Another writer to peruse in full when I retire

After plucking The Nature of Generosity by William Kittredge (Knopf, 2000) off the shelf in the home office (yes, when working from home I have the Internet AND old fashioned print to distract me), I opened in the middle and started reading, including the bellow excerpt.

Could have been written yesterday, but then wisdom doesn't have a sell-by date. Also odd that it fit in with the comment in a recent letter from a friend that we're all overloaded with information. Well, here's a bit more. I hope it makes you feel less info-stressed, as only quality and discernment can.

Preindustrial cultures ran on human energies; ours runs on internal combustion engines, telephones, fax machines, aircraft that can’t be flown without help of computer chips, not to mention simple electrical circuits. The walled cities Annick and I walked through in Europe were illuminated by electric lamps unimaginable to the founders. Bankers in Burundi stay in hour-to-hour touch with the London exchange by messages sent via satellite. Meanwhile, just upriver in the jungles, Japanese loggers level the ancient forests and displace tribal peoples who have lived in them for millennia, and these people then move to the teeming coastal cities, where their purposes and cultures often dissolve in acrid homelessness.

The First World and the Third World coexist in Jakarta and Manila, Tokyo and Cairo, Mexico City and Berlin, Sao Paulo and New York, and Moscow and Vancouver, intermixed and segregated in the same taxicabs, driver and driven. As we move toward a global culture, which languages will survive? Which birds? Can we even dream of the future? Can we understand the possibilities?

It’s becoming commonplace to think we face crazy-making overcrowding, environmental disaster, and chaos. We hear talk of a “complexity catastrophe,” in which processing systems like human minds have to deal with more information than they can handle. A result is fibrillation, the quivering and purposeless state that results in collapse of the entire system. The end of the Soviet Union, as I understand it, was perhaps not altogether the result of a dysfunctional economic system, but was also caused by information overload in their bureaucracies.

The interlocked network of governmental, institutional, and corporate entities that is presently calling the global shots could be on the edge of collapse, capable of averting the end of business as usual only by refusing to think or operate except within a system of belief based on predictable response to every situation – namely, institutionalized greed. Any other response is considered irrational. It is a simplifying strategy, designed to ignore overload, to weed out information and settle for being ultimately destructive but organized, filtering in just the right amount of data to fit the system and thus maintain control.