Sir, - Joe Carroll ("Amish country, where modern living is kept at bay - almost", The Irish Times, (September 9th), mistakes the basis of Amish thinking, which he likens to "Jesuitical hair-splitting". In fact, the Amish apply a sweeping principle in small ways. Their criterion is well-described by the American poet Wendell Berry, himself a farmer:
"Suppose the ultimate standard of our work were to be, not professionalism and profitability, but the health and stability of human and natural communities. Suppose we learned to ask of any proposed innovation the question so far only the Amish have been wise enough to ask: What will this do to our community? Suppose we attempted the authentic multiculturalism of adapting our ways of life to the nature of the places where we live."
Every sect, it seems to me, has at least one essential insight of universal relevance. The Yiddish writer and Nobel Laureate Issac Bashevis Singer believed that the rabbinical courts of his Hasidic childhood - where the litigants swore to abide by the ruling of a rabbi they had chosen - ought to be a model to the wider world. In a society where genetics now threatens to become eugenics, the same might be said of the Amish belief in the primacy of community and nature over the blandishments of compulsive technological drift. - Yours, etc.,
Chris Agee, North Parade, Belfast 7.