Acknowledging Children as Philosophical Thinkers

There are many versions of a story. Many sides and lenses that can distort, change, illuminate what is seen and unseen. What is heard and unheard. What is felt and unfelt. In the end, truth is but a facet of a diamond, a spark of ray from the sun, a forget-me-not flower seen from the eyes of a bee. What lives and breathes as reality is a perception, so who is to say what is possible and impossible?

~An Na, The Place Between Breaths

That's a bit of philosophy I like from a book I just finished reading. I don't know if this counts as philosophy, but it certainly seems a valuable truth our seven-year-old came up with:

Don't fall toward an angry cat or else you will get scratched.

This, on the other hand, definitely counts as philosophy. Our five-year-old, in response to his mom:

"Who is your favorite teacher at school?"

"Me. I'm a good example, which makes me a good teacher."

I mention philosophy because I love this article from Aeon. It captures my own thinking marvelously.

Philosophy with Children

Many elementary school-age children are wide open to life’s philosophical mysteries, lying awake at night thinking about questions such as whether God exists, why the world has the colours it does, the nature of time, whether dreams are real, why we die, and why we exist. . . . 

Yet despite our awareness that children wonder and ask questions, the deeper meaning of what they have to say is regularly dismissed by adults. We react to children’s big questions or expressions of philosophical thoughts by remarking on how cute or amusing they are (‘Kids say the darndest things’) or by dismissing them (‘She doesn’t understand what she’s saying’), not by taking them seriously.

Adults underestimate children’s capacities in general, and their capacities for serious thought in particular. . . . 

Even as childhood is idealised as an idyllic phase of life, children themselves have been cast as what psychologists and sociologists label ‘human becomings’ as opposed to human beings. Children are in the process of becoming fully human, but are not there yet. By contrast, adults are understood as complete human beings. As a result, we see children as ‘defective adults’, in the words of the cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik. . . . 

Being a child shouldn’t mean being treated as a mediocre thinker. . . . 

Philosophy isn’t confined to what goes on in colleges and universities: it predated these institutions, and it’s alive outside of them.

Philosophical wondering is part of being a human being. What is the right thing to do? Why do people have to die? Is this person really my friend? When we think about such questions, we’re doing philosophy, participating in a tradition that’s been around for thousands of years. Most adults who ponder philosophical questions aren’t professional philosophers, but that doesn’t disqualify them from engaging in philosophical enquiry. . . . 

Rather than teach philosophy, we try to do philosophy with children by creating spaces for them to explore the questions that interest them. . . . 

In these kinds of conversations, I am struck by the strengths that children bring to philosophical exploration, and particularly by their willingness and ability to approach these questions candidly and imaginatively. Although children’s early philosophical thinking reflects their newness to the practice, this newness also entails an openness to imagining an innovative range of possible solutions. . . . 

For children, philosophy is a profoundly imaginative and playful endeavour. . . . The writer John Banville refers to childhood as ‘a state of constantly recurring astonishment’ in which ‘at every other moment [the child] encounters something new and extraordinary’. . . . 

Adults and children both come to philosophical encounters with important capacities. Adults contribute life experience, conceptual sophistication, and a facility with language and reasoning. Children bring a fearlessness about thinking creatively, without worrying about making a mistake or sounding silly, and a willingness to share their thoughts openly.

Acknowledging children as philosophical thinkers in their own right gives them the opportunity, in a very real sense, to regard themselves differently, as valued independent thinkers. A 10-year-old recently commented about philosophy: ‘I like having my voice valued.’ These kinds of exchanges foster a recognition of children’s unique and important perspectives.

When adults genuinely listen to children, when our interactions with them are mutual, this challenges our preconceptions about children’s capabilities and limitations. Their distinctive points of view become more accessible to us, we’re able to take in what they have to say without prejudgment, and we become open to learning from them.

When I reflect on the meaning of childhood, for example, I recall one 10-year-old’s statement:

When you think about it, childhood and adulthood are just ideas people thought of, and then they put boundaries around these names to create something that isn’t actually real. There really is no such thing as ‘being a child’ or ‘being an adult.’ They’re just labels. We’re all people.

Children are not defective adults in the process of becoming fully human. They already are. And their thoughts and feelings are as valuable as anyone's.

When adults genuinely listen to children, when our interactions with them are mutual, this challenges our preconceptions about children’s capabilities and limitations. Their distinctive points of view become more accessible to us, we’re able to take in what they have to say without prejudgment, and we become open to learning from them.

As a youth services librarian, I do a lot of my philosophy with children through picture books. I'm pretty sure I tend to choose ones for storytime that are more thoughtful than most of my peers, ones often reserved for quieter, more intimate settings. This is not one of those, but I love it so much I feel the need to share anyway.

The Wolf, the Duck, and the Mouse

by Jon Klassen

Early one morning, a mouse met a wolf, and he was quickly gobbled up.

"Oh, woe!" said the mouse.

"Oh, me! Here I am, caught

in the belly of the beast.

I fear this is the end."

"Be quiet!" someone shouted.

"I'm trying to sleep."

The mouse shrieked, "Who's there?"

A light was lit. A duck lay in bed.

"Well?" said the duck.

"Oh," said the mouse.

"Is that all?" asked the duck.

"It's the middle of the night."

The mouse looked around.

"Well, out there it's morning."

"It is?" said the duck. "It's so hard to tell.

I do wish this belly had a window or two.

In any case, breakfast!"

The meal was delicious.

"Where did you get jam?" the mouse asked.

"And a tablecloth?"

The duck munched a crust.

"You'd be surprised what you find inside

of a wolf."

"It's nice," said the mouse.

"It's home," said the duck.

"You live here?"

"I live well! I may have been swallowed,

but I have no intention of being eaten."

For lunch they made soup.

The mouse cleared his throat.

"Do you miss the outside?"

"I do not! said the duck.

"When I was outside, I was afraid every day

wolves would swallow me up.

In here, that's no worry."

The duck had a point.

"Can I stay?" the mouse asked.

"Of course!" the duck said.

This called for a dance.

The ruckus inside made the wolf's stomach ache.

"Oh woe!" said the wolf. "Oh shame! Never

have I felt such aching and pain. Surely it must

have been something I ate."

The duck shouted up, "I have a cure!"

"You do?" asked the wolf.

"Yes! An old remedy sure to settle your

tummy. Eat a hunk of good cheese.

And a flagon of wine! And some

beeswax candles."

That night they feasted.

The duck made a toast. "To the health of the wolf!"

But the wolf felt worse.

"I feel like I'll burst. It hurts just to move."

A hunter heard the wolf moan.

He fired a shot but missed in the dark.

The duck called up, "Run! Run for our lives!"

The wolf tried to escape,

but he tripped

and got trapped in an

old oak tree's roots.

"Oh woe!" said the duck. "Oh doom!

What can we do? I fear this is the end."

The mouse stood up.

"We must fight. We must try.

Tonight we ride to defend out home."

"CHARGE!"

"Oh woe!" said the hunter. "Oh death!

The woods are full of evil and wraiths!"

He fled from the forest and never returned.

The wolf bowed down

to the duck and the mouse.

"You saved my life

when I thought not

to spare yours.

Ask a favor of me.

I will be glad to grant it."

Well,

you can guess what they asked for.

And that's why the wolf howls at the moon.

"Oh woe! Oh woe!"

Every night he howls at the moon.

"Oh woe!"

I also shared a bit of Klassen's newest book in The Science of Breathing.

Also in The Science of Breathing I shared a couple of short stories from Telephone Tales by Gianni Rodari. It's a bit like One Thousand and One Nights; a traveling salesman calls home each night and tells his daughter a bedtime story. It was published in Italy in 1962. My library's catalog describes it as: A collection of nearly seventy short and surreal stories told by Signor Bianchi, a traveling salesman, to his daughter over the telephone nightly. In my review I wrote: While not always carefully crafted stories, each tale is entertaining for its imagination and inventiveness. You never know what you're going to get.

My kids and I just got to a story that perfectly illustrates a philosophical principle I shared last post, You Belong to a Herd, from Eric Schwitzgebel. It's in an essay on the "golden rule," to treat others how you would want them to treat you. He asks why we should treat others well. His conclusion is, instead of trying to put yourself in their shoes, you should try to treat others how you would treat those you love most.

From "Imagining Yourself in Another's Shoes"

Care about me not because you can imagine what you would selfishly want if you were me. Care about me because you see how I am not really so different from others you already love. . . . 

People do, naturally, have concern and compassion for others around them. . . . 

Self to other is a huge moral and ontological divide. Family to neighbor, neighbor to fellow citizen--that's much less of a divide. . . . 

If you are one of those people who has trouble standing up for your own interests . . . offer the same kindness to yourself.

Seeing all people like you see those you love. Here's an example from Rodari:

"The Well at Cascina Piana"

Midway between Saronno and Legnano, at the edge of a great forest, stood Cascina Piana, which all in all consisted of three large farmhouses with three communal courtyards. Eleven families lived there. In Cascina Piana, there was only a single well for drawing water, and it was a strange sort of well, because there was a pulley to wrap a rope around, but there was neither rope nor chain. Each of the eleven families kept a rope, as well as a bucket at home, and anyone who wanted to draw water from the well would take down the rope, sling it over their arm, and take it to the well. Once they had a pail of water, they took the rope off the pulley and purposefully took it back home, where they hung it up for safekeeping.

Only one well and eleven ropes. And if you don't believe me, just go and ask around for yourself, and they'll tell you exactly as they told me that those eleven families simply didn't get along and were constantly making mischief against each other. Rather than pooling their funds and buying a nice strong chain that they could fasten to the pulley for everyone to use, they would have sooner filled in the well with dirt and weeds.

But then war broke out, and the men of Cascina Piana went off to fight, but not before telling their women a great many things, including a strict admonition not to let anyone steal their well ropes.

Next, came the German invasion. The men were far away, and the women were afraid, but the eleven ropes stayed hidden away in the safety of the eleven different homes.

One day, a little boy from Cascina went to the woods to gather a bundle of firewood and heard a groan coming from behind a hedge. It was a partisan, wounded in the leg, and the little boy ran to fetch his mother. The woman was frightened, and she wrung her hands, but then she said, "We'll take him home and keep him hidden. Let's just hope that someone helps your father, who's fighting as a soldier now, if he ever needs it. We don't know where he is or even if he's still alive."

They hid the partisan in the grain loft and sent for the doctor, saying it was for the elderly grandmother. The other women of Cascina, however, had seen the grandmother that very morning, healthy as a young rooster, and they guessed that something fishy was afoot. Before twenty-four hours had passed, the whole town knew that there was a wounded partisan in that grain loft, and a few old farmers were starting to say, "If the Germans find out, they'll come here and kill us all. We'll all come to a bad end."

But that's not how the women thought about it. They thought about their men, far away, and they thought that they, too, might well be injured and trying to hide, and they heaved deep sighs. On the third day, one woman took a salami from the hog they'd just butchered and brought it to Caterina, the woman who had hidden the partisan, and told her, "That poor man needs to recover his strength. Give him this salami."

A short while later, another woman arrived with a bottle of wine, then a third with a bag of yellow corn meal to make polenta, then a fourth with a chunk of lard, and before evening fell, all the women of Cascina had been to visit Caterina, and they'd all seen the partisan, and they'd all brought their gifts, wiping away a tear as they did.

And the whole time that it took the wound to heal, all eleven families who lived at Cascina treated the partisan like a son, making sure he wanted for nothing. When the partisan was healed, he went out into the courtyard to bask in the sun. He saw the well without a rope and was greatly astonished. The women blushed and explained to him that every family had a rope of its own, but they couldn't provide him with a satisfactory explanation of that odd state of affairs. They were tempted to tell him that they were all enemies, but this was no longer strictly true, because they had all suffered together, and together, they had helped the partisan. So even though they hadn't realized it yet, they'd all become friends and sisters, and there was no longer any reason to keep eleven different ropes for the well.

They decided to pool their funds and buy a single chain for all the families and to hook it permanently to the pulley. And so, they did. And the partisan drew the first bucket of water from the well, and it was something like the inauguration of a monument.

That same evening, the partisan, fully healed, set off again for the mountains.

"We'll take him home and keep him hidden. Let's just hope that someone helps your father, who's fighting as a soldier now, if he ever needs it." . . . They thought about their men, far away, and they thought that they, too, might well be injured and trying to hide, and they heaved deep sighs. . . . And the whole time that it took the wound to heal, all eleven families who lived at Cascina treated the partisan like a son, making sure he wanted for nothing.

Here's another bit of whimsy that probably doesn't count as philosophy, but I want to share it anyway because I enjoy it so. Lyrics from the song Wearing a Raincoat by They Might Be Giants.

Wearing a raincoat is flying around

In a plane made of a raincoat

But when you think of that you hurt your mind

And you'll need a friend to talk you down

Needing a friend to talk you down

Is food that comes from a pipe

But when you hate the food that comes from a pipe

You will turn to drugs to help you sleep

Turning to drugs to help you sleep

Will only lead to sleep

And sleeping is a gateway drug to being awake

Being awake, being awake again

Being awake is swimming around

In a lake of the undead

And the undead are like a bunch of friends

That demand constant attention

Demanding constant attention

Will only lead to attention

And once they have your attention

They use it to ask for attention

And once they have that attention

They use it to ask for attention

Wearing a raincoat is flying around

In a yellow rubber airplane made out of a raincoat

Yes, but when you think of that, you hurt your mind

And you'll need your mind for later on

Needing a mind for later on

Is a friend that comes at a price

But when you hate the friend that comes at a price

You will play the drums to help you sleep

No one except the writer is exactly sure what it means, but it teases at meaning so tantalizingly so as to be wonderful.

That's all the philosophy this post; now for other things that have caught my attention recently. First, two statuses I shared on Facebook one morning this week:

Two weeks left in the school year and I finally got our morning routine consistently adjusted to where we're not scrambling to avoid being tardy and always arriving at the last possible minute.

And:

I was so excited when I looked at my calendar this morning and realized I don't have to leave the house for anything (after school drop-off) and get to work entirely from home all day. The pandemic has spoiled me; returning to normalcy might hurt.

It's been an unusual year. I've mentioned recently that we're starting to get closer to something like normal. Yesterday the CDC declared fully vaccinated people can resume activities without wearing a mask or physically distancing. My library has resumed regular operating hours and most of our services. Here's an interesting graphic presented at our monthly board meeting yesterday.

Though, when I say "we" I mean my community and the U.S. Things are not going so well for much of the rest of the world.

Wealthy Nations’ Vaccine Spree Obscures Global Covid Misery

Mass vaccinations, falling case counts and waning coronavirus deaths in a few wealthy countries threaten to obscure ongoing worldwide suffering from the pandemic that’s likely to last for months, and perhaps years, to come.

That’s Carl Bildt’s worry as the new special envoy to the World Health Organization-backed effort set up last year to dispatch vaccines and other weapons against Covid-19. Suppressing the virus that’s advancing in India and beyond depends on persuading rich nations to share excess doses and help close a $19 billion funding gap, Bildt said in an interview.

An independent review of the international Covid-19 response echoed Bildt’s concerns Wednesday, calling for Group of Seven countries to commit 60% of the money needed this year. The report urged high-income nations to provide more than 2 billion doses to poorer regions by the middle of 2022.

“The risk is that if people in the U.K., EU or U.S. think the worst is over, the attention will shift,” he said. “The worst isn’t over.” . . . 

More international coordination is required to fix the inefficiencies and inequities, according to Robert Yates, executive director of the Centre for Universal Health at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.

“We’re not in good shape here,” Yates said. “Vaccines should be going to the countries and the age groups most in need, but that’s not happening.”

Global health officials stress that everyone is vulnerable if the virus keeps advancing, increasing the risk of concerning variants and prolonging the pandemic. Getting health workers immunized in developing nations should be the focus, said Bildt, who was named to the post at the end of March.

“As long as this is a pandemic that is spreading like wildfire in parts of the world, we’re not safe,” Bildt said. . . . 

“The rich countries through the likes of the G-7 and G-20 must come up with this money,” said Chatham House’s Yates. “That’s a no-brainer. By vaccinating the world we potentially save the economy trillions of dollars.”

We must remember that we're all in this together.

Which is going to be a struggle, since we can't even seem to grasp the concept of all being in this together at our more local level.

The Gas Shortage Is Another Recent Example of Americans Making Things Worse for One Another

As you’ve no doubt heard, a ransomware attack on a major gasoline pipeline has shut down a key supply conduit for fuel along the Atlantic Coast. That shutdown has led indirectly to gas stations running out of fuel, prompting GasBuddy users to report outages. . . . 

Remember when we mentioned that the pipeline shutdown led “indirectly” to shortages? That’s because a lot of what’s happening with gasoline at the moment is a function not of an actual supply problem but of the perception of a supply problem. People are rushing to get as much gas as possible out of concern it will become scarce, and that’s driving scarcity. . . . 

All of this probably sounds familiar. Last year, there were similar shortages of essential supplies that were in large part a function of panicky consumers. At the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, stores ran out of hand sanitizer. At multiple points, including in the spring of 2020 and then later that summer, people began to hoard paper products such as paper towels. There were some supply issues, but the main problem was just people buying too much. . . . 

There was a lesson we should have taken from that. If everyone were just to chill out and take only what they needed, things would have been better for everyone. . . . 

In broad strokes, this repeated pattern appears to be a function of a country that has no chill. Asked to just hold off on buying gasoline, people are filling and stacking up containers of gasoline in their trunks. Asked not to clear out the paper towel aisle at Wegman’s, people can’t resist. The response is less “we’re all in this together” than “if need be, I can probably fuel a rocket to Mars.” Instead of e pluribus unum, we’re defaulting to unum first.

There’s a more obvious example still, of course. For a year now, Americans have been asked to make small sacrifices aimed at protecting public health: reducing unnecessary interactions, wearing face masks, getting vaccines to prevent the coronavirus. And for a year now, some section of Americans has said, “pass.” The idea that wearing a mask or getting vaccinated might be of benefit to someone else is often framed as being an unacceptable or offensive violation of personal sovereignty. U.S. senators shrug at the idea that you should care if your neighbor dies of the coronavirus. Other politicians make hay out of their opposition to mandated mask-wearing, using those mandates — themselves a function of the density of people who otherwise refuse to wear one — as a way to trumpet their liberty bona fides.

I shared last year The Gun Debates Prepared Me for America's COVID-19 Response:

As a shooting survivor who works to educate people about gun violence and advocate for gun reform in the United States, I have spent years trying to convince people that it is worth making personal sacrifices for the sake of the collective good. That’s how I knew that if surviving this pandemic was riding on the event that people would willingly choose to give up a small amount of personal freedom to protect someone else, we were already in a losing battle.

And now we see:

There Have Been, On Average, 10 Mass Shootings In The U.S. Each Week This Year

We're just 18 weeks into 2021, and already the U.S. has experienced 194 mass shootings. That averages out to about 10 a week.

The tally comes from the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are shot or killed, excluding the shooter. . . . 

Here are the 11 attacks that took place just this weekend alone . . . 

It's all connected. We have to be willing to make small, personal sacrifices for the collective good.

And now a section of science fiction. Well, okay, nonfiction, but technology that has been the territory of speculative fiction until now.

Man Who Is Paralyzed Communicates By Imagining Handwriting

An experimental device that turns thoughts into text has allowed a man who was left paralyzed by an accident to construct sentences swiftly on a computer screen.

The man was able to type with 95% accuracy just by imagining he was handwriting letters on a sheet of paper . . . 

The device would be most useful to someone who could neither move nor speak . . . 

The system relies on electrodes surgically implanted near the part of the brain that controls movement. In previous studies, participants had learned to control a computer cursor or robotic arm by imagining they were moving their hands.

This time, Henderson, Shenoy and a team of scientists had the man imagine he was writing individual letters by hand while a computer monitored the electrical activity in his brain.

Eventually, the computer learned to decode the distinct pattern of activity associated with every letter of the alphabet as well as several symbols.

Once that process is complete, Shenoy says, "We can determine if the letter you wrote is an A or a B or a C and then plop that up on the screen and you're able to spell out words and sentences and so forth one letter at a time."

In previous experiments, participants had been able to use their thoughts to "point and click" at letters on a screen. But that approach was much slower than imagined handwriting.

Also, because the new system relies on familiar thoughts, the participant was able to use it almost immediately.

I find this amazing.

I haven't really ever paid much attention to Elon Musk or his enterprises, but this caught my eye.

The Profound Potential of Elon Musk’s New Rocket

Let me underscore just how transformative, and how profound, Starship could prove to be to our future in space, and to our understanding of life. . . . It’s unlike anything NASA has made before. It represents an entirely new concept of space operations, and the impact it very well may have on science is extraordinary. . . . 

SpaceX, taking the last $135 million, put forward a radically different concept—Starship. It would be an entirely reusable, two-stage-to-orbit, heavy-lift launch system powered by methane-oxygen engines with a capacity about midway between the Space Launch System and the more powerful Saturn V Apollo moon rocket. Because of Starship’s reusability, it would incur less than 1 percent the cost of either. Those features, by themselves, would be world-changing, but there is more: Starship would be designed to be refueled in low-Earth orbit by tanker Starships, allowing it to proceed further, for example to Mars, where its propulsion system could be refueled by propellant readily made from the Red Planet’s abundant water ice and carbon-dioxide atmosphere. . . . 

In February 2020, I travelled with my wife, Hope, to Boca Chica, a small city in Texas with a lot of low-lying land, near the Mexican border, where SpaceX is developing Starship and rapidly expanding. Musk wants to incorporate a town there and call it “Starbase.” A mariachi band was playing outside, entertaining long lines of people waiting to apply for jobs. Hundreds were already at work in the complex. Soon there would be thousands. It was apparent that Musk was not building a ship, he was building a shipyard. In the course of its 30-year Shuttle program, NASA built five Space Shuttles, one every six years on average. On our visit, Musk was gearing up to build Starship prototypes at a rate of one per month, which he’s actually done.

For a space program to be supported, not by three or four flight vehicles, but by scores of them—and eventually hundreds—is revolutionary. Starship ascents will be counted in rates of flights per week, or even per day. The Shuttle’s average flight rate of four per year, meant that, with a program annual cost of $4 billion per year, the actual cost of a Shuttle flight was a whopping $1 billion. A Starship transorbital railroad, employing 5,000 people, would cost about that much per year. Musk is aiming to manage 200 flights, which is possible with 20 operational Starships each turned around to fly again every 36 days. That would work out to $5 million per flight, 1/200th the cost of the Shuttle with five times its payload, for a thousandfold improvement overall.

The benefits of Starship for both robotic and human exploration are hard to overstate. Mars’ recent arrival, Perseverance, can deliver one ton to the Red Planet’s surface. Starship, with its 100-ton capacity, can land a battalion of robots. These could include many Perseverance-like explorers, and much bigger versions of the Ingenuity helicopter. Smaller rovers armed with high-resolution cameras could map the area, transmit to Earth, and allow millions of citizen scientists to walk the landscape in virtual reality and point the machines toward anything interesting. Construction robots, too, possibly humanoid in form, could build a Mars base capable of converting Martian carbon dioxide and water ice into methane-and-oxygen rocket propellant to store in tanks. With such a set-up, fully supplied in advance, Starships could start sending humans. 

It's beginning to look like he really is going to change the world in meaningful, history-making ways (and not just through this pursuit).

Not another technological development, but a good attitude to adopt concerning them:

To Be More Tech-Savvy, Borrow These Strategies from the Amish

‘The Amish communities of Pennsylvania, despite the retro image of horse-drawn buggies and straw hats, have long been engaged in a productive debate about the consequences of technology,’ noted Wired magazine in 1999. In 2013, an NPR reporter observed that the ‘Amish community [is] not anti-technology, just more thoughtful’. Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of Wired, spent time geeking out with ‘Amish hackers’ and peeking into workshops whose modern machines are powered by compressed air for his book What Technology Wants (2010). He concluded that: ‘In any discussion about the merits of avoiding the addictive grip of technology, the Amish stand out as offering an honourable alternative.’

The foundation of this ‘honourable alternative’ is to not adopt every single new technology, or use cars, phones and social media as soon as they become the norm. Instead, the Amish make slow and deliberate decisions as a collective. Rather than rushing optimistically or blindly into the future, they move forward cautiously, open but sceptical.

As it happens, Amish communities are home to plenty of tinkerers, hackers and technophiles. Just like early adopters who read the news online when ‘the internet’ was still a strange term, they rigged up light bulbs, bought telephones and surfed the web before their peers or church leaders knew much about them. Due to the decentralised nature of Amish religious life (there’s no Amish pope), no one set a policy for addressing these novelties. Contrary to what outsiders might expect, early adopters often aren’t censored, nor necessarily discouraged.

Nonetheless, in their small, tight-knit communities, neighbours and church leaders will take note. Many Amish communities shunned car ownership after watching car-owning families drive away for the weekend and play a reduced role in small-town life. Many banned phones in the house once their threat to the cherished tradition of neighbourly visits became clear. . . . 

It’s rare that the church bans a technology outright. (In some cases, bishops do make these decisions – although most communities that Yoder knows of rely on conversations among church members that lead to votes and agreements.) . . . 

‘The Amish adopt technology selectively,’ writes Donald Kraybill, professor of Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, in The Riddle of Amish Culture (1989), ‘hoping that the tools they use will build community rather than harm it.’

Remember the common good. Always remember the common good.