Professor Iannaccone made this point several times in my economics of religion class:
The Amish are the most technologically sophisticated people on this continent, the best at picking and choosing among innovations, deciding which ones make sense and which ones don’t….
The larger society at the moment has a primitive and superstitious belief that we must accept new technologies, that they are somehow more powerful than we are. Which makes the Amish in some ways the most modern American subculture—far more modern than some fellow with a cell phone who doesn’t really like how it changes his life, but has one just because it seems “normal.”
–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), p. 166-168
(HT Joe Carter)
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