Why there are no Amish geniuses

As I quite often mention, I rather admire the Amish people. In fact, ‘admire’ might not be emphatic enough a term: ‘starstruck’ is closer to it, and the only time in my life I have ever really felt an emotion of the starry-strucky variety was in 2013, when I was studying in upstate New York, near an Amish settlement.

I had taken a day trip off-campus to the nearby village of Canton, and, as I headed back towards the bus-stop at the end of my sightseeing extravaganza (highlight: a traditional American diner with moose heads on the wall, and a waitress who called me ‘hon’), I stopped suddenly in my tracks as I saw three of my be-hatted heroes, the Amish, standing outside the local drugstore, eating pizza slices and smoking cigarettes.

My admiration swelling further (if they only ate a perfectly pure organic diet and eschewed all vices, they obviously wouldn’t be as likeable), I desperately wanted to approach them and initiate a conversation about their wonderful way of life. But a sudden bout of shyness overtook me, and so I only managed to enquire about the time of the next bus.

If I’d been a little more confident (if I’d had the beer I’d wanted in the diner, which the waitress wouldn’t serve me because I didn’t have ID), who knows how differently things might have turned out, and I might be writing to you right now in quill and ink from my thatched cottage deep in the Amish prairies.

As it turned out, I got on the bus and went back to my student village - but we did have an expert in Amish culture on the faculty of the college, so I contented myself with spending a lot of time talking to her instead (and reading her book).

There are many things to admire about the Amish, and as I wrote in a recent article:

The Amish have resisted almost all the destructive elements of modernity, eschewing technology such as television and unfettered access to the internet, and living in self-sustaining communities where they produce much of their own food. They educate their own children and care for their own elderly, whilst enjoying a rich cultural and communal life. Their depression rates are very low. They’re also sceptical of modern medicine and largely don’t vaccinate, making them a physically robust and healthy people, with low levels of diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.

These kind of facts about the Amish are fairly widely known, as they’ve become somewhat iconic across modern culture, as an ever-more appealing alternative to the accelerating dystopian horrors of modernity.

However, there’s another facet of Amish life that receives far less recognition, but is at least as key to their success as all the healthy outdoor living, homegrown food, and heroic hats:

It’s their lack of breeding ‘geniuses’.

By ‘geniuses’, I mean people recognised as significantly standing apart from the crowd, by way of some kind of extraordinary creative ability: a brilliant artist, a virtuoso musician, a prodigal novelist.

While there are a small smattering of Amish writers, musicians, and artists (nobody you’ll have heard of without Googling), they’re typically people who have left the community for an ‘English’ (as the Amish call all non-Amish) life. Within Amish communities themselves, the existence of highly skilled purveyors of crafts such as writing, painting, or playing an instrument are very rare.

Why would this be? Why would the Amish produce such a small number of people with significant skills in these areas, as compared to other groups? After all, their IQs are no different to any other European group, and, as a people, they’re highly creative, producing hand-crafted furniture and beautiful quilts.

The Amish also enjoy music, and widely practice singing.

Yet they still don’t produce “geniuses” in terms of great musicians, artists, or writers.

Why not?

The reason they do not produce ‘genius’ level skill in these areas is simple: because they do not cultivate it - and this is key to their sustained success as communities and to their individual contentment as people.

Sounds unlikely?

Please read on...

The topic of ‘genius’ is hotly debated in psychology and whether such high-level skill is born or made, but the most persuasive theories point to environment as a far more significant factor than genetics or biology. A genius may have a high IQ, and IQ is considered to be highly heritable - but high IQs in themselves are no reliable predictor of talent or success. Equally, people without exceptionally high IQs can and do rise to ‘genius’ level mastery of a craft.

So to reach “genius-level” skill is not about being born with any particularly unusual advantage, but rather, it is widely accepted that, to reach high-level mastery of a discipline, people must practice compulsively whilst they are very young - typically putting in at least 10,000 hours of practice before they are 18, with much of this practice happening before they are ten.

If you miss this crucial developmental ‘window’, and come to something later in life, whilst you still may be able to become very good at it, you will be highly unlikely to ever reach the “genius” levels seen in those who practiced their craft from early childhood.

Mozart, for example, began playing the piano at age three.

The Brontë sisters were all writing their own magazines, sagas, and stories by age twelve.

Leonardo da Vinci began his formal training in painting and other arts at age 14.

And did Mozart, the Brontës, and da Vinci go on to have happy and fulfilled lives?

Famously not.

Mozart’s life is described as tragic, the Brontës were “pale, gravely sick, and unhappy“, and da Vinci is described as having “lived with significant unhappiness driven by intense perfectionism, chronic procrastination, and severe ADHD-like tendencies”.

In researching these people and their overall unhappiness, I repeatedly came up against the phrase that “despite their genius” they were plagued with terrible lifelong suffering and melancholy.

Well, it is not “despite”, and this is what the Amish instinctively know.

It’s because of.

Not that genius “causes” unhappiness as such, but rather, the conditions that cause genius cause unhappiness.

The conditions that cause a child to isolate from their peers for many hours every day over years to practice their craft, cause unhappiness.

The conditions that inspire parents or other caregivers to strongly encourage - or sometimes outright force - the child to cut themselves off from normal life to practice their skill, cause unhappiness.

The conditions of an ‘audience’, demanding that the child pushes themselves further and further to achieve ever more ‘greatness’, cause unhappiness.

The unhappiness isn’t just felt at the time, but has a tendency to become a lifelong tormenting prison, which is why phrases like “there’s a fine line between genius and madness” exist, and why geniuses so often grapple with serious mental health issues and substance abuse problems.

It is because the conditions necessary to create genius are typically so dysfunctional, that the genius pays a huge personal price for the rest of their - not infrequently shortened - lives (Mozart was dead at 35; none of the Brontë sisters saw 40).

Geniuses also typically struggle enormously to establish satisfying and lasting relationships.

The Amish have therefore, rather sensibly, realised that none of this is particularly aspirational.

They know that hot-housing their children, by separating them from peers and insisting they play the violin nine hours a day from age four, is not going to help that child become a happy, fulfilled, and well-adjusted member of their community - and so the Amish simply don’t do it. They don’t encourage or cultivate any situation where a child is spending hours alone every day doing anything, because, the Amish have recognised, this all too often leads to great personal dysfunction and unhappiness later on.

It may also lead to great genius and extraordinary creative feats, but that is not regarded by the Amish as adequately compensatory for a shattered life and excluded human being - as geniuses almost invariably report feeling like outsiders: lonely outliers who never really fit in anywhere.

The Amish do not wish this for their children, as they know that true happiness, purpose, and fulfilment doesn’t come from pursuing personal goals in isolation - but through a meaningful role in an integrated community.

So, while creativity is certainly encouraged in Amish communities, it is never cultivated in isolation. Young men will make furniture together, they won’t pore over a musical instrument for hours alone in their room.

Young women will create quilts with their sisters, aunts, and friends: not spend hours hunched alone over their journals in a dark bedroom (the Amish can and do write - but typically letters to family and friends, not introspective missives to themselves).

And because the creativity is communal, it is not competitive.

Conversely, contemporary youngsters in modern society can be, and often are, driven mad by relentless expectations to be the top, the best, to beat everyone else in the class. Even second place isn’t good enough, because that’s the first loser! A single ‘B’ besmirches an entire identity - the “straight A student” - and can throw an adolescent into deep existential crisis.

Such aggressive quests for personal perfection amongst modern youth drive anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and eating disorders - all of which are notable by their widespread absence in Amish youth.

While Amish youngsters typically grow up into happy and well-adjusted adults with low levels of depression and other psychopathologies, the “straight A student” archetype rarely fares so well. Even if they reach the top of their professional or artistic field, and enjoy lavish material success, their lives are all too often marked by deep frustration and unhappiness.

The ones who fail to fulfil their early promise, meanwhile, often descend into bitterness and jealousy, becoming highly destructive to themselves and those around them.

Clearly, neither of these trajectories are particularly enviable.

It is notable that, throughout film and literature depicting adolescence, the academically excelling “nerd” character is invariably presented as lonely and dysfunctional, shunned from normal social rituals and excluded by their more popular peers.

The popular peers are usually academically average at best, whilst showing far more interest in non-studious activities such as sports and socialising.

Communal activities. Activities engaged in with other people.

We may very well root for the unhappy, underdog “nerd” character in films, and despise the popular kids for bullying them - but we know that this dynamic nevertheless reflects an essential truth about human nature: that it is healthier and more formatively functional for children and adolescents to spend their time engaged in sociable, communal pursuits with other people, and it reflects an essential dysfunction if they are spending inordinate amounts of time alone in their bedrooms.

It is weird and dysfunctional for a child to do that, and - albeit in a highly inappropriate way - that’s what other kids are picking up on when they tease them. They are highlighting, in their own juvenile and inadequate way, that something is very wrong here.

We in “English” (non-Amish) culture are raised with the very strong message, from all dominant cultural institutions, that happiness and fulfilment come overwhelmingly from personal achievement. The formula is, you have a “dream”, you work hard to fulfil it (often staying in education for seventeen years or more to do so), you’re happy.

Unhappiness, it is strongly communicated to us, is caused by oppression: social or familial constraints that stop you from fulfilling your true potential. Once these obstacles are removed (which will probably mean leaving your community, family, and friends in your teenage years) you will actualise your dream and be happy.

It’s an interesting word to use, isn’t it, when referring to personal ambition -”dream”? After all, the word also refers to something else: it refers to the fantasy hallucinations we have at night whilst asleep. In other words, “dreams” are something that are not real.

This is actually therefore quite an accurate word to use to describe the idea that fulfilling a burning personal ambition will generally lead to sustained happiness, since a) a great deal of the time, people’s “dreams” are wildly unrealistic (becoming a sports star, an actor, a generally rich and famous hot-shot), and b) of those rare “genius” types who do achieve their dreams, this often does not translate into lasting happiness and fulfilment. Often quite the contrary, for the reasons we have explored in this essay.

A whole gravy-train industry of Higher Education has also sprung up around the idea of telling youngsters to “fulfil their dreams”, where money-grubbing universities cynically assure mediocre students with two Ds at A-level they can become the next Steven Spielberg by spending £50k studying Media Studies at the University of Swindon Roundabout.

When those students end up long-term unemployed whilst competing for a shelf-stacking internship at Tesco’s, it creates severe cognitive dissonance and dissatisfaction regarding what they expected from life, and what they got. Even much more capable students, with proper degrees from good universities, all too often follow a similar trajectory, with expectations drastically failing to match reality.

So, we return to the Amish: the Amish set themselves apart from almost all of modern civilisation by consistently giving their children completely realistic ideas of what they can achieve in life.

No Amish children are told they are great geniuses and can be anything they want so long as they work hard enough.

They are, instead, given the clear message that they are ordinary and average (”plain”, as the Amish put it), very similar to everyone else (hence the uniformity of dress), and that this is a good thing to be. It’s certainly not shameful or inferior or “less than”.

In short, Amish children are told, you don’t have to aspire to be extraordinary to receive ordinary rewards, such as love, belonging, and purpose. You qualify for these as you are.

Hot-housed “genius” children don’t receive this message, and pour themselves so obsessively into their craft - their quest to become “extraordinary” - generally because they believe it is the only way they can receive ordinary levels of love and acceptance - from their parents, from their peers, from the world at large.

Even if they appear confident on the surface - arrogant, even - the reality is that “geniuses” are almost invariably crippled with self-doubt and low self-esteem - it is what drives them to do what the healthy, well-adjusted child would not: sacrifice play, friends, relaxation and fun for becoming “perfect”.

And this trajectory, all too often and predictably, leads to miserable, discordant, lonely adult lives that, not infrequently, end prematurely and in obscurity, severed from everything that really makes people happy.

So, that’s why there are no Amish geniuses.

Because the Amish are genius enough to know not to create them.

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