host

roachboy, your lines of questioning and your running commentary on these threads, generally, and much more so lately, cause me to draw a comparison to a scenario where you, as an anthropologist, or possibly a news reporter from a large, west coast based media outlet, visits......say....Amish folk in Lancaster county, PA., with an intent on examining why, for example, these folks live such a quaint and anachronistic lifestyle, with a near universal shunning of the connection of electrical power or telephone lines to their homes.

You dig away at their belief sytem, asking why some of them can rationalize the accomodation of a telephone, located out in a field some distance from their home, wired to a free standing pole. You inquire as to why they find a gasoline powered clothes washer tolerable, but relegate themselves to horse and buggy for their personal transportation, instead of gasoline powered vehicles, and why they have less resistance to replacing horse drawn plows with modern tractors, than they do to replacing their buggies with cars.
You conclude that one of their greatest, common aversions is to proximity to
electrical wiring and devices. They know why they live the way they do, but
they cannot explain the combination of tradition, religiously influenced societal behavior, and the edicts of their elders that have dictated the resulting practices and prohibitions in their current lifestyles. Facts about the safety and benefits of electricity and gasoline powered transport can only reach them on one level, and not enough to influence them to embrace these
technological innovations to any further extent.

Care must be taken by the inquisitor not to lose sight of the fact that these curious subjects are people, and not specimens, much easier to do when you are questioning folks more similar to the Amish, "plain people", folks who just want to be left alone, to themselves, then when your subjects represent a group with an ambitious, externalized agenda.