IN most of the forlorn cities of upstate New York, less than 50 percent of the children born in 2010 were born to married parents. In Rochester, almost 70 percent of children are illegitimate at birth. But just south of Rochester, there is a scattered community where such things are virtually unheard of.

As this article in The New York Times about a crash that killed five Amish reports, the Amish population in upstate New York has grown by 13 percent in two years, with many migrating from nearby Ohio and Pennsylvania. Illegitimacy is not a problem for the Amish.

The Amish are an island of social stability in the region, evidence that it is not the economy that determines whether traditional sex roles survive, but the metaphysics of a people.

An Amish woman’s life revolves around her children and her home, and the idea of her being ashamed to live this way is ludicrous. She  may easily leave behind enough children and grandchildren to populate a small village before she dies. Many decades from now, her legacy will live and breathe while today’s female graduates of, say, Columbia Law School, supposedly so much smarter than the frumpy, apron-clad Amish housewives, have a good chance of vanishing without a trace.

Not only will the Amish woman leave raw numbers behind, she will leave behind functioning human beings, who are able to take part in civil society, to marry and have children of their own, to work hard and build upon what she did. And, yet by the values of modern leftist society, she has wasted her life.

                                                 — Comments —

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

I live in Upstate New York and can confirm, on the basis of birth announcements in the local newspaper, that the percentage of fatherless neonates is high. A proliferation of bastard-children is one sign of a cultural meltdown so overwhelming that contemplating it reduces a person to stupefaction. Should we really take the Amish as our counter-model? I have lived in two places where there were noticeable Amish populations. Before coming to Upstate New York, I lived for a decade in Central Michigan. We should not romanticize the Amish although certain quaint aspects of Amish life tempt us to do so. A town clerk in Michigan told me reliably, for example, that cousin-marriages were widespread among the Amish and that the effects of multi-generational inbreeding were an unspoken scandal. Some Amish whom one met in the course of daily life seemed healthy in mind and body, but no few others seemed somehow “off.” And while some were clean, others were ignorant or disdainful of the regular procedures of modern hygiene. A goal of Amish existence is self-sufficiency, but the fact is that the Amish traffic economically with the same outer world that they spiritually reject. Traditionalists also reject a good deal of the modern world, but deploring Internet pornography and the welfare state is not the same as rejecting electric illumination, antibiotics, and education beyond the eighth grade. There is something I daresay Gnostic about Amish apartness. Much of what The Thinking Housewife values – in art, literature, and music, in scholarship and knowledge – is as foreign to the Amish as it is to the unemployable “youths” into which too many fatherless neonates eventually grow. 

I remember once catching a glimpse of a young Amish girl of about twenty, doing some necessary shopping in the Michigan town where I lived. She had what were probably pretty features, but she was facially disfigured, under her bonnet, by terrible acne – which a few weeks of low-dose tetracycline and some dermatological supervision would probably have cured.

Laura writes:

I have written very briefly about the Amish a few times and have received similar comments. As I said before, I am not offering the Amish up as a complete model. I don’t embrace all of their values or their strain of Christianity. They are a good example, however, of a couple of important realities. One, a community that respects traditional sex roles is more likely to flourish. There are weird, suicidal cults that respect traditional sex roles too so it’s important not to get carried away with that one element of a society. But I don’t classify the Amish as a self-destructive cult.

Two, it is possible even in the modern world to honor and guard childhood innocence. Amish children look and act like children, not small, cynical, hard-bitten adults. Thirdly, a community that wants male breadwinners will find a way to more or less make it happen.The Amish in our area have started small construction businesses that are a successful addition to their farming economy. They are enterprising and hard-working. While the nearby rural population suffers from debilitating obesity, so much so that a significant minority uses motorized carts in lieu of walking, the Amish can be seen plowing their fields even in old age. They pay their bills at the local hospital in cash and have no health insurance.

My husband and my parents grew up in communities that were entirely different from the Amish in many ways but in the senses I mention above, they were much the same. My husband was raised in a working-class city where people worked in factories and drove cars. They used electricity and went to movies. Nevertheless, there was virtually no divorce. Motherhood and male authority were respected and almost all children were born to married parents. Adults didn’t callously expose children to raunchy, sexual images every day. So while I wouldn’t hold these communities up as complete models either, they have certain exemplary qualities.    

As you say, the Amish have virtually no high culture or intellectual life. And, as fruitful as the life of an Amish woman is, the Amish appear to disdain feminine beauty. An Amish woman often dresses in clothes that are outright ugly, and it seems deliberately so. Individualism is not sacred to the Amish. But it is far too sacred to us.

Mr. Bertonneau writes:

You wrote: “My husband and my parents grew up in communities that were entirely different from the Amish in many ways but in [some ways,] they were much the same… People worked in factories and drove cars. They used electricity and went to movies. Nevertheless, there was no divorce. Motherhood and male authority were respected and almost all children were born to married parents.” 

My father and mother were married for sixty years, so I knew domestic stability. (Albeit my father had a marriage before he wedded my mother – and I have an older half-brother from that marriage, to whose existence my mother never really reconciled herself.) I lived until I was eleven years old in Highland Park, an old suburb of Los Angeles. It was largely working-class (my father was a fire captain, later on a battalion chief), families were intact, and divorce was rare and scandalous. Beginning when I was twelve, my parents moved us to Pt. Dume in Malibu, which was in those days a remote place where land could be had cheap. (It’s now Beverley Hill West.) It was a rural environment, and it differed strongly from Highland Park. Because it was remote, fathers commuted a long distance to work; they were absent much of the day into the evening. There was less neighborhood supervision of children; there was not as much fathering, as there ought to have been. Then 1968 happened. There were many divorces; families ceased to function healthily, and the kids were left to the influences of the popular culture. Sex and drugs took a terrible toll on my cohort. A friend and I started to add up classmates at Malibu Park Junior High School and Santa Monica High School who died from overdose or related incidents. The list had climbed to something like thirty when we stopped counting. 

I mention this to indicate that I see myself as being on the same page as you. We can locate the virtues that our current social and cultural condition so desperately needs in the behavior of our own recent ancestors.

Laura writes:

Wow, thirty or more dead from drugs.

All communities lose some adolescents to dangerous behavior. The Amish tradition of rumspringa, which varies in different Amish sects, allows adolescents some license to rebel before they officially join the church. Some drink alcohol, wear non-traditional clothes and have sexual relationships.

Mr. Bertonneau continues:

Yes – thirty and more. This was over a period of ten years or a bit more. The death toll includes many later suicides of people who so ravaged their own lives that they could never recover a sense of accomplishment or dignity. There were murders. A girl who lived up the street from me took up with a semi-criminal boyfriend who was into drugs. When she came to her senses and told him to get lost, he killed her with a shotgun. In the house behind the house where I lived, a drug-addled eighteen-year-old with psychiatric and moral problems killed his eight-year-old sister, also with a shotgun. In thinking about Pt. Dume in those days, it occurs to me that the beach played a central role in the carnage. All households on Pt. Dume had beach privileges on private “Rivieras.” The beaches were isolated by tall cliffs, so once the kids got to the beach, where they tended, especially in summer, to spend the whole day and much of the night, they were in a little society of their own. But it was adolescent society, emotion-driven, sex-driven, and without parental oversight. The result was mayhem of fatherless-ness of a different kind. This strays a bit off topic, but the discussion has jogged my memory.

Art from Texas writes:

I do not think we can rule out the importance of the economy and livelihood as parts of our societies degeneration. I am not Amish, of course, and I think their beliefs are incorrect given that I am a
Catholic. Nevertheless, I believe the Amish attitude towards work and the economy has protected them. Bertonneau himself says that his own neighborhood “was remote, fathers commuted a long distance to work; they were absent much of the day into the evening.” He also says that compared to his previous neighborhood “There was less neighborhood supervision of children; there was not as much fathering, as there ought to have been.” If this is not an example of economic effects changing society I am not sure what else is.

 He writes, “Traditionalists also reject a good deal of the modern world, but deploring Internet pornography and the welfare state is not the same as rejecting electric illumination, antibiotics, and education beyond the eighth grade.”

I am not certain we can maintain a society with modern comforts and not eventually descend into degeneracy. I am driven to believe what many thinkers have said about “postmodernity”: it is nothing other than late stage capitalism. It is only a few countris in this hemisphere, effectively isolated, such as Greenland or the Faroes, that have maintained their traditions.

John McNeill writes:

I share Art’s uncertainly about our ability to maintain our modern comforts and also uphold a stable civilization. While I agree with your thesis that the breakdown of gender roles plays a large part in societal collapse, I also can’t help but notice that social decline comes attached with affluence and technology. Now of course I’m not 100 percent convinced that those things have a direct influence on collapse, but there is a link. It would be interesting to see how the Afrikaner enclave of Orania persists. It’s a community built on conservative Afrikaner values, along with a progressive environmental outlook, ie green technology. Their support for green technology is based on a desire to be self-sufficient, and it would be interesting to see if their society eventually collapses. If Orania succeeds, then it would show that future nationalist communities would not necessarily have to be Luddite in orientation.

Please follow and like us: