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Scripture guided their forbears to reject electricity and cars, writes Josiah Neufeld, but these modern Mennonites spurn our tech-obsessed culture for other reasons. Can these neo-Luddites help us with our own smartphone struggles?
Marcus Rempel has a pair of oxen he thinks of as friends. On a mild day in February near Beausejour, Man., the wiry 42-year-old is wearing blue jeans and a locally made woolen vest. He rips open a hay bale with pitchfork and flips a forkful over the wire fencing to his ruminant companions. “My two underperforming oxen,” he says affectionately as he leans on his pitchfork. The slanting winter sunlight lights up his breath.
Rempel bought the steers when they were newborns with the intention of training them to do work around the farm. He tried cultivating with them, but it was tricky business. You needed one person to lead the animals and another to control the machine. One steer was stronger, so they didn’t pull evenly. He was still trying to get the hang of it when the wooden yoke burned in a barn fire. So he turned his attention to mowing hay with a tractor pulling an antique mower he’d purchased from a guy who restores vintage machinery as lawn ornaments.
It was slow going. But slow has always been part of the plan.
Ten years ago Rempel and his wife, Jennifer Nast-Kolb, helped launch an experiment in simple living. Together with a group of friends who wanted to grow their own food and reduce their energy footprint, they bought 144 acres of farmland in the crook of the Brokenhead River. The collective built an energy-efficient three-storey straw bale house and began accumulating an assortment of 1970s-era farm equipment from auctions or neighbours’ machine sheds.
Today the community grows its own vegetables, raises and butchers its own meat and milks a herd of goats to make cheese. They’ve grown crops of wheat and oats, managed beehives and raised chickens, ducks, rabbits and pigs.
Rempel and his community belong to a movement of modern Mennonites who are choosing to resist the advances of technology by embracing old-fashioned skills. But they’re doing it for different reasons than their bearded and kerchiefed kin.
Rather than quote scripture, these neo-Luddites point to humans’ impact on the natural world, about the breakdown of interdependent relationships, about the injustices of global industrial capitalism. They reject the dogmatism of their forbears and mainstream society’s obsession with technological innovation.
Nearly everyone these days struggles with finding ways to manage or limit the technology that is rapidly changing our lives. We control our kids’ screen time, fast from Facebook, cycle to the office or join a letter-writing club.
But Rempel and his friends are digging down to a soil that’s deeper than the DIY fads of hipster culture. They’re tapping into their own contrarian Mennonite heritage.
***
Aiden Enns has a complex relationship with technology. Friday, March 25, 2016. Sun/Postmedia Network
To many outsiders, the word Mennonite conjures images of antiquated horse-and-buggy-riding Bible thumpers. “We ain’t really quaint, so please don’t point and stare/ We’re just technologically impaired,” parody artist Weird Al Yankovic gently mocked in his 1996 song, Amish Paradise.
Mennonites and the Amish are distant cousins. But, with the exception of a few small groups such as Old Order Mennonites, most Mennonites today are visibly indistinguishable from other Canadians you’ll find browsing the aisles of Best Buy.
Mennonites migrated from Russia to North America in two major waves. The first group came in the 1870s, seeking a country where they could avoid military service and educate their children without state interference. These were more conservative Mennonites, including Old Order Mennonites.
But the Mennonites who stayed in Russia embraced higher education and kept pace with the modernizing trends of European culture. During the political turmoil that followed the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution, a second wave of Mennonites fled to North America. Most arrived in Canada as penniless refugees. They turned to farming to survive, not as a matter of religious conviction.
Marcus Rempel’s grandmother came with the second migration. She weeded her own garden and butchered her own hogs out of necessity. She was proud to see her children get an education, find jobs in the city and buy their farmer sausage in the grocery store.
Rempel grew up in the suburbs of Winnipeg. His family belongs to the class of urban Mennonites who work for non-profits, law firms or IT companies. They drive fuel-efficient cars, attend churches with worship bands, have university degrees and adore the novels of renegade Mennonite author Miriam Toews. Growing up, Rempel learned about the horse-and-buggy Mennonites mainly from books. He thought they were weird. But also fascinating.
***
So what motivated Rempel to take up farming with old-fashioned tools? I asked him this question in his sunny kitchen while he pounds cabbage for sauerkraut in a 10-gallon crock using a wooden baseball bat.
Rempel was a university student working on a degree in occupational therapy when he first tried his hand at planting vegetables in an urban garden plot. “I remember thinking, ‘If there were some way I could do this kind of thing for a living, I’d quit school tomorrow’,” he says. A few years later, he, Nast-Kolb and their two daughters spent a couple of months in Georgia working with community of Christians who live together in a rural setting and welcome refugees. They came back to Canada with visions of doing something similar.
In Winnipeg it wasn’t hard to find a group of like-minded people who also wanted to live closer to the source of their food and to reduce their reliance on exploitative energy sources. One member of the community worked as a climate change specialist for the province of Manitoba. He had seen first-hand how burning fossil fuels was contributing to climate change. Rempel himself had done advocacy work with First Nations communities in northern Manitoba whose traditional hunting and trapping lands had been destroyed by hydro dams.
David Braun, a social worker who’s part of the collective, figures he’s doing what Mennonites have always done: resisting co-option by the system. He looks around him and sees powerful entities who pollute the world for profit and control. Braun left his conservative community of Holdeman Mennonites when he was a young adult. Since then he’s been part of other more free-spirited experiments in farming and community. He attends a non-denominational church, though he describes himself as “uncomfortable with religion.”
Rempel likes to call his community’s attempts to grow their own food, use animals for labour and reduce their energy consumption “foolish renunciations.” He got the term from Ivan Illich, a maverick Catholic priest and philosopher who owned little and critiqued modern systems of education, medicine and economic development in the 1970s. Illich argued that Christians should “renounce the powers of changing the world” and learn habits of simplicity and subsistence.
“They’re almost more symbolic acts that free our imagination than they are serious attempts to change the system,” says Rempel. He suspects it’s probably too late to save humanity from itself anyway. When cheap energy runs out, his oxen will come in handy.
In the meantime, he’s doing what he loves. “The reason we make our own cheese, or butcher our own hogs or farm with simpler tools and more complex cooperation with one another is that in these activities we can practice love in a way we cannot when we buy our food from the grocery store or climb aboard a single operator machine to accomplish the work that previously could be only achieved by humans working on the ground together,” he explains.
***
Anti-modern currents existed throughout the 20th century, says Royden Loewen chair of Mennonite studies at the University of Winnipeg. He points to the fin de siècle romantic poets, the counter-culture hippies of the 1960s, and the Old Order Mennonites who to this day drive steel-wheeled tractors.
The last are the subject of Loewen’s forthcoming book, Horse and Buggy Genius. Old Order Mennonites don’t own cars or cell phones, they farm with simple machinery, light their homes with lanterns and preach piety and pacifism. It’s easy to label them old-fashioned or backwards, but they offer a valuable critique of our 21st-century western society, Loewen says. They “leave a tiny carbon footprint on this earth, they care for their own, they respect the elderly, they reject factory farming.”
Old Order Mennonites “emphasize the community over the individual, the local over the national, simplicity over profit and peace over violence,” Loewen writes in the introduction to his book. They resist “much of what we ‘moderns’ assume to be true and good: personal achievement, ease, progress, ever-increasing knowledge, certainty, and the idea that society is healthiest when its citizens act in self-interest.”
These sound like words Rempel might use to describe his own community.
***
Aiden Enns is another neo-Luddite with Mennonite roots. The 54-year-old edits a magazine on activism and spirituality called Geez. He refuses to own a cell phone, sleeps in an insulated garage that he and his partner heat with a woodstove, and uses a homemade composting toilet.
But he makes his morning coffee with a gleaming Italian espresso-maker that cost him $2,500 at a gourmet restaurant supply store. It seems like a contradiction.
“Are you for or against technology? That question doesn’t apply anymore,” he tells me, crinkling the corners of his blue eyes. “We need technology whether we like it or not.” While I interview him, he makes me a coffee with his high-end machine.
Enns aligns himself with radical activists like Derek Jensen, who think humans are destroying the earth and that our civilization is bankrupt and should be undermined. Enns does his part by publishing a subversive magazine, boycotting drive-throughs and going to the bathroom in a bucket of sawdust.
Instead of asking whether technology is good, we should be asking ourselves which technologies make us more human and which ones dehumanize us, Enns says.
I watch him tamp freshly ground coffee into the chrome portafilter of his espresso machine. “This is 30 pounds of pressure,” he says, leaning on the silver tamper. “I get the bathroom scale out if I’m not sure.”
Most people use a “super technologically intense way” to get to the grocery store, Enns says, “they drive a car instead of walking.” That’s because our capitalist economy must constantly invent new conveniences to lure more consumers. If we always take the easy way, we’ll will lose our ability to do the things that give meaning to life, he says.
He holds up his hand-crank coffee grinder that pulverizes the beans with a carbon steel burr. “I wanted to feel the coffee, I wanted to be part of it,” he says. “I didn’t want to serve the machine. A lot of these things you have to serve them. I wanted to work together with the machine.”
Enns has no desire to be tethered to a cell phone. He’d rather make plans ahead of time and then follow through. It keeps the relationships more honest, he says. And it cultivates patience.
That patience came in handy when he first brought home his new espresso maker. The first cup of coffee tasted lousy.
“I thought, should I bring it back? Should I get some guru to come make it for me? Should I run to a coffee shop for some predictable coffee? Or should I figure it out? Figure it out. That’s my answer for life. That’s how you can live a full life with modest means.”
So Enns invited over a barista friend to give him a tutorial.
The coffee-making ritual is Enns’s antidote to the take-away culture he’s come to loathe. He believes people are destroying the Earth for the sake of convenience. Drive-throughs “make us lazy and car dependent and assume we’re idiots.” When they became popular, he vowed never to use one. Then he softened and vowed to stop vowing things because it reminded him of his fundamentalist Mennonite upbringing. “I grew up promising to love Jesus,” he says with a little laugh. “I’m trying to be less binary in most aspects of my life, to see the oneness of everything.”
Enns is turned off by the religious strictures of the Amish and Old Order Mennonites, but he admires their willingness to take a stance on technology, to evaluate its impact on their communities.
He likes to reference the philosopher Albert Borgmann. Borgmann doesn’t think we should stifle innovation or give up technological aids, but rather learn to choose those technologies that enable us to focus on the encounters that make us the most human. Encounters that bring our attention to the present moment and to the world around us, such as spending time with your children or riding a horse, Enns says.
***
Mennonites aren’t the only ones who resist society’s fervent embrace of every new invention. But when Mennonites do it, they have unique resources to turn to.
Paul and Elisa Barkman spent two years living on the community farm in Beausejour in a school bus they renovated into a home. Neither of them grew up on a farm. When they asked Paul’s grandparents to teach them how to butcher a pig, the grandparents were thrilled. “They still have lots of ritual,” says Elisa. “I remember the very first time we came to butcher. A few hours in, Paul’s grandma comes into the area where we’re cutting up meat bringing a bottle of wine … and then everybody drinks out of the same wine glass … It’s neat getting to learn from them, and for them it’s also very validating.”
One thing that separates the community in Beausejour from Old Order Mennonites is that the new community refuses to fix their principles in a set of unbending rules. No one’s going to get excommunicated for buying a new laptop.
Recently Rempel gave in to his parents’ complaints that he was too hard to contact. He asked his brother to help him shop for a cell phone. While we pounded sauerkraut in his kitchen the new phone was on the counter next to us, pinging, announcing incoming messages. Each time, Rempel stops working and tries to figure out how to answer the texts. “You know,” he says with a wry smile, “It’s amazing how quickly I can go from feeling kind of smug about not having one of these to feeling like I’m pretty cool because I have one.”
Josiah Neufeld is a Winnipeg writer.
查看原文...
Marcus Rempel has a pair of oxen he thinks of as friends. On a mild day in February near Beausejour, Man., the wiry 42-year-old is wearing blue jeans and a locally made woolen vest. He rips open a hay bale with pitchfork and flips a forkful over the wire fencing to his ruminant companions. “My two underperforming oxen,” he says affectionately as he leans on his pitchfork. The slanting winter sunlight lights up his breath.
Rempel bought the steers when they were newborns with the intention of training them to do work around the farm. He tried cultivating with them, but it was tricky business. You needed one person to lead the animals and another to control the machine. One steer was stronger, so they didn’t pull evenly. He was still trying to get the hang of it when the wooden yoke burned in a barn fire. So he turned his attention to mowing hay with a tractor pulling an antique mower he’d purchased from a guy who restores vintage machinery as lawn ornaments.
It was slow going. But slow has always been part of the plan.
Ten years ago Rempel and his wife, Jennifer Nast-Kolb, helped launch an experiment in simple living. Together with a group of friends who wanted to grow their own food and reduce their energy footprint, they bought 144 acres of farmland in the crook of the Brokenhead River. The collective built an energy-efficient three-storey straw bale house and began accumulating an assortment of 1970s-era farm equipment from auctions or neighbours’ machine sheds.
Today the community grows its own vegetables, raises and butchers its own meat and milks a herd of goats to make cheese. They’ve grown crops of wheat and oats, managed beehives and raised chickens, ducks, rabbits and pigs.
Rempel and his community belong to a movement of modern Mennonites who are choosing to resist the advances of technology by embracing old-fashioned skills. But they’re doing it for different reasons than their bearded and kerchiefed kin.
Rather than quote scripture, these neo-Luddites point to humans’ impact on the natural world, about the breakdown of interdependent relationships, about the injustices of global industrial capitalism. They reject the dogmatism of their forbears and mainstream society’s obsession with technological innovation.
Nearly everyone these days struggles with finding ways to manage or limit the technology that is rapidly changing our lives. We control our kids’ screen time, fast from Facebook, cycle to the office or join a letter-writing club.
But Rempel and his friends are digging down to a soil that’s deeper than the DIY fads of hipster culture. They’re tapping into their own contrarian Mennonite heritage.
***
Aiden Enns has a complex relationship with technology. Friday, March 25, 2016. Sun/Postmedia Network
To many outsiders, the word Mennonite conjures images of antiquated horse-and-buggy-riding Bible thumpers. “We ain’t really quaint, so please don’t point and stare/ We’re just technologically impaired,” parody artist Weird Al Yankovic gently mocked in his 1996 song, Amish Paradise.
Mennonites and the Amish are distant cousins. But, with the exception of a few small groups such as Old Order Mennonites, most Mennonites today are visibly indistinguishable from other Canadians you’ll find browsing the aisles of Best Buy.
Mennonites migrated from Russia to North America in two major waves. The first group came in the 1870s, seeking a country where they could avoid military service and educate their children without state interference. These were more conservative Mennonites, including Old Order Mennonites.
But the Mennonites who stayed in Russia embraced higher education and kept pace with the modernizing trends of European culture. During the political turmoil that followed the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution, a second wave of Mennonites fled to North America. Most arrived in Canada as penniless refugees. They turned to farming to survive, not as a matter of religious conviction.
Marcus Rempel’s grandmother came with the second migration. She weeded her own garden and butchered her own hogs out of necessity. She was proud to see her children get an education, find jobs in the city and buy their farmer sausage in the grocery store.
Rempel grew up in the suburbs of Winnipeg. His family belongs to the class of urban Mennonites who work for non-profits, law firms or IT companies. They drive fuel-efficient cars, attend churches with worship bands, have university degrees and adore the novels of renegade Mennonite author Miriam Toews. Growing up, Rempel learned about the horse-and-buggy Mennonites mainly from books. He thought they were weird. But also fascinating.
***
So what motivated Rempel to take up farming with old-fashioned tools? I asked him this question in his sunny kitchen while he pounds cabbage for sauerkraut in a 10-gallon crock using a wooden baseball bat.
Rempel was a university student working on a degree in occupational therapy when he first tried his hand at planting vegetables in an urban garden plot. “I remember thinking, ‘If there were some way I could do this kind of thing for a living, I’d quit school tomorrow’,” he says. A few years later, he, Nast-Kolb and their two daughters spent a couple of months in Georgia working with community of Christians who live together in a rural setting and welcome refugees. They came back to Canada with visions of doing something similar.
In Winnipeg it wasn’t hard to find a group of like-minded people who also wanted to live closer to the source of their food and to reduce their reliance on exploitative energy sources. One member of the community worked as a climate change specialist for the province of Manitoba. He had seen first-hand how burning fossil fuels was contributing to climate change. Rempel himself had done advocacy work with First Nations communities in northern Manitoba whose traditional hunting and trapping lands had been destroyed by hydro dams.
David Braun, a social worker who’s part of the collective, figures he’s doing what Mennonites have always done: resisting co-option by the system. He looks around him and sees powerful entities who pollute the world for profit and control. Braun left his conservative community of Holdeman Mennonites when he was a young adult. Since then he’s been part of other more free-spirited experiments in farming and community. He attends a non-denominational church, though he describes himself as “uncomfortable with religion.”
Rempel likes to call his community’s attempts to grow their own food, use animals for labour and reduce their energy consumption “foolish renunciations.” He got the term from Ivan Illich, a maverick Catholic priest and philosopher who owned little and critiqued modern systems of education, medicine and economic development in the 1970s. Illich argued that Christians should “renounce the powers of changing the world” and learn habits of simplicity and subsistence.
“They’re almost more symbolic acts that free our imagination than they are serious attempts to change the system,” says Rempel. He suspects it’s probably too late to save humanity from itself anyway. When cheap energy runs out, his oxen will come in handy.
In the meantime, he’s doing what he loves. “The reason we make our own cheese, or butcher our own hogs or farm with simpler tools and more complex cooperation with one another is that in these activities we can practice love in a way we cannot when we buy our food from the grocery store or climb aboard a single operator machine to accomplish the work that previously could be only achieved by humans working on the ground together,” he explains.
***
Anti-modern currents existed throughout the 20th century, says Royden Loewen chair of Mennonite studies at the University of Winnipeg. He points to the fin de siècle romantic poets, the counter-culture hippies of the 1960s, and the Old Order Mennonites who to this day drive steel-wheeled tractors.
The last are the subject of Loewen’s forthcoming book, Horse and Buggy Genius. Old Order Mennonites don’t own cars or cell phones, they farm with simple machinery, light their homes with lanterns and preach piety and pacifism. It’s easy to label them old-fashioned or backwards, but they offer a valuable critique of our 21st-century western society, Loewen says. They “leave a tiny carbon footprint on this earth, they care for their own, they respect the elderly, they reject factory farming.”
Old Order Mennonites “emphasize the community over the individual, the local over the national, simplicity over profit and peace over violence,” Loewen writes in the introduction to his book. They resist “much of what we ‘moderns’ assume to be true and good: personal achievement, ease, progress, ever-increasing knowledge, certainty, and the idea that society is healthiest when its citizens act in self-interest.”
These sound like words Rempel might use to describe his own community.
***
Aiden Enns is another neo-Luddite with Mennonite roots. The 54-year-old edits a magazine on activism and spirituality called Geez. He refuses to own a cell phone, sleeps in an insulated garage that he and his partner heat with a woodstove, and uses a homemade composting toilet.
But he makes his morning coffee with a gleaming Italian espresso-maker that cost him $2,500 at a gourmet restaurant supply store. It seems like a contradiction.
“Are you for or against technology? That question doesn’t apply anymore,” he tells me, crinkling the corners of his blue eyes. “We need technology whether we like it or not.” While I interview him, he makes me a coffee with his high-end machine.
Enns aligns himself with radical activists like Derek Jensen, who think humans are destroying the earth and that our civilization is bankrupt and should be undermined. Enns does his part by publishing a subversive magazine, boycotting drive-throughs and going to the bathroom in a bucket of sawdust.
Instead of asking whether technology is good, we should be asking ourselves which technologies make us more human and which ones dehumanize us, Enns says.
I watch him tamp freshly ground coffee into the chrome portafilter of his espresso machine. “This is 30 pounds of pressure,” he says, leaning on the silver tamper. “I get the bathroom scale out if I’m not sure.”
Most people use a “super technologically intense way” to get to the grocery store, Enns says, “they drive a car instead of walking.” That’s because our capitalist economy must constantly invent new conveniences to lure more consumers. If we always take the easy way, we’ll will lose our ability to do the things that give meaning to life, he says.
He holds up his hand-crank coffee grinder that pulverizes the beans with a carbon steel burr. “I wanted to feel the coffee, I wanted to be part of it,” he says. “I didn’t want to serve the machine. A lot of these things you have to serve them. I wanted to work together with the machine.”
Enns has no desire to be tethered to a cell phone. He’d rather make plans ahead of time and then follow through. It keeps the relationships more honest, he says. And it cultivates patience.
That patience came in handy when he first brought home his new espresso maker. The first cup of coffee tasted lousy.
“I thought, should I bring it back? Should I get some guru to come make it for me? Should I run to a coffee shop for some predictable coffee? Or should I figure it out? Figure it out. That’s my answer for life. That’s how you can live a full life with modest means.”
So Enns invited over a barista friend to give him a tutorial.
The coffee-making ritual is Enns’s antidote to the take-away culture he’s come to loathe. He believes people are destroying the Earth for the sake of convenience. Drive-throughs “make us lazy and car dependent and assume we’re idiots.” When they became popular, he vowed never to use one. Then he softened and vowed to stop vowing things because it reminded him of his fundamentalist Mennonite upbringing. “I grew up promising to love Jesus,” he says with a little laugh. “I’m trying to be less binary in most aspects of my life, to see the oneness of everything.”
Enns is turned off by the religious strictures of the Amish and Old Order Mennonites, but he admires their willingness to take a stance on technology, to evaluate its impact on their communities.
He likes to reference the philosopher Albert Borgmann. Borgmann doesn’t think we should stifle innovation or give up technological aids, but rather learn to choose those technologies that enable us to focus on the encounters that make us the most human. Encounters that bring our attention to the present moment and to the world around us, such as spending time with your children or riding a horse, Enns says.
***
Mennonites aren’t the only ones who resist society’s fervent embrace of every new invention. But when Mennonites do it, they have unique resources to turn to.
Paul and Elisa Barkman spent two years living on the community farm in Beausejour in a school bus they renovated into a home. Neither of them grew up on a farm. When they asked Paul’s grandparents to teach them how to butcher a pig, the grandparents were thrilled. “They still have lots of ritual,” says Elisa. “I remember the very first time we came to butcher. A few hours in, Paul’s grandma comes into the area where we’re cutting up meat bringing a bottle of wine … and then everybody drinks out of the same wine glass … It’s neat getting to learn from them, and for them it’s also very validating.”
One thing that separates the community in Beausejour from Old Order Mennonites is that the new community refuses to fix their principles in a set of unbending rules. No one’s going to get excommunicated for buying a new laptop.
Recently Rempel gave in to his parents’ complaints that he was too hard to contact. He asked his brother to help him shop for a cell phone. While we pounded sauerkraut in his kitchen the new phone was on the counter next to us, pinging, announcing incoming messages. Each time, Rempel stops working and tries to figure out how to answer the texts. “You know,” he says with a wry smile, “It’s amazing how quickly I can go from feeling kind of smug about not having one of these to feeling like I’m pretty cool because I have one.”
Josiah Neufeld is a Winnipeg writer.
查看原文...
