The Unz Review - Mobile

The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection

A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media
 iSteve Blog
The Amish Are Becoming a Socially Constructed Biological Race

Email This Page to Someone


 Remember My Information



=>

Over at Taki’s Magazine, my new column is about the Amish as an example of how nature and nurture interact with each other in ways that the postmodernist orthodoxy can’t begin to fathom:

The conventional wisdom about how race is just a social construct is back in the news with the endless excoriations of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. Sadly, the term “social construct” is usually used as an excuse to stop thinking: just announce that scientists have proven that race is socially constructed and you can shut down all cognitive processes without worry that you’ll get in trouble for crimethink.

Yet, as with all thoughtful considerations of nature and nurture, the notion of “social construction” can yield fruitful paradoxes. If social construction is as powerful as its enthusiasts claim, how could it not affect human beings genetically? If a social group constructs a new ideology about who should marry whom, for instance, how would that not alter future lineages and gene frequencies?

For example, America has witnessed over the last ten generations the socially planned breeding of a new endogamous extended family, a fast-growing proto-race that now numbers over 200,000 and is currently on pace to double every 21 years: the Amish.

Read the whole thing there.

 

12 Comments to "The Amish Are Becoming a Socially Constructed Biological Race"

Commenters to Ignore
...to Follow
Endorsed Only
[Filtered by Reply Thread]
  1. The concept of the Amish becoming more Amish over time makes sense as those who don’t like that way of life “boil off” and leave an increasingly concentrated residue over time.

    Another example of self-selection: north of Hadrian’s wall and south of Hadrian’s wall. The wall had many gates through which traders and immigrants could pass. North of the wall was an impoverished nation of herdsmen. South of the wall was the Roman Empire. One can surmise that those who wanted freedom in a lawless environment gravitated north and those who preferred an orderly and more prosperous life in submission to Roman rule gravitated south.

    The people who chose to live north of the wall are the ancestors of today’s American Scots-Irish, who also chose to live in a war zone in northern Ireland and then later to live in frontier America among hostile Indians.

    • Replies:
    Reply More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments
  2. Anyone who is curious about how the Amish live would be well-served to buy an issue of The Budget. It’s the New York Times of Amish-dom, with correspondents from every Amish community in North America writing in with brief descriptions of their month. Correspondents vary in quality and content, but there are certain common threads: farm news and weather, notes of any visitor from other Amish colonies, (surprisingly frequent) accidents, poetry, recipes, exhortations to non-ostentatious spirituality, and occasional trivia gleaned from English eccentricity as they perceive it. I have a few distant relatives and friends who grew up Amish, and I’ve been bugging them for cast-off issues of The Budget ever since I learned to read. It’s an addiction. The prose is very much what one would expect from eight-grade educated people writing in their second language (a variation of German is spoken at home), but wit and a general sense of well-balancedness abound throughout.

    http://www.incontext.indiana.edu/2012/nov-dec/images/Fig2amish.gif

    Above is a map of Amish population dispersal. As Amish communities disperse, either because of disagreement, overcrowding, or some combination of the two, they move west. Historically, that’s been a move from Pennsylvania to Ohio to Indiana and beyond. The newer communities tend to be less prosperous and more conservative. Part of the reason for this is that Amish Country in PA and OH have dual advantages found in no other Amish area: incredible farmland and nearby big-city suburbs (Philly and Cleveland) with lucrative construction trades. Out west they find poorer land and fewer wealthy English desirous of Amish craftsmanship.

  3. “Another example of self-selection: north of Hadrian’s wall and south of Hadrian’s wall.”

    I’d be interested in how much self-selection the American border imposes on Mexicans in terms of criminal intent. My impression from reading Joseph Wambaugh’s Border Patrol nonfiction book Lines and Shadows is that in the 1960s and 1970s, liberal America was a more fun place to be a criminal than dictatorial Mexico, which was kind of a police state and there wasn’t much for criminals to make money off of because the Colombians dominated the big money drug biz. But, over my lifetime, that has reversed and America has become the land of long prison sentences while Mexico has become a gangster’s paradise.

  4. Soon the NYT will publish an article expressing fears about the lack of diversity among the Amish and quote a professor about the coming rise of an Amish Hitler.

  5. “Amish Are Becoming a Socially Constructed Biological Race”

    After ten generations of strong artificial selection, this probably should read “Have Become”.

    @Jeff W – Fro my surname (and residence in Northumberland) you can surmise I am of Scots-English border stock – but while the border certainly has had an influence, the situation is not quite as you describe.

    Hadrian’s Wall runs through England – it is an hour and a quarter’s drive from Hadrian’s wall to the Scottish border on the East side (North of where I am sitting). The Picts were not ‘The Scots’ – the Scots came from Ireland after Roman times. The Lowland Scots – ie. most Scots – were speakers of ‘Inglis’ (a Medieval Scottish dialect of English) not Gallic. And during the centuries of Border Reivers, there was still intermarriage across the national border – it was more like the Border was a distinct country separate from both England and Scotland.

    But there is indeed a very sharp change in dialect at the modern border – e.g. between Coldstream and Cornhill, on opposite sides of a bridge: between a rather nasal Border Scots, and the gentle gargling of North Northumbrian.

  6. Mike Zwick [AKA "Dahinda"]
    says:
         Show CommentNext New Comment

    “The Amish opted out of the productivity revolution. Farming efficiency has increased radically over American history, which is, on the whole, a terrific thing. ”

    Ironically, Amish farms are the most profitable farms in the country. Most farmers in the U.S. stay afloat through governement subsidies but the Amish rely on low overhead and cheap labor (their many children and banding together with other families).

    Also, I know a former Mennonite who’s parents left the Amish before he was born. He is now a part of the flourishing Gay community in the small city near where I live. I guess his family did not have the “AQ” to stay Amish!

  7. “are you going to cover Bilderger?”

    I thought that inspired me to a brilliant idea, but alas some bloody Brit beat me there.

    http://www.bilderbergfringefestival.co.uk/

  8. “Diversity”

    Isn’t there a black Amish guy on “Amish Mafia”.

    BTW, two parachute observation on the Amish/Mennonite/Plain people.

    While at the Philadelphia central market, I had ice cream at a stall — a big stall — run by them. I haven’t seen skinny to the point of poverty skinny white people in a long time, since watching a documentary on Cuba, as a matter of fact (a large percentage of the country folks there, the Guajiros, are white or mostly so).

    Also, there was a sort of strange symbiosis between Amish and the local African-American community. While the SWPLs were lined up to buy EVOO at the Italian run stalls, blacks formed lines to buy Amish smoked turkey wings and cured pork.

  9. Amazing — Sailer and Gustavo ‘Ask a Mexian’ Arellano under the same virtual roof.

  10. “Ironically, Amish farms are the most profitable farms in the country. Most farmers in the U.S. stay afloat through governement subsidies but the Amish rely on low overhead and cheap labor (their many children and banding together with other families).”

    Horses are cheaper than tractors and you don’t have to electric, car and cell phone payments.

  11. You guys have an idealized notion of the Amish.

    No cellphone payments? Ha…

Comments are closed.

Past
Classics
What Was John McCain's True Wartime Record in Vietnam?
Are elite university admissions based on meritocracy and diversity as claimed?
The “war hero” candidate buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam.