Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [19]
But I suppose that there was an important difference between the Millers’ aid and Scott’s peasants’. The peasants had not chosen to go without modern technology. The Millers, at some remove, had. Certain Amish groups in the past went so far as to outlaw lightning rods, for fear of diminishing occasions of spontaneous barn raisings. To this day our neighbors forbade the purchase of insurance policies for similar reasons.
On second glance, then, the situations of the Millers and the peasants were not quite alike. The Southeast Asian peasantry got together in the name of self-interest to better their common lot. Our neighbors had worsened their lot so they could get together. The motivations were opposite. A certain artifice was present in the Millers’ seeming spontaneity. Or maybe the word was artfulness.
Early in the summer Mr. Miller, like the Jones family, had warned me about the coming winter and gave permission to gather fallen limbs from his woods. But winter seemed a long way off and I procrastinated. Then one day he appeared, bow saw in hand, and began severing large branches from the tree by our kitchen window. It was a perfectly good red maple. I went out and conversed with him as the boughs came tumbling down. He mentioned something about making light for the kitchen sink and protecting the cistern from growing roots. Soon I found myself working beside him, chatting and cutting up a stack of logs conveniently felled near the woodshed.
As he pulled away in his buggy, I reconsidered what had just happened. Did he really mean it about the dangerous roots? I gazed at the stricken tree—nothing remained but a stick—and with a start I realized what Mr. Miller may really have done: created his own mini-disaster. Namely, he had simulated a lightning bolt. Adversity was not providing the spur I needed to get going, so he went ahead and played nature’s part for her. And as we worked I’d felt a nice spurt of camaraderie.
For all the mysteriousness of the Millers, evidence mounted of a deeper mastery, an ability to ride the bumps and turns of circumstance and to convert or redirect them to higher ends—a kind of metaphysical hydroelectrics. Mr. Miller’s finesse, then, raises an intriguing possibility for those of us still abjectly dependent on technology: that a more natural way of living can, in some manner, be artificially contrived. We need not wait for chance or disaster.
Even the person I knew as Mr. Miller, I soon learned, was partly an artificial construct. It was Nate who informed me. My jaw fell when I found out. Mr. Miller had come from Lancaster County and had once lived in a setting almost as modern as anyone else’s. He didn’t belong to the group here but, in absentia, to a community of more up-to-date Mennonites still residing in the Boston–Washington corridor, whose male members ordinarily shaved their faces. His brethren used steel-wheeled tractors, electricity, and in-house telephones. While similar to the Amish theologically, they were more progressive technologically than even the most liberal Amish settlement. My landlord’s repertoire of skills was broader than I first imagined.
One day in his parlor I discreetly brought up the subject. He smiled and sighed, as if to acknowledge the fact that at last his secret was out. There was a pause in which he appeared to be carefully choosing his words. “I did it,” he said, his lips quivering slightly, “for the sake of the children.”
As conditions in his former habitat deteriorated, he explained, underage drinking, teenage pregnancy, and even drug use had steadily increased. In the suburban world of cookie-cutter houses, strip malls, and automobiles, parents were losing control of their offspring. Instead of working together on the farm, family members went different directions—fathers to factories, mothers to baked-good stands at highway outlets, boys to traveling construction crews. Money and wheels flowed freely. Opportunities for fun and escape multiplied. One in three Amish youth from Lancaster County were leaving the fold. The attrition