NPR aired a great story Wednesday about the challenges of a mental health professional working with a community of people with very different values and assumptions about the social world.
One of the key rites of passage for some Amish youth is a tradition known as rumspringa, in which 16 year-olds spend a couple years sampling what the world of the non-Amish has to offer before they decide whether or not to dedicate themselves to the Amish community as an adult. Some kids are content just wearing jeans and listening to Kelly Clarkson for a little while, but for many it can lead not just into a severe inner-crisis, but also a descent into alcohol or drug abuse. This is where Jim Cates comes in. He helps them with substance abuse problems, as well as generally sorting out where they fit in the grand scheme of things.
What interests me the most is the extent to which Cates has to improvise to accommodate the Amish world view. Arguably, the very practice of therapy, from Freud's bored Viennese housewives on, is one based on a set of individualistic values. Some branches of psychology have sought to break from this trend, but a great deal of the normative psychological measures and practices used in traditional therapy are premised on the ability of the person seeking help to be self-reflective, to disclose one's thoughts and feelings, and to seek self-actualization as ends unto themselves. As Cates notes in the piece, not only are these things not necessarily valued in Amish society, but it would be counterproductive to the overall mission of a therapist to push this kind of approach. The Amish culture tends to value the group over the individual. While this dichotomy between group and individual perhaps oversimplifies the picture (it's certainly a well-worn trope in studies of cultural differences: c.f. an earlier post on 'Asian values'), Cates reports undeniable differences that inform his practice.
Here's where my interest comes in. It is clear that different societies have different worldviews that inform not just their overall social behavior but also their political behavior and attitudes toward authority. Is it possible that societies that rely on more traditional forms of sociopolitical organization (I'm thinking, for example, tribally-organized people in Pakistan's FATA or rural Afghanistan) are in any way comparable to communities that likewise ascribe great importance to the collective, to religiously-defined codes of behavior and share mistrust of outsiders? Clearly, beyond the immense methodological and logistical problems of conducting empirical studies of a group such as the Amish with regard to their political and social attitudes, the comparability of these groups with those in under-developed, conflict prone areas would be a stretch. Nevertheless, if the great contemporary struggle for global policymakers is the task of confronting those who are not easily or willingly integrated into a 'modern,' 'western' model of political and economic life, then efforts should be made to understand more fully how those who follow other ways of life can peaceably cohabitate in a liberal state with those who do not share their ways.
As a question of pure pragmatism, divorced from any normative presumptions about what the good life of all Americans should be, perhaps better understanding those who choose to live in illiberal, non-individualist communities of our republic could provide insight on those elsewhere.
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