Ian Morris
War! What is it Good For?
Summary
Like most animals, humans have evolved to be able to use violence to get what they want. Yet unlike any other animal, humans have changed how and how much they use violence without evolving biologically into a different animal. Globally, people today are ten times less likely to die violently than our Stone Age ancestors. This talk looks at how this happened and what it tells us about our future.
Ian Morris
Ian Morris teaches at Stanford University, where he has won the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and served as Senior Associate Dean of Humanities and Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society for the Arts, and the London School of Economics’ IDEAS institute, and has excavated archaeological excavations in Britain, Greece, and Sicily. He studies long-term global history, asking what the patterns of the past tell us about the future. His fifteen books, which have been translated into seventeen languages, include the prize-winning Why the West Rules—For Now. The most recent, Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World, a 10,000-Year History, came out in 2022. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, delivered the Tanner Lectures in Human Values at Princeton University, and taught in the University of Zurich’s MBA program, as well as advising the World Bank and US National Intelligence Council and serving as the Australian Army’s Keogh Professor of Future Land Warfare. His research has been funded by the Carnegie and Guggenheim Foundations, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Geographic Society, and he has sat on the Max Planck Institute’s Scientific Advisory Board.