Colin Barrett: Blog

The controversial aspects of my story come together at the end.
There's some, albeit quite small, archaeological evidence of early modern human living structures made as I've described. That's unsurprising, since those structures naturally would have vanished over time. But the idea of humans living mainly in caves simply doesn't stand up to sense. Among other things a well-ventilated cave (to vent the smoke from heating and cooking fires) is pretty hard to find. As for Hugo's people cultivating crops, that, too, makes sense for the reasons I give. It's also hard to imagine agricultural settlements suddenly arising when they did-at the beginnings of historic times-without some precursor. I'm not talking about extensive planting, of course, more on the order of what today would be called kitchen gardens, but it makes sense that tribal/clan groupings in enough numbers to support the hunts that we have evidence took place would require greater sources of supplemental plant food than could be accommodated by random gathering activities unaided by cultivation of the soil.
The wheel? I think relatively modern American Indian history should speak to this point rather fully. Absent a technological base the travois is a lot more efficient means of transporting goods than a wheeled cart of some sort.
OK, I've slanted my story a bit toward the pacifistic. (The quote, by the way, is from a poem called "Out There" by Wilfred Owens, who died as a footsoldier during World War I, some of whose verses were set to music by Benjamin Britten in his War Requiem.) It's more probable that the development of tribalism in the time of Hugo's former life would have fomented much greater intra-human conflict than he discusses. Unfortunately the tendence of humans to act inhumanely toward other humans appears to have its roots in our beginnings. Still, it's possible that at least some segments of the population retained enough sense not to fight unnecessarily with their peers, and I choose to focus on that. The nastiness that modern people inflict on those around them by dint of petty differences in skin color, facial features, religious choices, linguistic distinctions, gender, sexual preferences and so on-just about any kind of difference at all, it seems-has never struck me as either rational nor productive. I prefer to view early humans as less intent on compelling those around them to conform to some arbitrarily selected "norm" of behavior and appearance or face physical duress or annihilation.
Besides, as the last chapter mentions, there were quite enough natural threats that made life much shorter for our ancestors than we enjoy. Humans didn't need to find trivial excuses to kill each other then; at least the humans of my imagining didn't. They were at least as smart as we and under vastly less population pressure to require thinning of the herd through organized warfare and unorganized mayhem.
Finally, I'm aware that I'm being pretty cruel to formal education and those who make it a profession. I don't mean to be entirely negative about the process, but I've always found our modern institutions of learning to often be aimed as much at stultifying those who come for knowledge as truly helping them. I actually handled the last two years of my college education about the way Hugo says; if going to class was unneeded (not infrequently), I didn't. I was taking a full load of classes as well as working a 40-hours-a-week schedule, which put more demands on my time than I could tell the school; they had rules that you couldn't work full time while you took a full load of classes. But I managed to simply not tell them, which avoided problems. In any case, I've always preferred to learn on my own than to be "guided" by teachers who want more to shape my thinking than to impart information.

We're now coming to what's perhaps the heart of the conceit that underlies my story.
If anyone's still in doubt, I agree 100% with what Graham says in his lecture; that's the author talking there. I know there are learned texts hypothesizing that somehow humankind went through some sort of mental epiphany somewhere during the annals of recorded history, or just beforehand, profoundly altering the ways in which thought was processed or sensory perceptions integrated into the internal self. Perhaps they're correct, but I just don't see it. The human species must have differentiated itself from the rest of the animal kingdom long before; the records of archaelogical artifacts seem to me to make that clear. The famous cave paintings, the technological advance of Clovis flint knapping, and so forth all speak to the same point. Burial sites also hint strongly at some sort of ritualistic quasi-religious mindset in pre-history. We have, in sum, a helluva lot of evidence that early modern humans were mentally as evolved as they are today, and little to say that they were intellectually the inferiors of our glorious modern selves and required some unspecified further evolution, beyond the physical process that reached its present level perhaps 50,000-75,000 years ago, to rise to our current status. Contemporary society is merely the culmination of millennia of development building on what had gone before, and fostered by growing population pressure that was partially engendered by an increasing life expectancy that directly resulted from the evolutionary growth in brain-power, rather than any dramatic breakthrough in evolution. At least such is my view, and it's going to take a lot of archaeological or sociological proof to give me cause to re-think it.

Sorry about missing the usual Monday post. I did lose power from Hurricane Matthew and didn't get it back until early Tuesdat morning, so I decided to wait until the next scheduled posting, today. The storm did its fair share of damage; I lost five large hardwood trees, one of which toppled over missing my house by no more than inches-but it did miss. The others fell away from the house, fortunately. A combination of the high winds and rain loosening the roots' hold on the earth. The shortest of the five was probably 40-50 feet. Left me with a pretty messy yard, but I've been fortunate enough to find people who've already got me cleaned up.
I've tried to stay true to normal courtroom procedures, and think I've generally done it pretty well. The demeanors of counsel are also fairly true to life; the attorneys for opposing sides are generally hostile to one another within the confines of the case at hand, but they of course share a profession, which often gives them greater affinity for each other than for their respective clients. In criminal law prosecutors are often especially antagonistic toward defense lawyers, but even so there's frequently an underlying feeling of camaraderie outside the courtroom doors, and wins and losses are commonly taken pretty much in stride with the lawyers recognizing any coups achieved by their opponents. True, a lot is at stake in the cases they try, but it's still a professional contest in which they may invest a great deal more interest than in the consequences to the poor souls whose money and/or freedom, even lives, may be in issue.
That, of course, isn't how Hugo sees it. I've tried to present him as something of an idealist untarnished by the rather cynical gamesmanship that pollutes modern society, and his ability to discern absolute truth from falsehood naturally colors his perceptions. Hark back on his tale of the stutterer to better grasp why he sees the law as a truly honorable trade in which to pursue his efforts to find a place in the new world to which he's come.

Well, the storm hasn't hit here yet, so I still have power. It may not be the same on Monday, so again I may have to skip a post. We'll see.
Everybody has known jerks like Sam, so this isn't much of a stretch. When you're in the lawyer business you pretty much take what your client presents. I'm not a criminal defense attorney, so I have little personal experience with such things. In my own work in transportation law I've also had some pretty distasteful clients, though. Only once did I ever walk away from a client, whose attitude was more than I could tolerate, Otherwise I just held my nose and did my professional best. It's what you do when you're working for yourself and make your living from the fees others pay you for your expertise; you're not always going to occupy the moral high ground. That's just the price of doing business in this kind of fashion.

The facts I give about Hawaii are accurate. My last marriage (the really good one) took place there, and in addition to getting married we did a fair amount of tourist stuff. I also visited alone some years later to spread my late wife's ashes in the sea off Oahu (she'd wanted them spread at Punchbowl, but after she died I found that Punchbowl is strictly a military cemetary, and she didn't qualify, so the ocean nearby was the best I could do). You know, my hotel overlooked that part of the ocean, and a couple of days later I awoke to see out my window a rainbow that seemed to emanate from the very spot where I'd strewn her ashes.
I'm very likely not going to be able to post on Friday. I'll try, but Hurricane Matthew is headed my way and I'm apt to lose power. We'll see. Otherwise my next posting will be next Monday, by which time power will surely have been restored.