Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve

Rob Wiblin: Pushing onto your most recent book, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels, there you argue that societies develop moral values and moral justifications and systems of organisation that basically allow them to extract the energy source that they’re relying on as efficiently as possible or as much as possible. Or alternatively, I conceptualised it as having more values that are conducive to producing an awful lot of GDP, at least in the modern world. On this view, our economic base has more influence on our moral thinking than might be immediately obvious. Perhaps our moral thinking has less influence on the economy than it might seem. Can you flesh out that idea a bit?

Ian Morris: Yes, I’d say there is a bit more to it than that. Again, it comes out of this thing about thinking about history biologically. I was invited to go and do the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University, which is run by the Centre of the Study of Human Ethics. This is a big deal, big honour within academia, so I couldn’t really say no to it. But I was a bit alarmed when they invited me, because I’d never written anything about ethics in my life. What should I say? Why did they invite me? I realised they invited me precisely because of the kind of work I’ve been doing.

Ian Morris: As I turned toward world history and started thinking about history in more evolutionary terms, my explanations became very materialist. I increasingly saw big forces like geography are very, very important in driving this story. Some historians were horrified by this. They’d say this is writing human agency out of the story. This was why they’d invited me, precisely because I was saying things which are fundamentally opposed to a lot of the work that these ethicists are doing.

Ian Morris: I thought, OK, I need to think systematically about what the implications of my work are for discussions of human values and why we are the way we are. The thing that strikes me most about human values is how variable they are: you can go to two communities quite close to each other geographically, and they will have entirely different attitudes about things like gender relationships, whether hierarchy is a good or a bad thing, all kinds of stuff like this, wildly different ideas about this. The malleability of our values is the thing that really struck me.

Ian Morris: I think that comes about because, unlike other animals, we have evolved biologically to the point where we can also evolve culturally. We have cumulative cultural evolution which is something that really no other species of animal exactly has. We can think up new ways to do things. We can tweak these, add to them over the centuries. Just like every other kind of animal, we act in response to the environments in which we live. But unlike any other kind of animal, we can do so cumulatively, changing the way we behave without having to evolve biologically into a different kind of animal.

Ian Morris: When elephants migrate to the edge of Siberia and discover, “Oh, it’s really cold in Siberia, we can’t go there,” they stop until they evolve biologically into animals that are hairy — woolly mammoths — which of course they eventually do, and in they go and they live there very successfully. On the other hand, humans migrate and spread to the edge of Siberia. They say, “Oh, it’s really cold there. What can we do about this? I know, let’s kill something and steal its skin and fur and wrap ourselves in it, and in we go.” This is precisely what they do. No other animal can do this.

Ian Morris: Looking at human values, we see not only this tremendous variability between societies but also these big long-term patterns. Through 90-odd% of our history on Earth, humans were hunter-gatherers who were living off wild plants and wild animals, mostly in quite small groups, migrating, moving around a lot to follow wild plants and animals as they move around and ripen. This has severe constraints on what you can do and the amount of energy you can capture from your environment. The fact that you’ve got to move constantly strictly limits what you can do.

Ian Morris: What anthropologists have found is overwhelmingly — not 100%, but overwhelmingly — forager, hunter-gatherer societies tend to be very, very egalitarian in terms of gender relationships, political relationships, economic relationships. Very egalitarian. Why are they like this? Is it because eating wild rice makes you feel like a saint and you want to sing “Kumbaya” and hug everybody? Well, no, that’s ridiculous. It’s because we are free to organise our societies in any way that we want.

Ian Morris: But say, the 17th century France of Louis the 14th, the Sun King: if you try to run that as a forager in the Kalahari Desert, it’s not going to work. You can’t run your society like that. The people who move toward egalitarian organisational principles flourish better than the ones who don’t. Over time — we don’t know how much time — people start saying to themselves, “Well, clearly, this is right. This is the way you should run the world. People are all the same. You should treat them all the same. That is only right and proper.”

Ian Morris: But then we have the agricultural revolution. Farming societies come into the world. In farming societies, overwhelmingly, people see the world in an entirely different way. They’re staying in one place now, growing domesticated plants and animals, generating much more energy. But there’s also all these things you’ve got to do. You can’t run these societies unless you build roads, you have ports, you build big ships, you have organisation, you have irrigation — all these things have got to be done.

Ian Morris: There’s a lot of different ways to do these things, but the way that historically clearly won out was top-down, hierarchical organisation. People in farming societies overwhelmingly — when the evidence allows us to see this — say, “People are all different and we all know this. Everybody’s different; no two people are identical. People are all different. Therefore, the fundamental moral principle should be that you treat people differently, with fairness.”

Ian Morris: If you’re a hunter-gatherer, “fairness” means treating everybody the same. In a farming society, fairness means recognising their differences: you’ll say, “The Pharaoh of Egypt is so rich, so powerful, that only a complete idiot would say the Pharaoh is the same kind of animal that you and I are.” In lots of places they’d say, “Our kings are like the gods, must be descended from gods.” In Egypt they say, “No, Pharaoh is a god. That is the only possible explanation for the world that we see. Common sense tells us Pharaoh is a god.”

Ian Morris: We live in a world where you need a lot of labour in your fields, especially if you’re rich and you’ve got big fields. You can’t work yourself. But we also live in a world where it’s hard to generate enough surplus from agriculture to pay wages, so they’re going to attract free labourers to come and work for you. So what do you do? You go to free, poor people and say, “Here’s this deal, come and work for me, or I will break your legs. How about that for a deal?” Free people tend to say, “Yes, OK, if those really are the alternatives.” These societies — this is what we see in their literary productions — evolve towards saying, “This is actually right and proper.”

Ian Morris: Take Aristotle, one of the cleverest guys who ever lived in the history of the world. You think you’re cleverer than Aristotle, you’re kidding yourself. Aristotle says, “Slavery is natural. The gods made humans so that some of us only realise our full potential when we are working for someone else, giving us orders. That is when we become fully actualised humans and other people only become fully actualised by having someone else do the labour for them and going on living this richer, intellectual life.”

Ian Morris: You might say, “Oh, this is terrible, this is horrible,” but this is how almost every society on Earth functioned for 5,000 years. Are they all wrong? This is the question we’ve got to ask ourselves. Then of course, what makes this question so problematic for us is that when the Industrial Revolution happens, we get this explosion of energy. There’s this debate that gets going over what is the best kind of society to generate and to use all that energy.

Ian Morris: Two big theories come out. One is the Western democratic theory: the more you push decision making down in the hierarchy — the freer you make people, basically — the better everything is going to go. You take away all these old prejudices about gender relations, women come into the workforce, hey, you just doubled the size of the labour pool. Old prejudices about how Jews should not be allowed to own property or something. Turns out in 18th century England, you start allowing Jews to own property. That works out really well for all the other rich people too. All these old prejudices just start disintegrating, slavery goes from being absolutely natural and reasonable to being absolutely unthinkable in the course of two centuries. Magic.

Ian Morris: But then you get this other idea, like the Soviet idea, the Nazi idea: no, centralise everything, run it from the top down. That is the best way to run these high-energy, super-efficient organisations. Nobody is telling us how to do this. We have to figure it out for ourselves. Yet our decisions are constrained by these vast material forces of geography, of energy. It’s like we’re trying to figure out all the time what is going to be the most productive, most useful, and most rewarding way for us as individuals to run these societies?

Rob Wiblin: We’ll come back to Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels in just a second, but let’s for now talk a little bit about historical methodology. Because I reckon a lot of people in the audience are probably quite open to the ideas that we’ve discussed above being right, but they might have a bunch of scepticism about how strong the historical evidence can ever be to support such big-picture claims about so many different societies, so many different places, so many different people, so many different eras. Why might unravelling answers to the kinds of questions that you’ve set yourself and tried to answer above be more viable than it might intuitively appear?