Ian Morris
Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve
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Summary
Some societies insist that everyone is equal; others think that some of their members are so special that they must be gods while others are so insignificant that they can be enslaved. It sometimes seems as if human nature is a blank slate, on which anything can be written. But in this talk, Ian Morris will suggest that there is actually a clear pattern in how human values evolve.
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.