Ian Morris convincingly demonstrates that the sources of energy available to a given society determine what types of values can thrive in that society. Mr. Morris segments the last twenty thousand years in three broadly successive systems of human values on a worldwide basis: Foraging values, farming values, and fossil-fuel values. The author acknowledges that his approach to human history for that period is reductionist, strongly materialist, mostly universalist, functionalist, and explicitly evolutionist.
Mr. Morris makes his case by starting with two assumptions based on what human biology has shown for the ten to fifteen thousand years since farming began:
1. Nearly all humans care deeply about some core values such as fairness, justice, love, hate, respect, loyalty, preventing harm, and a sense that some things are sacred.
2. These core values are biologically evolved adaptations.
These two assumptions lead the author to make two claims:
1. The last twenty thousand years can be subdivided into three broad stages during which humans have shown how they have interpreted these biologically evolved core values. These three stages mostly correlate with the three major methods, i.e. foraging, farming, and fossil fuels, that humans have perfected for capturing energy from their environment.
2. Changes in energy capture cause changes in human values.
Foragers have low tolerance for political and wealth inequality. However, they display a “middling” acceptance of gender inequality and violence.
Farmers consider political, wealth, and gender inequality a good thing. Nonetheless, they tend to be less tolerant of violence than foragers.
Fossil-fuel users have a negative perception of political and gender inequality. Furthermore, they have even less tolerance of violence than farmers. In contrast, fossil-fuel users adopt a “middling” acceptance of wealth inequality. Mr. Morris is here at his weakest when one reviews the lamentable catalog of human horrors since the 18th century saw the emergence of the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom.
These two above-mentioned claims raise two implications:
1. Fossil-fuel values are the right interpretations of our biologically evolved core values because we live in a fossil-fuel world. For this reason, forager and farming values are wrong until what the author calls Industria also passes into history.
2. The interpretations of our biologically evolved core values will evolve faster than ever before across the 21st century. Why? Energy capture is changing faster than ever before.
To his credit, Mr. Morris systematically addresses the diverse arguments made against his reductionist, strongly materialist, mostly universalist, functionalist, and explicitly evolutionist approach to human history. One cannot escape from the overall impression that many of these critiques get into the weeds while losing track of the big picture.
In summary, the author invites his readers to consider how important energy capture has been in modeling human values for the last twenty thousand years.
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