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AHA!

by Barbara Parker

195 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #01-0070; ISBN 1-55212-669-2; US$22.00, C$24.00, EUR18.00, £12.50

AHA! argues in a jovial way that those inventions which have become monster market successes are also inventions which most easily click into our stone-age behavioural grid. Each consumer hottie (fast food, tv, the box store, etc.) triumphs globally because it happens to push memory buttons from our gatherer-hunter past.

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about the book      about the author      Table of Contents and sample excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book The gist of AHA! is to show that what 21st century humans like doing most is tribal in nature and still based on getting one's DNA into the next generation. We love our car and get great satisfaction from the cell-phone, make McDonald's or Home Depot a roaring success, adore Oprah and tolerate elevator music because not enough generations have gone by to shake off ancient survival behaviour. Eleven chapters take an amusing look at some pretty basic impulses evolved for life in the savannah and how we indulge them today: we love to chew and drink while watching TV; we buy magazines stuffed with illustrated gossip about celebrities; we can't resist adding that pea-green blouse at 70% off regular price to our crammed closet. In the last chapter AHA! concludes that the print culture (though not print) is waning because focussing in solitude on black marks in a line is not the heritage of our still in-control past.

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About the Author Barbara Parker comes to Canada from her native Germany at the age of 23. She learns to speak English while working as a house-maid. Since she knows how to type, office jobs provide the next "immersion" lessons. Seven years go by. Barbara attends Simon Fraser University and earns her MA in English Literature. She teaches at Vancouver City College. She has a second child. This and that happens. She returns to office work, then retires in the early 1990s. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia. To observe and contemplate human behaviour seems her default setting, lately upgraded to handle scanning of neo-Darwinian and sociobiological texts. Having pondered, she now thinks that she has found out what makes our species enthusiastic rubber-band collectors, pet owners, cell-phone users, channel switchers, or attendees at 3-tenor concerts. AHA! is the result.

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Table of Contents

After a suitable INTRODUCTION in which it is explained how the book got its title,
THE PACKRAT gathers and displays human behaviour which illustrates our built-in distrust of good times.
In GENETIC FLUKES the reader may be surprised to learn why Pavarotti, Martha Stewart, or Magic Johnson exert the pull they do. Sleeping Beauty, told and annotated in line with the "genetic fluke theory", ends the chapter.
In THE CELL-PHONE the author amazes herself when she finds that this device lets us re-join the comfortable closeness of the ape troupe.
THE WEATHER takes a shot at an explanation why atmospheric conditions are a topic of endless fascination and the lubricant for sociability.
In THE FIRE AND THE TALE it is discovered that television has been with us for 800,000 to 1.2 million years.
THE AUTOMOBILE shows the hunter tame the bronco so he may ride not only higher but also faster than fellow man or beast. The exploration of the human & car relationship comes to a surprising conclusion.
In NOISE the reader is privy to all manner of speculation why it is that we submit willingly to have our ears assaulted.
HAIR lays bare for all to see that our love of hairy surfaces--confirmed by an 11 billion dollar pet food industry and the many more multi-billion dollar tonsorial business--rests on behaviour evolved for a world quite unlike ours.
After reading MAGIC one hesitates to kick any vending machine ever again.
SAINTS attempts to dispel doubt that celebrity worship is a passing fad.
PRINT IS TOAST contemplates the receding of the print culture because hi-tech clicks into our default setting. That setting, not evolved substantially since Cro-Magnon days, responds to hunt, gather, look, talk, listen.

 

TIDBITS FROM 6 CHAPTERS

THE PACKRAT
Long before we were a twinkle in evolution's eye, those precursors whose genetic imprint we share -- fish-reptile-bird-mammal -- instinctively stuffed themselves when good luck or skill presented them with more than they needed to still the hunger of the moment. Most animals hide, bury, store food against a rainy day. Most animals eat all they possibly can during times of plenty, store fat on their bodies, and live off this provision during lean times. The human animal grabs what it can while it can, employing its fearfully well developed cerebral cortex. We can't alter this coding for hoarding even though environment and circumstance are no longer those of the days without shopping channels. And so it is that we pounce with joyful abandon upon the abundance of the marketplace. We get our high from acquisition, and contentment from our collections. As a hoarder, the human leaves the packrat and the squirrel in the dust.

THE CELL-PHONE
Although the key-pad is an integral part of the design of the phone, by happenstance it also fits how we have always tried to get someone's attention. Before we can reach out and touch someone, our fingers have to touch a bunch of buttons. By necessity we have to use our fingers to nudge and prod to attention the voice we want to hear. We can't get attention until we've used our hands. To use one's fingers to get someone to notice us, to talk to, is as old as the hills. From toddlerhood onward we tug on clothes, touch a hand, grab an arm to signal our need or willingness to talk. And often it's done even though the tugger has nothing much to say nor expects even a single pearl of wisdom. It is not the possibility that the connection might sparkle with brilliant discourse that sells a lot of cells! It is that we can establish on impulse that we matter to someone, be it ever so briefly.

THE WEATHER
The elements mattered because they were directly responsible for the seven fat and the seven lean years during that relatively long period of our agricultural past. The elements mattered even more during that much longer time when the only creek nearby dried up, the lengthening of the days didn't bring the expected disappearance of the snow, a hurricane's devastation came unannounced -- all without pantries, super-markets, or international relief organizations. If any proof is needed that humans do not adjust their mental habits to a changed environment, even one so drastically changed as that in the industrialized, digitized, urbanized world in the last 150 years, consider the pre-historic grip the topic WEATHER has on us.

HAIR
In ages when we did not yet know how to modify our environment to be warm in winter or cool in the summer, hair conferred protection from freezing to death or having one's skin roasted. The taming of fire, using caves as shelter, building primitive huts and keeping a source of heat going took almost 300,000 years. Over that time body hair became less and less necessary to keep the DNA container alive long enough to produce a version of itself. Speaking of those replicas: every baby replica found the nourishing nipple beneath some hair, be it the fur or hair of the mom unit or her chest-covering furry garb. That primal memory alone should suffice to make us want to touch, stroke, nuzzle hair.

SAINTS
The celebrity cult of our time is built upon the adoration of the churched saints which, in turn, had its origin in the veneration of animals and those humans who excelled at hunting them down. At one point our clever brains transferred the significance we gave to the hero-animal or hero-human to a representation: a painting on a cave wall. That morphed into an illumination in a manuscript which morphed into the photo in a glossy magazine. Images of the celebrated in moments sublime as well as ridiculous are reproduced millions of times. Anyone who packages and markets the images, lives, or leavings of the famous will not die a pauper. Buying what is associated with the admired entity is a kind of wisdom hard-wired within us from ancient times onward.

PRINT IS TOAST
For our essentially still stone-age physiology, it's not a good fit to get information in print mode. It's easy to look and talk; it's hard to learn to read and write. We're evolved to function in a collection of people who share a relatively small space, mostly stay put, know each other by name, are kin to half the folk in the tribe, are guided by the same beliefs, do some tilling, gathering, hunting. This was, by and large, village life as well. In that setting one's brain was not asked to train the eye along lines made up of variously shaped marks; instead information got picked from a bunch of visual clues. Now it so happens that our latest brainchild, the globe-conquering digital processor, scatters over our information-rich landscape congenial visual clues: icons here; icons there; icons simply everywhere.

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Catalogue Information

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