The River

Sunday, February 22, 2009

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.

Comments:
beautifully accurate passage, thanks for posting. never read him. I plan on ripping it off in some way and here is high-bandwidth insight, stuff I knew at the same time but my vocation was not to write it down or slow it down but to make it move faster.

All true but here's something to throw into the wood chipper of your intellect: what if Jesus had Facebook?

Btw I have the first 20 pages of "Who Would Jesus Fuck" written. It was enough to pick up a professional book editor, so we'll see what happens. some strange things have been happening to me or for me since Obama was inaugurated. I've been running for so long and know some qualities of the battles which have been conducted behind the kabuki screen and my side won.

My side is far from perfect but it means I don't have to run anymore don't even have to hide.
 
"battle behind the kabuki screen" -- now there's a title. For the next book.

How about "what would Jesus blog?" I wouldn't know, just been trying to figure it out for the past six years. Most would consider him a lunatic, it appears. Including himself.

I hope you have more to tell us on your epiphany. I'll be over at your blog regularly, of course, either way.
 
You've done a pretty damned good job on WWJB so far. Watch out for pharisees. Will have to give you the manuscript when I feel it's ready. The next chapter: "Pornography Through the Ages."
 
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.

This cannot end / disintegrate / be discredited soon enough.

One wonders, of course how the world functioned 100 or 200 years ago .. sheesh. There wasn't even a Dow Jones Index back then, for goodness sake. How ever did things get done or progress happen ?
 
yes, we seem to be enamored of our own catastrophe. I mean, come on, just because the financial system has been manipulated into a giant ponzi scheme no one can do anything worthwhile anymore? I'm sorry, but nothing has changed in the real world of material things and work, effort and production. Leaders are, as Kittredge says, cut off on all sides from thinking in any terms except those handed to them by institutional greed. While those of us who never bought into that in the first place are going, this is bullshit, this whole financial collapse is an even bigger lie than 9/11.
 
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