Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve
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Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve
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Overview
The best-selling author of Why the West Rules—for Now examines the evolution and future of human values
Most people in the world today think democracy and gender equality are good, and that violence and wealth inequality are bad. But most people who lived during the 10,000 years before the nineteenth century thought just the opposite. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, biology, and history, Ian Morris explains why. Fundamental long-term changes in values, Morris argues, are driven by the most basic force of all: energy. Humans have found three main ways to get the energy they need—from foraging, farming, and fossil fuels. Each energy source sets strict limits on what kinds of societies can succeed, and each kind of society rewards specific values. But if our fossil-fuel world favors democratic, open societies, the ongoing revolution in energy capture means that our most cherished values are very likely to turn out not to be useful any more. Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels offers a compelling new argument about the evolution of human values, one that has far-reaching implications for how we understand the past—and for what might happen next. Originating as the Tanner Lectures delivered at Princeton University, the book includes challenging responses by classicist Richard Seaford, historian of China Jonathan Spence, philosopher Christine Korsgaard, and novelist Margaret Atwood.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400865512 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/22/2015 |
| Series: | The University Center for Human Values Series , #41 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels
How Human Values Evolve
By Ian Morris, Stephen Macedo
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Ian MorrisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-6551-2
CHAPTER 1
EACH AGE GETS THE THOUGHT IT NEEDS
Mr. George
In 1982, I went on my first archaeological excavation in Greece. I was thrilled: I had dug a lot in Britain, but this was something else entirely. An ancient Land Rover took me from Birmingham as far as Thessaloniki, where I caught an even more ancient bus to Assiros, the farming village where we would be working (figure 1.1). There I settled into the project's routine. All day long we would count, weigh, and catalogue fragments of prehistoric pottery, and as the sun went down, we would revive ourselves with a glass or two of ouzo in the dig house's dusty front yard.
One evening, an old man came down the dirt road past the house, riding sidesaddle on a donkey, tapping the animal with a stick. Next to him was an old woman, on foot, bent under the weight of a bulging sack. As they passed, one of my fellow students greeted them in broken Greek.
The old man stopped, all smiles. He exchanged a few sentences with our spokesman, and then the little party trudged on.
"That was Mr. George," our interpreter explained.
"What did you ask him?" one of us said.
"How he's doing. And why his wife isn't riding the donkey."
There was a pause. "And?"
"He says she doesn't have one."
It was my first taste of the classic anthropological experience of culture shock. Back in Birmingham, a man who rode a donkey while his wife struggled with a huge sack would have seemed selfish (or worse). Here in Assiros, however, the arrangement was clearly so natural, and the reasons for it so self-evident, that our question apparently struck Mr. George as simpleminded.
A third of a century later, this book is an attempt to explain what I saw in Assiros. It is based on the two Tanner Lectures in Human Values that I delivered at Princeton University in October 2012. Being asked to give the Tanners is one of the highest honors in academic life, but I was especially delighted by the invitation because I am, frankly, such an unlikely person to receive it. In the thirty years since I met Mr. George, I had never written a single word about moral philosophy. Needless to say, that detail gave me pause, but on reflection, I convinced myself that Princeton's Center for Human Values was actually the perfect setting for me to hold forth on the events in Assiros, because explaining Mr. George's comment and my own reaction to it requires nothing less than a general theory of the cultural evolution of human values across the last twenty thousand years. For that task, a background in history and archaeology rather than in moral philosophy struck me as just the right skillset, and, I told myself, such a general theory of the cultural evolution of human values might be of some interest to moral philosophers too.
Whether I am right or wrong is for you to decide, with some input from the experts. After five chapters in which I set out my theory, in chapters 6 to 9 the four respondents to the original lectures—the classicist Richard Seaford, the Sinologist Jonathan D. Spence, the philosopher Christine M. Korsgaard, and the novelist Margaret Atwood—will have their say. But I get the last word, responding to the responses in chapter 10.
The Argument
In the last forty or fifty years, academics have written hundreds of books and thousands of articles about culture shocks similar to (and often much odder than) my encounter with Mr. George, his donkey, and his wife. What I offer here, though, is rather different from most of these studies. When we look at the entire planet across the last twenty thousand years, I argue, we see three broadly successive systems of human values. Each is associated with a particular way of organizing society, and each form of organization is dictated by a particular way of capturing energy from the world around us. Energy capture ultimately explains not only what Mr. George said but also why it surprised me so much.
Immediately, though, I must make a caveat: because value systems—or cultures, or whatever we want to call them—are such shapeless entities, the only way to present this argument in the space of a hundred or so pages is by focusing on specific subsets of the broader systems. In my comparisons here, I therefore limit myself to ideas about equality and hierarchy (including politics, economics, and gender) and attitudes toward violence. I pick these topics partly because I am interested in them and partly because they seem to be important. However, I also suspect that most subsets of values would reveal similar patterns; and if they do not, comparisons between different subsets of values will be one obvious way that critics might falsify my argument.
I will spend chapters 2 to 4 trying to demonstrate the reality of these three broadly successive systems of human values. I call the first of them "foraging values," because it is associated with societies that support themselves primarily by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals. Foragers tend to value equality over most kinds of hierarchy and are quite tolerant of violence. The second system I call "farming values," because it is associated with societies that support themselves primarily off domesticated plants and animals. Farmers tend to value hierarchy over equality and are less tolerant of violence. The third system, which I call "fossil-fuel values," is associated with societies that augment the energy of living plants and animals by tapping into the energy of fossilized plants that have turned into coal, gas, and oil. Fossil-fuel users tend to value equality of most kinds over hierarchy and to be very intolerant of violence.
This framework not only explains why Mr. George's comment seemed so odd to me in 1982 (his values were largely those of the farming phase, while mine belonged to the fossil- fuel phase) but also seems to have two broader implications for the study of human values. If I am right that energy capture determines values, it perhaps follows (1) that those moral philosophers who try to identify a one-size-fits-all, perfect system of human values are wasting their time, and (2) that the values that we (whoever "we" happen to be) hold dearest today are very likely to turn out—at some point fairly soon—not to be helpful any more. At that point (again, if I am right), we will abandon these values and will move on to a fourth, post-fossil-fuel, stage. I close, in chapter 5, with some speculations on what such values might look like.
Explaining and Understanding
My study of culture shock differs from most recent studies in trying to explain the experience rather than understand it. This distinction is usually traced back almost a century, to Max Weber, the founding father of sociology. Weber, however, was not the first scholar to contrast understanding (verstehen) and explaining (erklären) as ways of thinking about social action. That honor seems to belong to the philosopher and historian Johann Gustav Droysen, who suggested in the 1850s that historians and natural scientists were engaged in fundamentally different activities. Historians, he said, were trying to understand (by which he meant grasping past actors' subjective meanings) their subject matter, while natural scientists were trying to explain (by which he meant identifying causes) theirs.
Weber not only elaborated Droysen's original formulation on a massive scale but also suggested that sociology has a third goal, distinct from both history and science: to synthesize explaining and understanding. "A correct causal interpretation of a concrete course of action is arrived at," he insisted, "when the overt action and the motives have both been correctly apprehended and at the same time their relation has become meaningfully comprehensible.... If adequacy in respect to meaning is lacking," he added, "then no matter how high the degree of uniformity and how precisely its probability can be numerically determined, it is still an incomprehensible statistical probability, whether we deal with overt or subjective processes."
In the 1930s, the sociologist Talcott Parsons brought Weber's thought to a broad audience among American social scientists, but the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (who began his career as a student of Parsons) put a very new spin on it in the 1960s–1970s. "Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun" Geertz wrote, "I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning." Building on this interpretation of Weber, Geertz concluded that making sense of social action must be based on "long-term, mainly (though not exclusively) qualitative, highly participatory, and almost obsessively fine-comb field study," producing what he famously labeled "thick description."
Thick description, said Geertz, should normally take the form of "the essay, whether of thirty pages or three hundred, [which is] the natural genre in which to present cultural interpretations and the theories sustaining them." That said, "the claim to attention of an ethnographic account ... does not rest on its author's ability to capture primitive facts in faraway places, but on the degree to which he is able to clarify what goes on in such places, to reduce the puzzlement—what manner of men are these?—to which unfamiliar acts emerging out of unknown backgrounds naturally give rise."
In arguing that social scientists should focus on understanding, rather than the synthesis of understanding and explaining that Weber promoted, Geertz caught a larger mood in American academia. By the mid-1980s, most humanists and many social scientists had followed his lead, transforming culture shock from a problem into an opportunity. We should rejoice, the historian Robert Darnton (at the time, a colleague of Geertz's at Princeton) wrote just a couple of years after my encounter with Mr. George, that "what is proverbial wisdom for our ancestors is completely opaque to us," because "when we cannot get a proverb, or a joke, or a ritual, or a poem, we know we are on to something. By picking at the document where it is most opaque, we may be able to unravel an alien system of meaning. The thread might even lead into a strange and wonderful worldview."
It did cross my mind back in 1982 that Mr. George might be having a little joke at our expense, poking fun at our First World condescension toward his rural ways. And yet the facts remained that it was Mr. George sitting on the donkey and his wife struggling with the bulging sack. I do not doubt that contextualizing his comments within a thick description of Assirote village life would unravel a strange and wonderful worldview, but here I want to do something different. Instead of understanding Mr. and Mrs. George's behavior, I want to explain it.
In doing so, I will draw on a line of inquiry that goes back not just beyond Geertz but also beyond Droysen. If we go back far enough, particularly to the half-century between the 1720s and 1770s, we come to a time when explanation, not understanding, dominated the scholarly study of culture. From Montesquieu to Adam Smith, many of Western Europe's intellectual giants reacted to the flood of information coming in about other continents by positing—as I do here—that humanity had moved through a series of stages of economic development (usually some variation on hunting, pastoralism, farming, and commerce), each of which had its own characteristic system of manners.
Some of these theorists called their work "philosophical history," because they felt that they were using the past to answer some of the central questions of moral philosophy, but others preferred "conjectural history," for the equally good reason that they knew that the schemes rested on conjecture rather than real evidence about the past. From the very beginning, conjectural history attracted a combination of mockery (Walter Bagehot joked that Adam Smith "wanted to show how from being a savage, [man] rose to be a Scotchman") and rage (in the first volume of the Historisches Journal, published in 1773, Johann Christoph Gatterer railed against the "pretentious little Humes or Robertsons, the little German Voltaires," and promised "to hunt down these insects without mercy, wherever they may be"). By the 1790s, many scholars had concluded that the costs of conjecturing without evidence outweighed the gains of philosophizing, and conjectural/philosophical history went into sharp decline.
But the urge to explain culture shock would not go away. A new approach, which has come to be known as "classical evolutionism," took shape in and after the 1850s, as missionaries and administrators produced a new wave of stories about the weird ways of non-Europeans, and academics developed new explanatory frameworks. By the 1920s, however, the first professional anthropologists had shown that classical evolutionism was almost as conjectural as eighteenth-century philosophical history. Explanation once again went into retreat—only to enjoy another great revival (now in a form called "neo-evolutionism") in the 1950s. By this point, a significant body of archaeological and ethnographic evidence had been gathered, and explainers could ground their claims in statistical analyses of massive datasets, but by the 1980s thick description had routed this third wave of explainers too, albeit this time more on theoretical than empirical grounds.
It might be tempting to interpret this story as just one more piece of evidence that there is no such thing as progress in the humanities and social sciences, but that, I think, would be a mistake. What we really see here is scholarship working the way it is supposed to. Since the eighteenth century, one group of scholars after another has conjectured about the causes of cultural variation, and one group of critics after another has refuted them. In each round of debate, the explainers and understanders forced each other to come up with better theories and data, and in the 2010s, with the understanders in the ascendant, we would-be explainers need to raise our game once again.
Isms
To do this, explainers need to complement the hundreds of thick descriptions of meaning in specific cultures with broad comparisons spanning large areas and long periods of time. These will be thin descriptions, largely (though not exclusively) quantitative, and not very participatory. They will be coarse-grained, because they sweep up into a single story hundreds of societies, thousands of years, and millions of people, and reductionist, because they seek answers by boiling down the teeming variety of lived experience to simpler underlying principles.
The three value systems that I identify—those of foragers, farmers, and fossil-fuel users—are examples of what Weber called ideal types, "achieved," he explained, "by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified mental construct. In its conceptual purity, this mental construct can never be found empirically in reality. It is a utopia." Ideal types reduce the real lives of billions of people to a few simple models, and because they subsume such enormous empirical variation, they are necessarily riddled with exceptions. But this is the price we have to pay if we are to identify causes behind the chaos of real life.
This path is bound to strike some readers as leading us into -isms of all the wrong kinds. To begin with, it is reductionist. In most branches of the humanities and some of the social sciences, "reductionist" is a term of abuse, but rather than denying the obvious fact of my reductionism, I want to embrace the charge. My defense is that all scholarship is reductionist. Anyone who denies this is not thinking hard enough. To give just one example: I recently had occasion to look up some details in Martin Gilbert's eight-volume biography of Winston Churchill (which was actually published as thirteen separate books, because some of the volumes were too big to be constrained within a single pair of covers).21 This must be one of the biggest biographies ever written, but it is still reductionist. Reducing any individual's life to words on a page—even five thousand such pages—necessarily involves distorting a more complex reality; reducing the lives of everyone who lived in the last twenty millennia to a few short chapters necessarily does so more. But that is fine. The question we should be asking is not whether a historian, an anthropologist, or a sociologist is being reductionist—the answer is always yes—but what level of reduction is required to resolve the problem being posed. Big questions often need a lot of abstraction, and so that is what I provide.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels by Ian Morris, Stephen Macedo. Copyright © 2015 Ian Morris. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Figures and Tables ixAcknowledgments xi
Introduction by Stephen Macedo xiii
Chapter 1 Each Age Gets the Thought It Needs 1
Chapter 2 Foragers 25
Chapter 3 Farmers 44
Chapter 4 Fossil Fuels 93
Chapter 5 The Evolution of Values: Biology, Culture, and the Shape of Things to Come 139
Comments
Chapter 6 On the Ideology of Imagining That “Each Age Gets the Thought It Needs,” Richard Seaford 172
Chapter 7 But What Was It Really Like? The Limitations of Measuring Historical Values, Jonathan D. Spence 180
Chapter 8 Eternal Values, Evolving Values, and the Value of the Self, Christine M. Korsgaard 184
Chapter 9 When the Lights Go Out: Human Values after the Collapse of Civilization, Margaret Atwood 202
Response
Chapter 10 My Correct Views on Everything, Ian Morris 208
Notes 267
References 305
Contributors 341
Index 343
What People are Saying About This
"Ian Morris has thrown another curveball for social science. In this disarmingly readable book, which takes us from prehistory to the present, he offers a new theory of human culture, linking it firmly to economic fundamentals and how humans obtained their energy and resources from nature. This is bold, erudite, and provocative."—Daron Acemoglu, coauthor of How Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty"Ian Morris has emerged in recent years as one of the great big thinkers in history, archaeology, and anthropology, writing books that set people talking and thinking. I found delightful things in every chapter ofForagers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels, interesting enough that I found myself sharing them with family over dinner. The breadth of reading and the command of the subject are just dazzling. His major argument—that value systems adapt themselves to ambient energy structures, in the same way that an organism adapts to its niche—is fascinating."—Daniel Lord Smail, author of On Deep History and the Brain"This is an important and stylistically excellent book written from a sophisticated materialist perspective. It is eminently readable, lively, and with clearly stated arguments explored in a systematic fashion. In a sense, it follows up on Jared Diamond's work on agricultural origins, and it parallels Steven Pinker's book on warfare in depicting a world that is culturally evolving in a certain direction. Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels should have a serious impact."—Chris Boehm, author of Moral Origins: The Evolution of Altruism, Virtue, and Shame