The thing about the Amish and my friend Mosie that stumps me and keeps me thinking is the enormous number of riddles and shades that surround their culture.

They are known for their rejection of technology, yet they don’t really reject it at all. They use it pretty much the way it was meant to be used – with care and considerable thought.

As a long-time media critic, I am coming to see that the Amish understand technology better than most of us who use it rather wantonly. Because of them, I am seeing technology differently, for the first time in a long time.

The lesson for us, I think, is their thoughtfulness and unity versus our shallowness and greed. They saw the future. We didn’t. They saw the benefits and the traps. We didn’t.

Because there is no Twitter and Facebook and TikTok or Fox News or One America in the Amish world to foster division and spread lies and conspiracies unchecked, they are united.

There is no such thing as partisanship.

They can react to change, face problems, and fix them while we are mired in argument and division, and dishonor. Most importantly, they remain unified after 500 years.

The Amish have protected their culture and their children from the ravages and depravity of techno-media and the effects of all-consuming life in the digital tsunami.

Many of the English children I know no longer even know how to speak to one another, let alone their parents.

On the other hand, the Amish have fought fiercely to keep technology at bay. One of the first things that caught my eye  – it stands out – is that they are so much more fulfilled and contented than most of us are.

Every morning a horse-drawn cart rides by our farmhouse on the way to help an Amish family build their barn. The workers, Amish men from different communities,  go to work singing. They sing on the way home.

I tried to think if I have ever seen workers in the “English” world go to work singing.

It is a beautiful sound, accompanied by the clip-clopping of horses’ hooves.

Amish children speak to one another and their parents all day.

How did this happen, what does it mean, and what does it say to us?

The Amish refuse to own trucks and computers, and phones but use them or pay others. They seem on the surface to be a rigid, almost authoritarian patriarchy, but they are far from that.

I’ve been involved with technology ever since computers came into the lives of writers. I wrote all my books on computers, have used cell phones for years, and always considered Steve Jobs the most brilliant of modern heroes.

He made so much of my life possible, from my writing to my photography and my blog, in so many ways.

I’ve used technology all my life, yet I never thought about it as much as I should have or in ways that I might have.

After all, I wrote for Wired Magazine soon after it was created, then for Rolling Stone, and then for various publications as a media critic following the eruption of new media as it pushed out so much of the old.

I expected something very different than what I found when I met Moise and spent time on his farm and with other Amish men and their families. I think we all know the Amish stereotypes – the straw hats, bonnets, plain ways, horse-drawn wagons, refusal to let much of the modern world into their lives.

I found the stereotypes to be false and shallow. Because the Amish don’t have a public relations apparatus and never defend or explain themselves, most people know little about them beyond what they can see.

I thank Moise and members of his large family for talking about technology and the Amish and helping me begin to understand it.

What keeps drawing me to write about the Amish is that we have some of the world’s most advanced and ingrained technology.

And they have little of it. They use it but don’t own it. It gets into their work but rarely into their lives.

The Amish have made a great trade-off with the world: I would call it fewer distractions, much more satisfaction.

While we “English” have seen our communities ravaged by corporate greed, social media, new technologies, political divisions, hostile messaging platforms, trolls and conspirators, and boundless greed, the Amish embrace theirs with unconditional love, sacrifice, and support.

Imagine a life where neighbors pay your medical bills if you can’t; where church members from everywhere come hundreds of miles to build your home or your barn without pay in a few weeks and know that you will do the same for them.

They live without Western life’s cultural and societal obligations: no insurance or credit cards, there is a constant and reinforcing reliance on family, friends, and community members.

Hospital stays are paid for by the church members, who visit the sick religiously. Barns and homes damaged or destroyed by fire or storms are rebuilt by members of the community and not by insurance money, which the Amish are forbidden to buy,

The elderly are cared for by their families, and if necessary, by the church. They have no fear of aging; to them, it is the next step towards heaven.

Financial and personal counseling, if needed, is done by peers, not professionals.

Children are encouraged to leave home at age 16 and explore the world’s temptations, including any technology they want to use. Only two or three percent of the children who go out on Rumpspringa decide to leave their families and move elsewhere.

The restrictions on technology limit some of the things the Amish can do.

But they also leave room for a strong and constantly reinforced sense of community, a rock-solid sense of family, and a deep sense of security, communication, and contentment that has almost been lost in our bitterly divided, distracting, expensive, and mostly unfulfilled population.

For the Amish, their work is a call to faith, not a job.

Every Amish person I speak with says it’s a tradeoff they readily accept; they have no interest in copying our lives by letting technology penetrate the deepest part of their culture.

Almost everyone I talk to outside of the community tells me they could never bear to be an Amish person, yet they would give almost anything to be secure and fulfilled, and they long for a sense of community.

If we think they are confusing, spend a few hours talking to them about us. They cannot believe what we have allowed technology to do to our lives, our government, our children, our peace of mind.

The Amish are aware that they pay the price for their sacrifices if you want to call them. School ends in the 8th grade, and children have few viable job options outside of the community.

That seems to be okay with them.

Moise asked me one day, “can you imagine my children in the public schools?.”

No, I said, I cannot.

As importantly, I would be sad if that was forced upon them. It would ruin the calm, gentleness, and innocence that marks their children.

The kids I know who are not Amish are not nearly as peaceful, focused, and satisfied as these children tell me they are and seem to be, and yes, it is cheap and easy to write it off as brainwashing.

Our society is so chaotic and difficult we assume happy people must have been manipulated or brainwashed.

Their different communities choose amish elders; since they don’t appear on TV and join in debates or build up profiles on social media, they are free to govern and do their work.

They have no fear of being attacked by some vicious politician.

The kind of paralysis, show-boating, lying, and posturing now a feature of U.S. politics is unheard of in Amish culture.

Moise is an elder, and all he has to do is his job – helping people with questions of faith, confronting people who violate their faith.

I’ve met brainwashed people and see them on the news every night, and these children are not brainwashed in any way.

Kevin Kelly, my former boss and the co-founder of   Wired,  wrote a book a few years ago called What Technology Wants, a look into the future of the digital eruption.

One chapter of the book was called “The Lessons of Amish Hackers,” of whom there are apparently many. Kelly spent weeks talking to them and visiting with them.

Kelly was surprised, as I was, to find the Amish didn’t hate technology at all. Even the Old Amish, the very conservative purists (like Moise), appreciate technology, follow its growth, and use it when they need to advance their work.

Kelly found that Amish homes are full of geeks and hackers and kids tinkering with their own technologies.

“We are not fools,” said one of Moise’s cousins. “We do what we need to do to survive and protect our families.”

The Amish have learned how to use technology without letting it overwhelm their children, faith, and community, as they see has happened to the families of the outside world.

Just look, Jonathan, an Amish farmhand, told me, “what technology has done to your people and their children. We won’t let that happen.”

In his book, Kelly wrote that he is “convinced that the Amish are more content and satisfied as people than the rest of us fast-forward urban technophiles.”

In their deliberate constraint of technology,” he wrote, “they have figured out how to optimize an alluring combination of leisure, comfort, and certainty over the optimization of uncertain possibilities. The truth is that as the technium explodes with new self-made options, we find it harder to find fulfillment. How can we be fulfilled when we don’t know what is being filled.?”

Kelly has been one of the great seers of technology for decades now, and he hit it right on the nose in his chapter on the Amish. I was surprised by how similar his response to the Amish was to my own.

The Amish are thoughtful about technology, he discovered, in contrast to our mad rush to keep up with it and try to survive it. They saw the future; we didn’t.

We seem helpless to slow it down or control technology, and it is eating us alive. It becomes clearer by the day that technology has failed to uplift us, make our lives safer or easier, help our children, or protect our democracy from unraveling.

It has been a great boon to online marketers, who get richer by the hour, and bigots and extremists, who thrive in this unpoliced world.

What the Amish set out to do is to control the technology in their lives, not to hate it or ban it. They chose to be thoughtful about it. We didn’t; it turns out. People bring devices into their homes – Alexa, Ipads, computers, TikTok – as if they were boxes of tissue paper; there is almost no thought about the consequences of inviting these powerful creations into their homes.

The digital Age promised us better than this, and since the Amish never embraced the digital age, they are not frightened, disappointed, or angry about the ugly trail it is leaving.

Kelly and the people at Wired never foresaw Facebook or Twitter or the legions of trolls and the countless hate and conspiracy sites. The bad genies are out of the bottle, and we look the other way.

The Amish culture is different from ours. It has plenty of troubles and challenges, but it has delivered every single thing it promised for five hundred years.

To some, that suggests they are evil and iron-fisted, that they must be doing something wrong to be happier than we are.

To others, it suggests they are doing something right, and it is us who are lost.

The Amish know precisely what is being “filled” in their lives:

Jesus, community, family, faith, humility, and a deep sense of moral commonality.

“Wary of the impact of certain forms of technology,”  writes Donald B. Kraybill in The Riddles Of The Amish, “the Amish have categorically rejected things like televisions and video cameras. In other cases, they have been willing to negotiate selective use of telephones, electricity, cards, and other types of technologies.”

It’s true that technology brings things and takes things away.

It seems that we let it take too many things away in exchange for the things it brought. For most Americans, that means the opportunity to buy things more easily than ever, play games,  and make the rich even richer.

The Amish, anxious to preserve what they love, have kept technology at bay and protected their children from it while carefully exploiting it when it serves them and advances their interests.

I am somewhat taken aback by how savvy and intelligent these people are; those hats and bonnets and horse-drawn carriages fooled me. They have held it together, even as we appear to be losing it.

Technology, it turns out,  is at the center of this revelation

Whenever I talk to Moise and visit his farm, I think of Wendell Berry, the author, poet, farmer, and eloquent advocate of minimalism. Moise is not eloquent; he is no poet.

But he, like Berry, is a committed minimalist.

But he also argues passionately that our embrace of technology is destroying the land and the world and ravaging people’s peace of mind and quality of life –  the idea of fulfillment that the Amish seem to have preserved.

“The aim of industrialization technology,” Berry writes, “has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands.”

Without animals, says Berry, and with too many machines, “something essential is removed from the minds of the farmers.”

Like the Amish, Berry is a deep thinker and farmer who works his farm old-fashioned using horses instead of tractors, very much like the Amish. You can’t work or farm alone, he says; there must be some support system.

When I connect Berry’s powerful writing with Moise and his way of life, I can clearly see the almost ecstatic sense of fulfillment and timelessness and love of nature that comes with a minimal amount of technology.

That is Berry’s genius, and it is also the genius of the Amish, who choose faith and fulfillment and family over money. Our culture chooses money over everything, including faith, fulfillment, and family.

By working with animals, the Amish elevate people over machines.

They make the cost of production low, but not for profit, for the community, for their children.  And for God.

They don’t work alone; there is a vast support system of sons and daughters, cousins and in-laws, brothers and sisters, and every single member of their church.

Because they don’t use cellphones, computers, Ipads, cars, trucks, and hired workers and tractors, they cement their ties to family and community. Everyone is in it together; everyone is essential to the other; no one is nearly alone.

They don’t waste time and energy arguing with one another.

Because they reject debt, electricity, phone bills, insurance, and labor costs, they live in simplicity and safety. They live without the burden of owing things to other people.

They pay their bills instantly and won’t rest until they do.

Theirs is not a perfect world by any means, but it is a secure and connected world. They know few of the terrors that modern life in America takes for granted.

They are adamant about opposing media technologies; they abhor the values and images of mass media society.

That line seems non-negotiable.

The very thing we most use media for is banned from Amish homes and workplaces. You will never see Fox News or CNN broadcasting bad or disturbing news around the clock while you buy some donuts or pies in their sheds or kitchens.

When it comes to technology, the difference between them and us is that they use technology with great care and caution, convinced of its danger to the social fabric.

We use technology to sell things we don’t need, to help destroy the fragile earth, to send countless and mostly empty messages to each other and strangers, and to rip our social fabric to pieces.

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“A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.” — Wendell Berry.