| Many members of modern society embrace social change with delightviewing each new gadget as a welcome sign of the upward spiral of progress that leads to a brighter tomorrow. Unlike such moderns the Amish have been skeptical about the fruits of scientific advance even though they have enjoyed some of them. Indeed, the Amish have often met the press of progress with stubborn resistance. Their battle with modernity has been a struggle to save their cultural souls. |
| In fact, we might say that the Amish struggle with modernity has been a war against progress, or at least the spirit of progress. They certainly are not opposed to everything new, and as the following essays show, they have acquiesced to modernity in many ways. But the Amish are engaged in a war against the spirit of progressagainst arrogance, against progress as a goal, and against the social fragmentation and alienation that often accompany some forms of "progress." |
| It might seem odd to portray the pacifist Amish as engaged in warfare, even at the level of metaphor. But, in fact, the Amish see themselves as constantly fighting against the influence of worldly institutions. As one Amishman put it: "The Christian life is a warfare." The Amish war against progress, however, is not expressed in a blind resistance to all change. The chapters in this volume underscore the substantial degree of aciaptation and compromise that has inevitably accompanied Amish survival. |
| Their battle has been against a particular concept of progressone that has been enthusiastically embraced by much of the rest of the world since the Enlightenment. This notion of progress rests on the perfectibility of human institutions. It is founded on the confidence that reason and its handmaiden, technology, will eventually eradicate war, hunger, poverty, and all other evils that plague human beings. For the Amish such a view of progress is only one more expression of arrogance. To reject this view in all of its forms requires a constant struggle, a continual "warfare." This war is waged with faith rather than firepower and with self-effacement instead of smart bombs. But it is a war nonetheless, requiring courage, tenacity, and at times the tactic of compromise and even retreat. |
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