Re: [Phys-l] A physicist and his background

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

Apparently Garrison Keeler grew up in a restrictive community, but he also
escaped from it.  He has used his background to nostalgic, comedic effect.
It seems that the most restrictive and anti-modern communities actually
manage to survive better.  The children are so unused to modern life that
they find it frightening.  So they stay in the community.  It turns out that
cloistered religious communities also survive better and are actually
growing.  But there the choice to join is an adult decision.

A number of the Amish communities actually encourage the children leave for
a period of time and experience the modern world before they can come back
and be a full adult member.  This is a wise decision because it defuses the
abuse argument, and makes the community stronger.  Also some Amish will use
electric tools for making products, but not in the home.  So even the Amish
are accommodating to modern efficiency.

One isolated group that actually encouraged modern efficiency was the
Shakers.  But they had the problem that they didn't believe in having
children, and the lure of the world was too strong.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> One day (long ago) we were chatting about various things and I asked him
> where
> he had grown up.  Minnesota.  Since I've been to many Minnesota
> communities
> (and listened for years to Prairie Home Companion), I asked him where in
> Minnesota.  He told me his story, getting progressively redder in the face
> and
> angrier thinking back on it.  He had grown up in one of the isolated Amish
> or
> Amish-like religious communities that prohibited contact with the external
> world.  His own curiosity and intellectual abilities had led him to make a
> traumatic break with the community and escape it, finding some way to get
> an
> education and eventually even a Ph.D. in physics.  He was so angry
> thinking
> back on his parents and the community leaders, and kept telling me this
> was
> serious child abuse, and a completely unconscionable crime.
>
> I was afraid ever to discuss his background with him again, and never did,
> but
> I remember his reaction so very clearly.  I'm sure what he said was a
> correct
> description, and I appreciated being forced to think about the fact that
> tolerance is not always a virtue.