions from ever feeling – from actually being – that way.

While identifying Christianity as the driving force behind their beliefs and behaviors, the Amish both take that identification further as an all-encompassing lifestyle and in an entirely different direction than most other Christians. When I first started working with the Amish, maybe mentioned where the produce had come from or described an experience at an Amish farm to others, I was shocked by the anger and resentment leveled against the community. The most common accusation involved perceived hypocrisy. The rules against certain things like electricity and telephones and rubber tires are fairly consistent, but each district administers its own specific guidelines (called ordnung), thus creating an environment of either strict adherence or flexibility around some of those prescriptions. It’s not unusual for Amish dairy farmers to use a generator to keep milk cold. Phone booths, sometimes fully decked out with metal roofs, seating, and landscaping, and discreetly placed at the end of long driveways, are scattered throughout the countryside. Amish may not drive cars but they have no compulsions against riding in them.

Even people I considered generally open-minded – members of the food co-op, women at La Leche League meetings – expressed distrust about whether the Amish could be “truly organic” since their rules were inconsistently applied, for instance, or laughed about the Amish fixation on modern medical counsel, describing the “sea of black” at their doctors’ offices or in the waiting rooms at the hospital. One of my closest friends called the Amish women’s prayer bonnets “crash helmets.”

At first, I just figured such prejudice was an expected, if not reasonable or acceptable, reaction to difference. It’s true that the local roads were often clogged, especially on Tuesday and Wednesday “sale days” by both Amish buggies and the tourists who had come to see evidence of their days-gone-by pastoral and picturesque lifestyle. Old-fashioned windmills (used to pump water) turning lazily in the summer breeze. Colorful dresses – pink and lavender and yellow – pinned to clotheslines. Tawny Belgian and black Percheron draft horses plucking grass in pastures or hauling farm equipment or wagons from one field to the next, often with adorable stair-step children wearing suspenders and child-sized straw hats clinging to the sides. Honey for sale. Homemade rag rugs and quilts displayed in the yard. Wooden furniture for sale. Real blacksmiths. Coopers. Carpenters. Millers. Not just names, actual livelihoods. Who did these people think they were? What made them think they were better – more godly – than everyone else?

Except they didn’t. They don’t. And this is one primary source of the real antagonism, even if those rolling their eyes or cursing their neighbors don’t know it (and they hardly ever do.)

Lining the shelves at the local libraries – and now found in a simple search online – are books and articles and treatises representing a whole genre of anti-Amish literature. With no Christian background of my own, the argument took me a while to understand. It goes something like this. Evangelical Christianity relies on a concept of individual faith, of guaranteed salvation resulting not from social or community actions but from the personal act of accepting Jesus into one’s heart, and perhaps expressions of same such as baptism, church attendance, Bible study, or conversion in the form of being “born again.” Conversely, the Amish claim no knowledge of who God might choose for salvation, believe they can only live a life of obedience with eternal destiny ultimately determined by God’s judgment.

The form obedience takes, and the values underlying it, are key. These values entail a very active rejection of pride and the committed embrace of humility. Since no individual person can know their standing with God, accountability is to the community, to good works, and achieved through simplicity, pacifism, and grace. The Amish family doesn’t reject electricity because it is too modern, or because God doesn’t like it, or because they are trying to be better Christians than their English neighbors. The concern is that such conveniences will make one less dependent on the community, may provoke pride or competition for status or accumulation of material goods, might, like photographs, which are also prohibited, become a tool for personal vanity. Conformity to the world is a threat to humility, the desire to submit one’s own importance to the group.

Thus, the offense taken to the Amish lifestyle is two-fold. On the one hand, it is religious, as the anti-Amish literature attests. I remember stumbling onto these books for the first time, occupying several shelves at the library and each title focusing on a woman and her “shame.” The author Tracy Fredrychowski, as an example, has written no fewer than a dozen titles describing how Esther or Rebecca or Anna or Barbara discover the lie or deception of their Amish upbringing and eventually find their way to the truth of individual salvation. Numerous Christian blogs use the Amish failure to submit to the will of Jesus as a testament to the insidious ways that pseudo-Christianity can lead true believers away from salvation by the mistaken belief in earning it through good deeds. The words “sola fide” appear again and again. The Latin term for “faith alone,” is asserted as a, if not the, distinguishing tenet of Protestantism, and securely exiles the Amish from true Christianity by their abject failure to interpret the Bible correctly.

Resistance to worldliness may be their god’s directive for keeping the Amish humble, but the outcome is community. For so many people in the world, the sense of belonging inherent to community results in an “us” and “them” mentality, and a value system that reflects whatever hierarchy those categories entail, both for those within and without that community. But that only occurs if the “us” can claim some kind of special status, such as a dispensation from God, for instance, as ‘believers’ in contrast with non-believers, as ‘saved’ in contrast with damned. If one rejects individualism, as the Amish do, and believes that God’s mercy is dependent on discipleship in a community of solidarity and aspiration, no one can claim superiority, no one can know who will ultimately reside in the kingdom of God. As with all “resistance” movements, the failure to conform can be threatening to those in the mainstream who derive their security from maintaining the status quo. This direct attack on individualism, the crowning glory of evangelical Christianity (and, not incidentally, of capitalism) is the most grievous offense of all.

I suppose it might sound strange to refer to Amish community as a resistance movement. It depends on what you’re resisting. Since this is an extended critique of alienation, I can easily argue that it is hard to find a better case study for anti-alienation than the Amish. Certainly no individual perfectly fulfills or represents the values of a belief system, no matter how heartfelt, and no community satisfies the needs or successfully allows for the individual freedom of every member. I’m not intending to put Amish community on a pedestal and I am keenly cognizant of the serious errors, diminishment, and deceptions my chosen field of anthropology has perpetrated by, at the very least, projecting embodied cultural assumptions onto study subjects. Additionally, I’m not a Christian and don’t seek the answers to life’s meaning in the pages of any single book, or pair of books, especially not those with stories gathered and written by a few men thousands of years ago and then used to justify most of humanity’s most heinous conduct.

That said, and with the thought experiment template still in mind, here are what I believe to be some relevant observations based on my own experience and particular expertise.

If we accept the premise that alienation is both symptom and cause of critical social problems, that personalities develop around experiences that coalesce to create belief systems, and that many of those belief systems promote rather than abate alienation, leading humans to see each other as rivals, preventing us from caring for one another and the planet we live on, and preserving existing extractive and exploitive wealth and power dynamics (mostly because those in power benefit from us doing just that), then we will want to know what values and practices might address the problems arising from alienation and how core belief systems might become extrapolated to a less alienated society.

When Daniel Yoder first told his story to Max at Bonneyville Mill, he wasn’t looking for a business opportunity. Yes, he wanted to make his farm financially viable, but his concern was for the community as a whole, Amish farmers living in northern Indiana and caring for their land. This was not because Daniel was such a benevolent person, a community organizer, or a social scientist preserving a culture. He was acting on his value system, one which assumes that a group living in harmony with each other, their land, their animals, and the natural environment is what God intended for humanity. If you substitute ethics for God, I couldn’t agree more (especially as an antidote for alienation.) Daniel also wasn’t there because he sought a position of leadership among his neighbors or any status for presenting what might turn out to be a good idea. As mentioned earlier, the idea wasn’t his to begin with, nor did he claim any credit or authority for it. In fact, I would guess that the idea itself meant next to nothing to him other than as a context for further discussion, much of which, though we didn’t know it at the time, had already taken place. What would be the point of an idea, in Daniel’s mind, if it wasn’t carried to the group and experienced much as a shared meal that everyone can chew on and digest and add their own ingredients to and gain satisfaction from? If that sounds like an ideal, something too pie-in-the-sky to imagine working, recall that the ordnung of Amish decision-making is actually hundreds of years old and consists of quarterly meetings where issues affecting the entire church district can be discussed. The district has a bishop who is considered an experienced elder and whose wisdom is highly respected, but he has no direct decision-making capacity. I believe this is what we call democracy.

I also mentioned earlier that I loved the growers’ meetings which, over time, expanded from conducting official business to including picnics and potlucks. Nothing could have prepared me for the nature and pace of those meetings. Most of the time was taken up in silence. Each person who spoke did so with measured cadence and low enough volume that everyone had to attend carefully to hear the words. No one ever responded immediately to another person’s comments. No one ever interrupted, ever argued, ever raised their voice or shook their head or rolled their eyes or judged another person’s opinion in any way. Laughter was common and storytelling was frequently used to make a point. The meetings lasted forever and quite often arrived at no resolution. It seemed like the process was intended to hear all points with the expectation that, once informed, individual families could be trusted to make considered decisions. On more than one occasion, it seemed to me that a decision had been made (centralized pickups at the Bontreger’s instead of farm by farm, for instance) only to discover that someone or other had chosen on their own to take a different path (Isaac couldn’t bring his produce to David’s but he would drop it off at Roy’s on Tuesdays but not on Fridays.) I came to think of the patterns as conversational pacifism.

I also soon learned that when necessary, decisions could be made quickly, though still in the context of a more informal ordnung, i.e. democratically. One evening, rather late in the fall, we were at the Bontreger house and it had already gotten dark by the time we had finished loading David’s winter squash. Ruth asked us to come into the house to finish our conversation closer to the warmth of the woodburning stove and we were all standing in the living room when we heard the sound of buggy wheels on the gravel driveway and then a loud knock on the door. As David lit a lantern and went out to answer, Ruth told us that county school authorities had been at the school that day and told the frightened teachers that the Amish schoolhouse was in danger of being shut down if the community refused to receive measles vaccinations. Apparently, there was an ongoing minor outbreak in the public school in a nearby town and the school board had decided to expand vaccination efforts in response. Ruth knew this was why the men outside had come. We hurriedly prepared to leave but she said no, stay until David returned. It wouldn’t be long, she said, and the men would not come into the house. We knew David was standing out in the cold barefooted and without a coat, but Ruth insisted not to worry. The meeting would be short and, she added, laughing a little, kept that way by the uncomfortable inconvenience to David. They just needed confirmation from all the parents whose children attended the school. She was right and David returned within 15 or 20 minutes. He reiterated what Ruth had told us and added that the Amish school board – the men outside – had decided to close the school until the measles danger was past. They wouldn’t vaccinate their children but they didn’t want them to get measles either. David smiled wryly at the irony of vaccinating after the fact and also of the obvious contradiction that the public schools already required vaccination and children there still got sick. No Amish children were sick and yet the English school board had made a special effort to attempt to enforce the vaccination on them. “It’s not a problem,” he said. “because we were able to easily agree.”

Back to Daniel, though it must be noted that he was not an especially popular man in the district. I won’t pretend that some of that might not have come from the fact that he was in his mid-thirties and not yet married (he got married a few years after that first meeting) but I think it was mostly because he was considered very conservative in comparison to most other members of his community and not quite as humble about his opinions as was completely desired. Elkhart and Lagrange counties combined comprise the third largest Amish community in the country, slightly behind Lancaster County, PA and Holmes County, OH. Daniel regularly mentioned what he believed to be the cultural peril threatening the Lancaster community due to extensive tourism and resulting cottage industry. He greatly feared the same fate brewing in Indiana and, while he knew many of his neighbors thrived on the business that out-of-town visitors brought, he fretted about the negative influence. No one else seemed nearly as concerned. Yet, I grew to both like and respect Daniel, mainly because of an intense experience I had in relation to the birth of his first child.

We were at the Yoder house picking up produce just a few weeks after Daniel’s wife Lizzie had given birth to a baby boy. Daniel rarely spoke directly to me – another symptom of his conservative values – but that day he gestured for me to step toward him and then, with his head lowered, mumbled that he thought Lizzie could use my help in the house. I told my kids where I was going and to stay with their dad and then followed him in. I’d been there a couple of times before for growers’ meetings but expected something less than the extreme tidiness usual to Amish houses since a newborn was now in residence. Instead, the house was, as always, immaculate, not a dish out of place or crumb on the counter. We stepped into the living room and Lizzie, always a very thin and pale woman, was sitting on the couch looking like someone who had recently recovered from a nearly fatal disease. I sat beside her and she put her hand on my knee, her eyes filling with tears. She leaned forward and pulled the blanket away from the face of the baby in her arms; I had to swallow hard to control my startled reaction. I took the baby from her, barely as heavy as a cantaloupe, and stroked my finger across his cheek. He did turn his head, but the motion was lethargic, his eyes remaining shut, the lids nearly transparent. Lizzie and Daniel told the story in tandem. The birth had gone fine but the baby was small, a little weak. He’d lost some weight the first week, and though the midwife said that was normal, she did encourage Lizzie to nurse more often, any time the baby stirred. Lizzie admitted that she hadn’t completely followed that advice, had been told the baby shouldn’t nurse more often than every three or four hours, and she had used a pacifier in between. Gradually the baby had become less and less enthusiastic about feeding, sometimes latching on for only a few minutes and then fading off to sleep. Two weeks had passed with no weight gain and now the baby had only a couple of wet diapers each day and no messy ones. Lizzie glanced at Daniel when she suggested that maybe she should supplement with formula. She also looked a little shell-shocked as she expressed concern about all the work that needed doing on the farm and how Daniel could ever get it done by himself, though he shook his head when she said it.

I’d never felt so nervous about giving breastfeeding counsel. I had no idea how they would react when I described what needed to happen if Lizzie was going to be able to continue breastfeeding, or if that was even their highest priority. I wasn’t sure myself if it should be; their baby was very ill, failing to thrive. They had no reason to trust me, or any information I might have to share, and what I had to say would be difficult for anyone to hear. They needed to lose the pacifier entirely. Lizzie might have to retrain the baby to suck. If the baby wouldn’t stay awake on the breast, she might have to cup or spoon feed him (at least she knew how to hand express milk) until he got stronger, a tedious and time-consuming process. She had to forget about the farm work and the housework and concentrate on the baby. He needed to nurse all day every day until he began to gain weight, until he pooped several times a day, until he was clearly receiving nourishment. There could be no compromises.

I couldn’t tell how they were responding at the time, wondered for days after what they decided to do. This was a man who, I believed, thought English society was corrupt (and who moved his family, a few years later, to Wisconsin to get even further away from it). Did his conservatism also translate into patriarchal authority? Would he question my expertise based on my gender? Would he minimize the baby’s needs, Lizzie’s breastfeeding, in favor of the smooth operations of the household and farm? Might he even blame Lizzie for the baby’s failure to grow?

When we returned to the farm maybe two weeks later, Daniel repeated his gesture to follow him to the house, no greeting and as serious as ever. Lizzie was seated in exactly the same place on the couch, but, this time, her cheeks were rosy and her smile was wide. She passed the baby to me and explained that he was doing much better. Daniel sat beside her and with a show of affection I had never seen or would ever see again between Amish couples, put his arm around Lizzie’s shoulders. “I walked to the back fence,” he said, “and I took that pacifier and threw it as far as I could into the woods so we would never be tempted to use it again.” Lizzie said that she had been nursing continuously night and day and the baby had begun to gain weight. She laughed when she described how her mother, who had come to help, complained (with humor) that every diaper change also meant changing his entire outfit since the voluminous poop had leaked out the edges. Lizzie’s mother had told her sisters and her sisters had told their husbands and now the three couples were coming two evenings a week to help Daniel weed carrots and beets. The church ladies were delivering food each night. Lizzie shyly admitted that Daniel was washing the dishes, that she hadn’t been out to the fields, or out of the house at all, since the last time I’d been there.

I’d never been so happy to be completely wrong. Why had I assumed they, and Daniel in particular, would fear knowledge? Sure, it might have been different if the knowledge had not reinforced their existing worldview, at least to an extent. Though pacifier use is extremely prevalent in Amish families, as a relatively “modern” invention, it was a satisfactory target. You can’t be a farmer, especially a dairy farmer, without understanding supply and demand: the more you milk, the more milk is produced. I think I imagined that they would be embarrassed, or maybe resistant to responding to a baby who seemed to have special needs, who fell outside of what they might have perceived as normal expectations. The stakes were quite high. They had to balance what would allow their baby to thrive and community pressure (possibly in the form of the advice of whoever had told Lizzie not to nurse too often), the child’s well-being and the demands of their family business, values that do actually trust human bodies to perform physical tasks such as breastfeeding a baby and those that put work that expresses the highest calling of land stewardship as a priority. What I hadn’t understood is that embarrassment or resistance would have been a function of ego, or of pride. Those things, it turned out, are not a result of a deep commitment to values. They are, instead, a consequence of alienation. And Daniel and Lizzie weren’t alienated. They had in their cultural toolbox a concept referred to in Anabaptist literature as galassenheit. Composure in the face of challenge. Calm submission to the larger needs of family and community while putting one’s own ego aside. Heidegger used the term to describe being available to and accepting of uncertainty and mystery. For the Amish, it means avoiding selfishness, individuality, and pride in service to the greater good.

I did, though, have a bit of a run-in with actual patriarchy, and consequently learned how the Amish I knew dealt with it.

Though Martha Slabach didn’t always have produce for us, I was always glad when she did. She was a fantastic gardener and one of my favorite people to talk to, excited to share sightings of praying mantises or predatory wasps in her vegetables, her family’s reaction to the salad she’d made of wild purslane (not enthusiastic), or something smart or silly one of her eleven children had said or done. I didn’t think she was very old, maybe mid-thirties or so, but her hair was graying and her hands so cracked and worn that I imagined that her days must be spent scrubbing – laundry or dishes or produce. Despite her bright attitude, at least in my presence, she was clearly worn out. Theirs was the only Amish farm I ever saw that reeked of poverty. The property was located at the far northern edge of the county where the land became hilly and rocky, much different than the flatter, more fertile landscape further south and west. Rusting farm equipment lay seemingly abandoned in the weedy margins surrounding a half-collapsed barn, the road to the house was rutted and treacherously steep, the garden plots appeared barely defended from encroaching sumacs and mulberry trees and head-high ragweed and burdock on all sides, and even the clothes hanging from the line seemed tattered and gray. None of this might have earned a second glance if it hadn’t been so distinct from the order and neatness characteristic of other Amish farms. Martha’s husband Ernie rarely made an appearance when we were at their farm, which was a relief since his bulldog demeanor was a little disconcerting. I don’t think even Max had ever carried on an extended conversation with him, though he did one time show us a pair of draft mules a cousin or some relative was asking him to house temporarily for reasons I don’t recall. The animals were magnificent, huge and muscled like a draft horse but with the quirky face, pacific eyes, and enormous ears of a mule. Ernie just shrugged when we tried to ask questions about them, ignored his younger children as they clambered up the wooden fence to get a better look. Following him back out of the barn, his shoulders nearly touching his ears and his hat pulled low over his eyes, I couldn’t help but imagine that a surly temper roiled just under the surface.

On the occasion I’m remembering, Ernie ambled into the yard where we were standing and, without introduction, said, “You need to buy Martha’s bread.” I didn’t know how to respond to that complete non sequitur and when I glanced at Martha for a little guidance, she was studying her bare feet. I decided to hold my tongue, waited to see if he would say more. “She makes good bread,” Ernie finally added. “She’s already making bread for the family and might as well make more. You could sell it for her at the store.” He turned to her then, asked, “How many more loaves can you make?” I had the impression that this wasn’t the first time they’d discussed it and I could tell by Martha’s face that she was mortified and trying hard to hide it. “I said a dozen,” she responded quietly. “I told you I could do a dozen more.” That confirmed my suspicion that he’d told her to ask and then decided he couldn’t trust her to do so.

We left it that I would talk to the store manager. I didn’t think it would do any good to explain that, first, it wasn’t my department. Second, we already had a good supply of locally-baked bread. Third, we couldn’t sell bread made in someone’s random home kitchen. They’d need a commercial kitchen, professional packaging, approved labeling with weights and dates and ingredients, a food service license. Plus, I had no idea if Martha herself even wanted to add bread baking to her list of responsibilities. I figured I’d ask her the next time we talked without Ernie around.

Later that week, we picked up produce from Ruth Coblentz, who was married to Ruth Bontreger’s brother and lived just a few farms down the road. The Coblentzes were the youngest members of the growers group, closer to my age, and just getting started in farming, though Samuel’s primary job was as an apprentice to the neighborhood windmill builder (he eventually took over the business.) Ruth’s two children were almost exactly a year behind my first two and, of all the women in the group, she was the one with whom I had the most in common. I maybe shouldn’t have, but I mentioned the conversation with Ernie and Martha to her. She didn’t seem even slightly surprised, nodded her head knowingly. “Everyone sees it,” she said. “A group has already gone to the bishop.” I asked her what she meant, and she said, “He’s free with his fists.”

I didn’t hear the whole story until quite a few years later when we’d started a farmers market and were seeking vendors. The market hadn’t opened yet but we were at the building working when a middle-aged woman and what appeared to be her adult daughter came through the door. “Maybe you don’t remember me,” Martha said. “I’ve gotten old.” We hugged tightly and I assured her that I remembered her very well, that she looked exactly the same. As with all conversations with Amish women, we went through her children one by one, where they were now, what they were doing, who they’d married, how many children they’d had. Then, without any prompting, Martha launched into the history of her marriage since I’d last seen her maybe eight or ten years earlier. It had started back then, she said, with the men of the church taking Ernie aside to ask him if he needed help with his relationship with God. Martha insisted she hadn’t said anything to anyone else, repeated what Ruth C. had said about “everyone seeing”, mentioned her sisters and a brother “keeping their eyes out for her” since they knew that Ernie was “difficult”. Then the bishop and a few of the other elders came to the farm for a more official conversation with Ernie. He was made to understand that he had one more chance to show the community that he was caring for his family before sterner action was taken. Martha was also given a choice. She’d tried to leave several times before, but this time, they said, the church district would support her, provide help on the farm while she and whichever younger children she chose to go with her were housed at a facility where Amish women in her situation (she never used the word ‘abused’) could rest, recuperate, and determine their best options. Martha told me that she’d gone to the place once for several weeks, but couldn’t stand being away from her older children or her garden. When the choice was offered again, she said no, she wanted Ernie to be the one to go. That is eventually what happened. While facilities for men are a bit less common, the church arranged for Ernie to go to Tennessee to a place, Martha said, “where he could find his way back to the church.” She said they had “classes” there for him to learn how to be a better husband and father and to learn to control his temper. She had hoped that it would work. He was gone for nearly six months. When he returned, Martha had decided to move on from the marriage, even though the separation would tear her family apart and she and Ernie would still be married. She told me that she now lived with her sister and the four of her youngest children who were still at home. “I just wanted to see this,” Martha said, turning to peruse the market space. “I still think about baking bread,” she added, laughing a little as if we both understood all that was contained in the statement. I told her the space included a licensed kitchen and if she really wanted to start a bakery business, she would be welcome to use it. She said she’d think about it and we hugged a second time. I never saw her again.

The only thing most people know about the Amish is the practice of shunning. The use of the meidung or banns is certainly not irrelevant to Amish culture since it was, historically, a primary distinguishing practice between Amish sects and closely related Mennonite groups. Yet, shunning is often used by English to support the idea that the Amish are callously single-minded in the preservation of their lifestyle, to the point of banning their own family members from participation if they break the rules. I don’t know what Amish culture was like in the past and this may well have been accurate at some point or in some rare circumstances. After seeing Martha, I asked another close Amish friend, Arlene, if there had been any discussion about shunning Ernie. Arlene said she didn’t know of any shunnings in the district in her lifetime, but that violence could, if anything ever did, qualify as a shunning offense. Mostly, though, I’ve wondered about why even the potential for this practice is so challenging to our sensibilities.

In essence, the practice of shunning is a community saying “we will not tolerate this behavior.” We have laws that do the same. While no law governs the length of women’s skirts or criminalizes divorce (not directly, though cultural norms absolutely act as enforcement exactly as they do among the Amish), there are always consequences to non-conformity. For the more egregious crimes (theft, assault, rape, murder), the larger society has foregone community enforcement entirely in favor of militarized policing, mandatory sentencing, dehumanizing and dysfunctional profit-based incarceration. As pretty much anyone working on civil rights and social justice issues will tell you, models for reframing the excessive punishment regime of the modern carceral state come mainly from indigenous schemas in North and South America, the Kurdish lands of Western Asia, and in Oceania where tribal courts and community councils emphasize restorative justice, cultural traditions and values, and social responsibility. In other words, pressure to conform to social rules result from a kind of pact or contract with the understanding that the benefits of belonging come with accountability. Banns.

I’ve thought a lot about this. Does a community have the right to enforce rules of belonging or does that make them some kind of cult, in danger of imposing group restrictions on the rights of individuals? What is it about the uniformity of Amish culture, and especially any practices they might use to ensure it, that many find so distasteful? Is religion as a motivating force automatically exclusionary and reductive or can it contain within its structure a set of de-alienating and liberating values?

I can freely admit that I am not afraid of collectivism (which I hope I don’t need to point out is not the same as communism, though that ideology is no more frightening to me than capitalism). I chose the particular stories of my experience with the Amish to illustrate some of the values underlying a non-individualistic, non-alienated society. Care of family, community, and planet. Democracy. Accountability to the group. Non-violence. Mutual benefit. Detachment from ego. Acceptance. Group identity doesn’t have to be dangerous if it is not coupled with superiority, hierarchy, or exceptionalism, though this requires, as the Amish example shows, a certain amount of humility and de-emphasis of pride. Though I can also admit that I used to see religious affiliation as the source of the majority of harm in the world (still do, to an extent), I am working to recognize that pretty much everything we “know” is the function of a worldview or a belief system. Without religion, ethics generally step in to provide guidelines for social interaction. The Amish engender such fascination (for me, at least) because they seem to have established a belief system that tips the scales away from absolute individual sovereignty toward mutual benefit, which I am arguing here is the only ethical choice for a society that works equitably for its members and protects its resources for future generations. Our fear of collective values, practices, and systems of justice is the same fear that keeps us beholden to political and economic systems that are deeply harmful to most people but feel like some kind of security stopgap for whatever might be much worse.

I don’t want to be Amish. I don’t think everyone should be Amish. I don’t want to be told what clothes to wear, to keep my hair covered, how I will spend every Sunday morning, the pool from which I can choose a partner. Oddly, in these particular ways, Amish society is hardly different from many if not most cultures of the world. School uniforms or suits and ties say something very specific about the people who are wearing them. Sexuality is policed in far more insidious ways by state legislatures. There is very little difference in determining who we work with, socialize with, partner with as a function of class, for instance, than of religious affiliation. Our actions result from our belief systems, but we can pretend like they are choices because we are blind to the mechanisms that govern them. We see individualism as a rights issue instead of as a tool for the patriarchy to control us and our rampant consumption. We imagine that, because we think so little about how our worldview is formed that it must be somehow intrinsic, even “natural”, and are offended by a window into that misconception, as if we have been asked to peek at something perverse or even obscene. We believe that our worldview protects us from some insidious “group think,” as if fascism doesn’t actually thrive on dividing us from each other, as if alienation isn’t a bigger threat to well-being than connection.

And now I’m ready to talk a lot more about connection.