Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Way Back
Inspired by this.
It’s funny how your perspective on things changes with time. If you had asked me five years ago when and where I would choose to live, I would have said anytime in the last three-hundred years, in an Amish community. I’m tired of corporate America, tired of mortgages and cars, tired of all of the conveniences and pleasures that result in tearing families apart. Why not live in a community that values stability, family, honest labor, and working the land? Our ideals seem to line up perfectly.
As I did more research, I discovered a few things that bothered me about the Amish. Religious dogmatism, some evidence of domineering sexual inequality, and a blanket condemnation of anything foreign. I began thinking about how the Amish react to technology, how new automatically equals bad, and I realized that they have fallen into an unthinking conservative trap. Technology in itself is not bad, the problem comes in how we as individuals and as a society choose to use that technology. Sure, automobiles and airplanes have resulted in the scattering of families and to some extent the disintegration of neighborhoods. On the other hand, building walls around your community making it stifled and insular creates unnecessary hardship and societal problems as well.
Fundamentally - human behavior causes problems, not things. Both as individuals and as a society, we can choose to act right or wrong in any circumstances.
That is not to say that as a society are unjustified in working to minimize harm from the misuse of things, only that blanket solutions are rarely as simple as they seem.
Soon after deciding that Amish life was not for me, I ended up reading the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. This fun, fascinating series about a family’s lives on the American frontier in the late 1800s was inspirational, to say the least. I could not imagine a more free, more happy life than that spent working one’s land in a small rural community, leading simple lives while still appreciating beauty and knowledge. What more could one ask for? The midwest or great plains in 1880 - that was where I wanted to be.
Then, I read a short book that served as a post-script to the series - On The Way Home. It was put together from journal entries made as Laura Ingalls Wilder, along with her husband and daughter, moved from South Dakota to Missouri.
After reading this book, it became clear that the rest of the series had been sanitized for popular consumption. All of the ugly reality was hanging out in this book, and it left me feeling deceived by the rest of the series. Dying kids, years of crop failures, extremely low success rates for homesteaders, land speculation and fraud… The frontier had a dark side.
Why would I want to do constant backbreaking labor, live in a shack, and watch my kids die, knowing in the end that even that meager lifestyle was likely unsustainable?
So much for the frontier.
As I’ve thought about it some more, I’ve come to appreciate what I have, and to identify the elements of the eras I admire so as to attempt to incorporate those elements into modern life. Just as technology can be abused, so can it be thrown out the window.
I intend to work the farm without a tractor, using horsepower instead. The elegance, simplicity, sustainability, and efficiency of horses for a small operation greatly appeals to me. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, mechanized equipment became available that made horses amazing efficient at their tasks. I intend to cherry-pick that element of frontier life and bring it to the present.
Similarly, I intend to cultivate a closeness of family that is rarely known today, by including the kids in the labor we do, the fun we have, and the education we provide. Not that I intend to raise them to be sheltered, but I want them to identify first with their family and only later with their peers. Modern schooling has largely destroyed this notion, much to our detriment. Another element of frontier life brought to the present.
I admit it - I really like flush toilets and electricity. I’ve told people that my ideal time and place is 1880s rural America, but with a few 1950s perks.
But even that isn’t quite right. It is only in the modern era that I have the luxury to choose these things, the wealth to try farming and screw things up without my family starving, the internet to form virtual communities and research things that are no longer passed down through the generations, and modern medicine to treat my family when they are ill.
While I intend to pick and choose the good things from many eras, and reject the bad things from the modern era, I’ve come to recognize that it is only in the modern age that I have the luxury to even make those decisions. So when it comes right down to it, I think right here right now is good enough for me.
Comments
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Interesting. I read this after I commented on the Mrs.’s Way Back post.
I like the cherry picking aspect, too. We need to realize that we have Rose (
) colored glasses on when we read the Prairie series. We need to realize that everywhere and everywhen has its problems and that human nature is imperfectible. If we keep that in mind, we as a society could build something grand.
I think you and I would get along. Too bad you’re so far away instead of down the road.
Your technology analysis is right on the money. For instance, the internet has given us a raw sewage pipe into our living rooms, but it has also allowed us to meet like minds far away. The art comes in closing the pipe while visiting the minds.
Weetabix | 6/25/2008 10:55 AM CDT -
As is almost always the case, you’re likely painting too large a group with that brush. We have Amish all around here and I see their farms everywhere when I drive south, or west. In northern Indiana they have embraced technology to a degree, although they try to limit it’s influence on their “personal lives” ... many have telephones in the barn, most have lights and appliances. They, apparently , make great craftsmen for the RV industry and do not hesitate to ride in vans, not use power tools. Just like a Catholic is not necessarily a “Catholic” ... neither is there one flavor of Amish or Hutterite or any of the others that try to cling tighter to conservative values than most of us.
I grew up on westerns and always chuckled at the “sterilization” of the stories. It all seemed so idyllic ... yet the reality (living in rural Alberta) was that even in the ‘50’s, herding cows in the wintertime was anything but easy. There never was a time when cowboys simply rode around all day like John Wayne ... it was backbreaking work, and lonely as hell.
I’ve also gotten a real kick out of the constant barrage of glamour of the “family farm.” If only all those who idealize it actually knew what they were talking about ... backbreaking work for subsistance living ... they sure wouldn’t romanticise it anymore. But I do agree with you that all the technology we have available today allows us to cherrypick the good parts. Even though the ‘net can - as noted by Weetabix - be a sewer pipe ... never before have we been able to have the experience of millions immediately available to us. I don’t have to trot down to the library when I have a foal who isn;t nursing properly ... I can jump online and find information to help me decide what to do. (he died - new mare, no colostrum) The major problem is sorting through the chaff to find the wheat kernels ... LOL
How did the Island trip go?
pete in Midland | 6/25/2008 12:19 PM CDT -
Well, Amish with lights and appliances aren’t really all that Amish anymore, as far as I’m concerned.
The island trip got rained out. On the second night there, there were severe thunderstorms nearly continuously for 8 hours. We were tenting. Given that everything was wet, the kids were cold, there was no chance of a fire, the mosquitoes were on the warpath, weather after the storms was looking to be hot and humid, and they were forecasting more storms over the next two days, we got out of there. Had a nice couple days off at home, drying out.
American Farmer | 6/25/2008 12:51 PM CDT -
“What places and times hold special fascination for you” can be a fun game to play. But if choosing when to live were actually a serious option, I’d still say “right here, right now, with the previously-unthinkable luxury the modern era affords for picking and choosing the best aspects of other ways of life, while disregarding the aspects that don’t work as well”.
The modern era has a lot wrong with it. But so every every era. What it has _right_ is enabling that choice.
Matt | 6/26/2008 05:12 PM CDT
