Ian Morris, in NewScientist (18 Apr 2015) “Morality is rooted in the way societies get their energy” (paywall) (print: “The unexpected origin of human values”) and in his new book Foragers, farmers and fossil fuels: How human values evolve (Princeton University Press), suggests that energy requirements of culture dictate the human values that prevail:
I call the first of the three systems foraging values, because it is associated with societies that support themselves primarily by hunting and gathering wild plants. For tens of thousand of years, everyone on Earth lived this way, but now barely one person in a million does so. …
No two modern foraging bands are identical, but virtually all agree that a fair world is one where everyone is treated more or less the same. No one should be much richer than anyone else or much more politically powerful; and men and women should have roughly equal freedom to do what they think best. Upstarts who subvert these values will be cut down to size with mockery, ostracism and even violence. …
The second moral system, which I call farming values because it is associated with societies that support themselves primarily with domesticated plants and animals, could not be more different. … Virtually all these groups operated on the principle that a fair society was not one where all were treated more or less the same; rather, it was one where different individuals were treated differently. Some were wiser and more virtuous than others, and deserved to be rich and powerful. It was right to own slaves, for women to defer to men and everyone to defer to rulers who had been chosen by the gods – or actually were gods – because people who were male, free and royal were better than people who were not. Hierarchy was fair.
The third moral system is once again wildly different. I call this fossil-fuel values, because it is associated with societies that augment the energy they can extract from living plants and animals with that from fossilised plants, by burning coal and oil to power machines.
Fossil-fuel society began in Britain around AD 1800 and spread rapidly around the world. As it did so, farming values simply collapsed. Opinion pollsters tell us that by the 2010s, huge majorities – varying only slightly with age, sex, religion and nationality – were insisting that political, economic and gender inequalities are bad. Steep hierarchies, say fossil fuellers, are not fair, and people who disagree seem as immoral as democrats, socialists and feminists would have done 1000 years ago.
Interesting, but what does this have to do with energy?
Foragers captured very little energy from the world – typically, no more than 5000 kilocalories per person per day, to use as food or fuel – and they had to live in tiny bands, usually less than 10 people strong. This made it impossible to create steep political, wealth or gender hierarchies; which, in turn, meant that those who interpreted fairness as treating everyone roughly the same tended to do well, while those whose idea of fairness was treating people differently did not. …
The upside of farming, though, was that it unleashed a flood of energy: by my calculations, the amount of energy used per person roughly doubled between 10,000 BC and 4000 BC, to reach 10,000 kilocalories a day (see “Energy-hungry humanity” graph below). By 1 BC it had risen to 30,000 kilocalories a day. As this happened, farmers turned much of the extra energy into more of their own kind. In 10,000 BC, there were no farmers on Earth, but there were about 5 million foragers; by 1 BC, there were 250 million peasants, who had driven the few surviving foragers on to lands the farmers did not want. …
The industrial revolution increased energy capture even more dramatically. Around AD 1700, the average north-west European used about 32,000 kilocalories a day, but by 1900 this had nearly tripled, to 92,000. Today, the average American burns through 230,000 kilocalories a day. Once again, we turned a flood of energy into more of ourselves. In 1800, there were 1 billion humans. Today, there are 7 billion of us.
The remarkable thing about this energy surge, however, was that rather than pushing the farming world toward even steeper hierarchies, it did just the opposite. Today, 60 per cent of the world’s population live in democracies, and in almost all of these places women can vote and economic inequality has tumbled.
So he suggests that values are shaped by energy requirements; that energy availability enables better reproduction; but that there is not any kind of correlation between energy requirements and, to put it baldly, slavery. He uses the Gini coefficient, which measures (roughly) inequality in a group, to measure our misuse of each other. Since this is a pay article, I shan’t copy his chart, but the average values for the three society types are .25 for foragers, .48 for farming societies, and for today’s fossil-fuel society, as he calls us?
By the 1970s, the average Gini coefficient for income equality (after tax) in the nations belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was just 0.26.
While I’m wary of apples and oranges, it is a fascinating analysis. Finding good data over time doesn’t appear to be easy. The OECD, mentioned above, provides this 2013 data:
indicating Gini moving up for the OECD as a group over the years.
Reluctantly leaving the fascinating question of whether the Gini coefficient implies slavery, unrestrained greed, or something else, we can return to the primary question of how energy availability (vs requirements) changes the human value system. In the beginning, we must acknowledge that a value system cannot be disconnected from group, or even species survival; indeed, value systems have evolved as a survival mechanism. Foragers, while being fairly egalitarian, are also fragile, with low reproductive potential. The farming value system requires – coerces – nearly everyone to give up their autonomy in order to lower the fragility value. But a nuance missing from the paper – but perhaps not the book, which I’ve neither purchased nor read – is whether the energy consumed by the farming group, for some given individual in the hierarchy, includes the energy, at least in some part, of those below him in the hierarchy, or if it’s only a personal consumption. I think it’s clear that fossil fuel, and the power systems it enables, replaces the slave labor that used to be employed on the farms; the value system of the farm evolves in order to justify the farm because the farm’s output enables the survival of the group. Thus, from Morris:
Here the anthropology of modern peasant societies partly comes to the rescue. What the downtrodden disagree with, ethnographers find, is not hierarchy as such, but their own place in it, or the suspicion that their so-called “betters” are not living up to their moral obligations. Resisting specific husbands, masters or lords who are abusing their authority is right and proper; resisting authority itself is not. And we find similar attitudes even in texts from now-vanished farming societies. “The Tsar is good, but the boyars [local elites] are bad,” a typical Russian peasant saying went; rebellion was justified if its goal was to let the tsar know that his agents were failing him, but not if it intended to challenge the divinely appointed tsar himself.
So this illuminates, to some degree, the fascinating anachronism that is much of modern religion: it evolved to support the farming era, when nearly everyone was involved with farming and energy came from the human back; now that it is unneeded, it continues on but carries a burden of irrationalism which leaves us with such amazement that many still believe it just because it’s so unbelievable.
And, finally, the fossil fuel value system can safely move back toward autonomy and equality without sacrificing group survival, or so would go the theory – although how nuclear war impacts the theory may be a discussion for another day.
