Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels

Why do people in different times and places hold radically different beliefs about fairness, hierarchy, gender, and violence? In Ian Morris’s Tanner Lectures, the answer is as stark as it is sweeping: energy drives values. The ways societies capture and use energy—through foraging, farming, or fossil fuels—create constraints and opportunities that make certain moral outlooks more workable and appealing than others. Morris’s guiding idea is materialist but not mechanical: energy shapes population scale, which shapes social organization, which in turn shapes what people take to be right and true.

The causal chain

Morris builds a consistent causal sequence: energy capture → population scale → social organization → dominant values. Forager societies, working with low energy input and small groups, emphasize equality and sharing. Farming societies, with higher density and stored resources, prize hierarchy, property, and stability. Fossil-fuel users, with huge surpluses and markets, tilt toward political equality and expressiveness. The phrase "Each age gets the thought it needs" sums up his thesis neatly: moral codes are adaptive architectures that fit the challenges of their ecological and economic base.

The biological foundation

Morris accepts that human beings share biological moral instincts—fairness, harm avoidance, loyalty, and sacredness (following E. O. Wilson and Frans de Waal)—but argues these instincts are flexible materials. Culture, built on those instincts, evolves Darwinianly: societies experiment with norms and institutions; successful forms persist because they help groups survive and grow. Borrowing Leslie White’s formula (C = E × T), culture expands with the product of energy and technology. Thus, at each stage of history, values emerge that best support continuing energy capture and institutional survival.

Three modes of social life

To make the argument vivid, Morris presents three "ideal types" of society. Foragers live in small bands that prioritize sharing and autonomy. They have egalitarian gender norms, but frequent interpersonal violence due to weak central authority. Farmers create dense settlements and heavy hierarchy—land ownership, patriarchy, and bureaucratic states become key. Fossil-fuel users, beginning around 1800, develop industrial economies, democratic institutions, and values of equality and self-expression. These shifts are not moral progress in an absolute sense; they are functional responses to new survival constraints.

From hierarchy to equality

Energy abundance reorganizes social scale. Small groups manage equality through cooperation; large agricultural states sustain hierarchy; massive industrial polities, linked by energy-rich systems, reinvent equality through institutions and rights. Group-level selection ensures that societies with arrangements fitting their energy-regimes tend to prosper and spread. Even gender relations follow the same logic: farming, reliant on muscle and inheritance, fosters patriarchy; fossil fuels and technology redistribute power, enabling gender equality through income and independence.

Moral measurement and critique

Morris links modern data like the World Values Survey to his theory, finding loose correlations between economic structure and value orientations. Yet critics—Richard Seaford, Jonathan Spence, Christine Korsgaard, and Margaret Atwood—challenge the model’s determinism and moral implications. Korsgaard asks whether adaptive values are morally justified; Morris replies that practical success is moral legitimacy in human terms. Atwood warns that energy transitions now risk collapse or mutation—where humanity might disappear altogether through ecological failure or technological transformation.

Core takeaway

Energy capture explains why human values shift systematically over millennia. Morality evolves through material feedback: when the energy regime changes, societies reinvent fairness, hierarchy, and freedom to match. Morris’s overarching lesson is simple: understand the energy base, and you begin to understand the moral world built atop it.

Across the book, you see law, religion, and ethics as instruments tuned to the physics and biology of survival. As fossil fuels wane and new technologies rise, the same force that forged ancient agrarian hierarchy may soon reshape posthuman ethics. Whether that shift means enlightenment or extinction depends on how wisely we manage the energy systems that write our moral scripts.

Morris organizes human history around three types of societies: foragers, farmers, and fossil-fuel users. Each captures energy differently and therefore finds different social forms workable. This triad offers a simple yet powerful lens for long-term cultural explanation.

Foragers

Foragers live in small, mobile groups depending on wild resources. They emphasize collective sharing, reciprocity, and autonomy, using ridicule and ostracism to prevent dominance. Anthropologists like Richard Lee and Marshall Sahlins describe them as economically equal but facing high mortality and violence. Their moral world centers on fairness and immediate survival, not long-term hierarchy or property rights.

Farmers

The farming revolution began after the Ice Age’s "long summer" in regions Morris calls the Lucky Latitudes. Domestication allowed settlements, inheritance, and specialization. Hierarchy, property laws, and gender divisions became institutionalized. Women’s labor was confined to home economies; social coercion through slavery and serfdom became common to sustain large works. Inequality rose but violence fell. Religion, law, and custom reinforced stability and order needed for dense populations.

Fossil-Fuel Users

Industrialization unleashed energy abundance through coal and steam, multiplying energy capture by an order of magnitude. Mass markets and cities exploded. Liberal values—political equality, secularism, pacification—expanded because high energy economies made coercion less necessary. Women’s participation and literacy transformed family structures, while democratic governance and welfare states lowered violent death rates.

Key takeaway: Foraging fosters egalitarian sharing; farming institutionalizes hierarchy; fossil fuels enable liberal egalitarianism. Each social world embodies the moral system that fits its energy base.

The triad remains analytical, not literal: hybrid forms and exceptions abound—from affluent foragers in the Pacific Northwest to modern illiberal industrial states. But it captures the broad regularities that make long-term moral and institutional changes intelligible.

Morris insists that scale—how many people interact—shapes hierarchy, and energy drives scale. Societies that capture more energy support larger populations, which require organization and control. Over time, these systems compete; those that manage scale effectively survive and spread their institutions.

From small bands to vast states

Groups below a few hundred people, as Naroll showed, stay relatively egalitarian. Once energy capture allows larger populations, coordination demands hierarchy. Morris uses examples like Kerkeosiris in Roman Egypt to show how even villages became stratified once agricultural surplus emerged. Affluent foragers challenge this simplistic model but confirm the rule: when resources concentrate, scale and inequality rise.

Cultural competition and selection

Cultural traits compete much like genes. Groups with institutions suited to their energy base—say, bureaucracies for farmers or market democracies for industrialists—tend to outlive neighbors. Multilevel selection operates: individual strategies matter, but group efficiency wins in the long run.

Modern paradox: large but less hierarchical

Modern fossil-fuel societies are vast in scale yet less hierarchical. Energy abundance enabled literacy, rights, and institutions redistributing power. Charles Tilly’s concept of "dedifferentiation" captures this flattening. Technology compensated for complexity, allowing equality within massive systems.

Core idea: Energy makes scale possible; scale pushes hierarchy; but technology and institutions can redirect hierarchy toward equality if they fit the new regime.

This evolutionary logic explains why small egalitarian bands and modern democracies share moral intuitions about cooperation, while agrarian states remain outliers. The tension between energy, equality, and hierarchy drives the story of civilization itself.

One of Morris’s most compelling threads concerns violence. Human history shows a striking decline in routine killing as energy capture and state authority grow. The pattern is functional rather than sentimental: monopolized violence reduces incentives for private bloodshed, reshaping moral judgments about harm.

From revenge to law

Foragers rely on self-help justice; retaliation and feud are common. Without centralized enforcement, homicide rates are high—sometimes 10% of all deaths. Farmers invent states, courts, and religion-backed morality to curb chaos. Roman and Han empires brought death rates under 5%, showing that institutional capacity pacifies through deterrence and bureaucracy.

Industrial pacification

Modern, fossil-fuel societies achieve the lowest interpersonal violence in history. Effective policing and courts, stable incomes, and rights culture transform violence from acceptable tool to taboo. Morris connects this change directly to energy: abundant, regulated systems reduce survival threats and enable moral expansion from mere survival to empathy and universal ethics.

Illustrative case: When Morris discusses the Taliban’s attack on Malala Yousafzai, he notes that under modern institutional regimes, such acts violate not only laws but the shared moral reality shaped by fossil-fuel-linked equality systems.

Energy thus underwrites moral restraint. As state power scales, punishment becomes costly, and mutual trust becomes profitable. Violence becomes morally and practically obsolete—not because humans are better angels, but because we live within systems that reward peace.

Morris ties gender and sexual morality directly to the material base. Biology defines reproductive roles, but culture shapes who holds bargaining power. When energy regimes change, work, property, and inheritance structures shift—and so do moral codes for sexuality and family.

From equality to patriarchy

Foragers, lacking accumulative wealth, maintain relatively egalitarian norms. Agriculture creates property and inheritance, making female chastity and male lineage economically vital. Patriarchal control intensifies as agrarian economies depend on male-dominated labor and offspring continuity. Morris points to Athens and Hesiod’s texts to show how institutions codified these hierarchies.

Industrial emancipation

Fossil-fuel economies reverse many constraints. Wage labor and mechanization draw women into the workforce; contraception and education reduce dependency. The moral emphasis shifts: fidelity becomes a personal commitment, not an economic one. Domestic technology (“engines of liberation”) shrinks unpaid labor, altering marriage norms and family size.

Insight: Energy access determines who can control resources; control determines moral legitimacy in gender relations.

Modern equality movements reflect not only ideology but deep structural change: once women earn income and energy supplies extend beyond muscle, old agrarian hierarchies melt. The evolution of moral views on marriage and sexuality follows the thermodynamics of production no less than the rhetoric of rights.

Is morality simply imposed ideology or adaptive reason? Morris argues that societies generally behave sensibly within their material situations. Values that endure do so because they work. Ideology may distort, but common sense eventually prevails—because survival rewards practical beliefs.

The common-sense defense

Christine Korsgaard distinguishes real moral truth from social adaptation, but Morris responds that shared human cognitive capacities continuously test and refine norms. If agrarian hierarchy had been mere delusion, it could not have sustained billions for millennia. It made functional sense under low-productivity conditions. Ideology, he contends, explains less than the material logic that honest peasants followed.

Practical examples

Morris’s Kenyan field story demonstrates this. Local women choosing wage labor over reform campaigns show pragmatic morality—pursuing tangible welfare over ideological purity. The failed Tanzanian ujamaa movement illustrates ideology’s limits when it collides with material inefficiency.

Core claim: You should read history through practical success—values last because they work. Ideology may color behavior, but material adaptation keeps societies honest.

Morris sees moral correctness as contextual human wisdom, not revelation. When moderns condemn the Taliban or ancient patriarchs, they do so from a different energy logic. Understanding that difference builds empathy without surrendering moral judgment: common sense remains the ground truth of human value.

Quantifying values is tricky. Morris admits that his analysis trades nuance for pattern recognition. Rather than detailed ethnography, he relies on Weberian ideal types and datasets like the World Values Survey to find correlations between energy regimes and moral orientations.

Correlation not causation

The data show modest but meaningful links: societies with smaller agricultural shares lean toward secular-rational and self-expression values. Yet cultural noise remains high (R² only 0.24–0.43). Historical depth is also limited, since surveys cover the modern era only. Morris uses qualitative synthesis for pre-industrial history and quantitative analysis for recent times—a hybrid approach that balances breadth with honesty about uncertainty.

Critiques of method

Jonathan Spence warns that such indices flatten lived complexity. Richard Seaford adds that statistical generalizations risk reifying elite values. Morris responds that pattern-seeking is necessary for global comparison. You cannot explain ten thousand years of change one village at a time.

Lesson: Macro-historical explanation demands reduction; you trade detail for understanding. But keeping awareness of that trade-off guards against false precision.

By blending models and interpretive evidence, Morris builds a persuasive, testable framework. You come away with a method that may not predict every detail, but that maps moral evolution onto measurable physical foundations.

The shift from farming to fossil fuels triggered the sharpest moral revolution in history. Across a mere few centuries, values that took millennia to evolve overturned. Industrial energy abundance unleashed democracy, secularism, emancipation, and vast new moral vocabularies.

Energy explosion

Coal and steam turned dead plants into power. Per-capita energy capture skyrocketed, enabling urbanization, mass production, and literacy. Britain’s industrial revolution exemplified this fusion of technology and social liberation. Systems that could support millions efficiently made coercion wasteful and freedom economically rational.

Institutional change

Two paths diverged: liberal industrialization expanded citizenship and rights, while illiberal versions used coercion to mobilize labor. Abolition of slavery, labor laws, and welfare systems emerged from new energy leverage—machines reduced the need for forced human muscle. Simon Kuznets’s curve captures inequality’s oscillation: rising early, compressing mid-century, widening again later.

Pacification and equality

Alongside wealth came moral pacification. Violence declined as institutions enforced order. Women’s participation and contraceptive control redefined family ethics. Modern liberal values appear not as random enlightenment but as feedback from industrial economies optimizing cooperation.

Key takeaway: Industrialization moralizes abundance: when energy and information flow freely, equality and peace become materially sustainable principles, not mere ideals.

The industrial moral revolution is thus structural. Its liberal optimism depends on continued energy and technological coherence. When fossil fuels fade, new regimes will redefine morality again—perhaps as sharply as the agricultural transition once did.

Both Morris and Margaret Atwood end on uneasy ground: the next transformation may dwarf all previous ones. If energy systems falter or humanity engineers itself beyond biology, the very foundations of value may dissolve. The global network is now one experiment with no backups.

Collapse scenarios

Atwood imagines abrupt collapse—loss of supply chains, ocean failure, or environmental calamity. Morris warns that energy shortfall or ecological breakdown could turn moderns into desperate scavengers, quickly reviving forager-like values: violence, opportunism, survivalism. History suggests material regression erases liberal ethics swiftly.

Transformation scenarios

Alternatively, biotechnology and AI may alter what counts as human. Posthuman or machine intelligence may develop new moral systems irrelevant to our biology. Morris extends evolutionary logic to this possibility: if cognition and energy processing change, morality will select for forms that sustain the new order, however alien.

Warning: The next century’s moral identity is inseparable from how we manage energy and technology; failure or mutation will redefine what counting as “human value” means.

Morris and Atwood ultimately urge megathinking: moral futures depend on pragmatic control of energy, ecology, and innovation. Whether humanity sustains or transcends its current moral frameworks, the physical base will remain the silent author of what we call right and wrong.