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Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels
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Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels

How Human Values Evolve

Ian Morris
Princeton UP, 2015
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In this ambitious treatise, historian Ian Morris argues that how societies get fuel for energy from the environment determines their values. When a society’s ability to capture energy changes, its values change. Morris tracks three major societal systems: Foragers came first, then farmers, then the age of fossil fuel. This work grew from Morris’s Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton in 2012, and retains the accessibility of really good lectures. Morris includes critiques from historians Richard Seaford and Jonathan Spence, philosopher Christine Korsgaard and dystopian novelist Margaret Atwood. getAbstract recommends Morris’s big picture and fascinating details to anyone interested in ethics, culture, values and social change – and in how these factors shape technology and vice versa.

Summary

Human Culture and Values

Human culture and values evolve over time. The dominant factor shaping human culture is how people capture fuel for energy from their environment. Human history moved through three main stages, each with its own values. Foraging cultures came first. Foragers support themselves by gathering wild plants and hunting animals. Foragers “value equality over most forms of hierarchy,” and accept violence as part of life. Farmers followed. Farmers support themselves by domesticating “plants and animals.” They “value hierarchy over equality,” and largely reject violence. The third stage features “fossil-fuel values.” This culture takes energy from “fossilized plants” in the form of “coal, gas and oil.” “Foragers, farmers and fossil-fuel users” provide models of cultural evolution that show how “each age gets the thought it needs.”

Foragers and Their Values

Foraging cultures fill the first 90% of human history. Foragers, or “hunter-gatherers,” emerged in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. “By 10,000 years ago,” they expanded into all habitable areas. Foragers moved often, traveling “in small groups” because food was available in different...

About the Author

Ian Morris is Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford. He is the author of Why the West Rules – For Now, War: What is it Good For? and numerous articles and books.

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