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Gareth Morgan - Back to the Future? |
The week has been one of contrast – from experiencing the actions of a community ensuring it is at the forefront of modern technology and using that technology to score competitive advantage over its neighbours, to a visit to a very traditional community that goes out of its way to minimise the impact our modern lifestyle has on its members.
Firstly the modernisers. I refer to the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania which has made the decision to get a leap ahead on other cities by making the whole city a wireless hotspot. As I mentioned in an earlier column America is light years ahead of New Zealand in internet availability with free wireless hotspots in every hotel, motel, and café you can find. The creed is pretty clear – if you don’t offer it you don’t get patronised. So in a Starbucks for example you will typically see the place frequented by executives catching emails, attending internet-conferencing with colleagues sat down in Starbucks in other cities or back at HQ.
Well Pittsburgh has decided to go one better. The local authority there has decided to make the whole town a hotspot – the parks and the streets included. The rationale is multifaceted - people will move their businesses there because of the connectivity; more people will visit because they know they’ll stay online whether driving through town or watching the kids play ball; and most importantly it offers the city’s citizens opportunities to form online businesses, opportunities other towns with crap or expensive connections can’t offer. The plan is that the first 2 hours are free and then you pay.
The initiative is just one example of a community recognising the importance of technology to keeping it in the race for jobs and tourist dollars.
By contrast, and to look over the fence at the other side we pondered whether a 1200km detour from the planned route up to Lake Erie, so as we could visit an Amish community would be worth it. Then a New Zealand friend kindly provided the contact with Ernie Conover, a BMW motorcycle club member who lives in the vicinity of such a community in northern Ohio. That was the tipping point – we headed north beyond the Potomac and Shenandoah to make contact.
The Amish derive from the Mennonites who were a breakaway sect from the Lutheran church during the Protestant Reformation of the 1500’s, taking the view at the time that the Lutheran’s failure to separate State from Church presented unsolvable conflicts of interest. They slung their hook and fled to Switzerland where they splintered again, with the conservative Amish peeved about only loose adherence to the practice of shunning – excommunication of negligent members. The first sizeable group of Amish arrived in the US in 1730. Nowadays Ohio hosts the largest Amish community in the world.
What fascinated us about them is the courage to live their own way of life amidst a modern secular community with all the pressures of consumerism and conformity. Brands, suburbia, and welfarism are anathema to the Amish. Their core value is to shun pride as a virtue – so they all live in the same coloured houses (white), wear the same coloured clothing (blue) and ride the same coloured horse and buggy (black). The belief is that they’ll get a better deal in heaven if they adhere to values of obedience, humility, thrift and simplicity.
The society then is of a strongly hierarchical family form and the simplicity nowadays includes some contradictions such as using petrol engines for farm machinery but still eschewing use of electricity and motor vehicles. So horses still pull the ploughs, although they can borrow their (secular) neighbour’s telephone but can’t own one. Still, we saw many a push-mower being used as opposed to the ubiquitous sit-on mower that does little to keep your average American trim.
But their traditionalism (itself valued as the anchor to historical roots and identity) provides barriers and problems as well. Their children all leave school age 13 so their ability to be “Yanked Over” (enter secular society) is limited by lack of education anyway. And of course, while the community is growing in numbers it is primarily through breeding rather than new blood and so the sect has a disproportionate incidence of genetic diseases that in-breeding fosters. Steps to mitigate the latter have included adopting children from Korea and China!
Despite their wish just to be left alone, as you’d expect they come in for a fair amount of stick from the local secular community which has a bit of a love/hate relationship with the Amish. They resent their non-conforming ways but love the brand cache to the extent it generates tourist dollars. Just before we arrived a motorcyclist on large Honda cruiser was killed when he ran his bike into the rear of an Amish family in their buggy on the highway. That understandably reignited debate about buggies on the roads. On the other hand their values of honesty and toil make then superb workers for the local businesses. That the paycheck is sent to the father of the family is of no concern to the employer.
That the Amish wish to live their own life and be left alone didn’t mean they weren’t willing to chat to us and indeed we enjoyed the brief conversation with them as they came and left from the hitching rail in the village square, where they’d come in to buy supplies.
So two communities – one trying to get the edge going forward, the other determined to retain the past. Only in America!
C'mon ducklings let's cross the road
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