Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels

How Human Values Evolve

Ian Morris, Stephen Macedo, Stephen Macedo

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400865512
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia mondiale

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.

CHAPTER 1

EACH AGE GETS THE THOUGHT IT NEEDS

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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).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 wife2 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.

FIGURE 1.1. Locations and groups mentioned in chapter 1.

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 2012.3 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.4

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.5 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,6 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.”7

In the 1930s, the sociologist Talcott Parsons brought Weber’s thought to a broad audience among American social scientists,8 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.”9 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.”10

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.”11

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.”12

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,13 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.14 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 informa...