Isaac Asimov's Foundation Pt. 1
"Foundation,” Psychohistory and Positivism
Greetings and salutations! This issue of the Official William Emmons Books Newsletter is the first installment of a new series I’m running where I read through the original Foundation stories by Isaac Asimov as they first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction. In this issue, I’ll be introducing the series, looking at the first story “Foundation,” and relating Asimov’s fictional science of psychohistory to Auguste Comte’s Positivist philosophy.
Introduction To My Foundation Read Through
My regular readers may notice I am running a lot of read throughs right now. Why extend myself so broadly? Well, all my read throughs work together to form a comprehensive whole. Below I’ll lay out my reasons for the Foundation read through and all will be elucidated.
Earlier this year, I saw some people on Twitter talking about how Asimov was boring. Even though 10 years ago I took a crack at reading the Foundation trilogy and lost interest by the third book Second Foundation, I still had a kneejerk reaction to this. The naysayers made me want to return to the source and see for myself. I mostly read short fiction, so I started with “Nightfall” and “The Fun They Had” and have continued on to lesser known stories. My initial judgment is that he produced interesting stuff but some of it is hit or miss and nothing I’ve read by him is brilliant.
And yet the Foundation series continues to flicker in my imagination. Some of the reason for this is that the series captures an ideology present in a lot of science fiction—that the universe, which includes human society, can ultimately be known and manipulated. Percolating on this has caused me to consider the Foundation series as a foil for the anti-positivist ideology of C. M. Kornbluth’s novel The Syndic and to start considering how psychohistory relates to the capital-P Positivism of 19th century French philosopher Auguste Comte.
Moreover, my nascent read through of 1950s Astounding has already put me in a position of having to face the Foundation series directly. The January 1950 issue of that magazine contains a serial that is the last installment in the original series. As I see it, this left me with three options: (1) I could skip the serial; (2) I could read the serial without reading its antecedents; or (3) I could take it all the way back to Astounding May 1942 where this first Foundation story was published. Curiosity encircled me and forced me to surrender to number 3.
A historical note and a shout out before we dive in. If you were reading the Foundation series between 1951 and 1982, it was as the Foundation trilogy of novels Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. However, in 1950 or before when my read throughs of Astounding, Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction start, you’d be reading it as a series of uncollected short pieces out of your or a friend’s collection of old magazines with cover dates scattered across eight years. The chapters in the later novels resemble the earlier stories but are not identical. For example, content from “Foundation” was reworked into the second chapter of Foundation but a new first chapter was written to replace parts of it that were lopped off. I came by this information and the original order of publication from this Reddit post which was the final push I needed to start my read through.
“Foundation”
This short story is a political drama used to illustrate the Promethean possibilities of social science represented here by psychohistory or as it more often and more simply called in this its initial appearance psychology. Indeed, the neologism psychohistory is used only once in “Foundation” on the next to last page whereas references to psychology and psychologists are peppered heavily throughout the text. Emphasis supplied because I find it jarring what a so-called psychologist is able to do in Asimov’s fictional universe.
Enter Hari Seldon, a psychologist so versed in the contours of human thoughts and emotions that he can foresee a coming galactic dark age apt to last 50 millennia and—through his leadership of other skilled scientists and puppet mastering of at least 100,000 unwitting people, all of whom are hermetically sealed off from all but the most rudimentary knowledge of psychology—shorten that dark age to a mere millennium.
At the start of the story, Seldon is already an old man on death’s door. He addresses his followers one final time and revisits their plans to establish two Foundations that will be well springs of civilization at opposite ends of the galaxy. These are to be set up under the auspices of a Galactic Encyclopedia project with a charter from the Galactic Empire. The charter is a cover for the real purpose of preserving civilization. This true plan is so secretive that even the encyclopedists and others who will populate the Foundations will not know about it until it is well under way and they are locked into it.
The story then jumps 50 years forward to one of the Encyclopedia projects on a planet called Terminus. The rest of the story is composed of a series of conversations among politicians and diplomats. There are three major contradictions driving the story and one major theme.
The contradictions are the conflict between the civilian population of Terminus as represented by Mayor Hardin and the imperially-appointed scientific government constituted by the Encyclopedia’s Board of Trustees, the conflict between the Galactic Empire and newly independent kingdoms on the galactic periphery, and the conflict between one such kingdom called Anacreon and Terminus. Of these three contradictions, the primary one in the story is the internal conflict on Terminus which is, of course, driven forward by the other two contradictions.
The major theme is that galactic civilizational decline is indicated by men of science (they are all men) turning their backs on new research and relying only on what has come before. This resting on old assurances leads to severe political bungling by the Board of Trustees. Based on a misplaced faith in their imperial charter, the Board believes that the Emperor can and will protect them from Anacreon. For his part, Hardin doesn’t go along with this and is wily enough to trick a representative from Anacreon into believing Terminus has atomic weapons, thus holding off invasion for a little while.
The Board of Trustees also believes an imperial representative called Lord Dorwin’s false assertion that Anacreon still recognizes the Emperor’s sovereignty because of the letter of a treaty between the two powers. They also falsely believe Lord Dorwin promised them imperial protection. Without consulting Hardin, the Board sends Anacreon a communique stating that they remain under the Emperor’s protection. In so doing, they manage to tip off Anacreon that they are not a nuclear-armed power after all.
Anacreon answers with an ultimatum: allow us a military base and turn over your lands to be parceled out to our nobles in one week’s time or else. Only after this does the Board of Trustees consult with Hardin and request his help. They are truly dumbstruck as they are unable to read dynamic situations or take in new data. They have mistaken the map for the territory.
Hardin, who has incomplete training as a psychologist, humiliates the Board of Trustees by having a logician run the treaty between the Galactic Empire and Anacreon as well as Lord Dorwin’s statements to the Board through a computer to see what their substantive content is. The computer’s analysis reveals that Anacreon owes the Emperor no duties and that Lord Dorwin made Terminus no promises of protection. To put fine point on it, Hardin also leads the people of Terminus in a bloodless coup against the Board.
Still the damage has been done. Terminus has lost the time it needed to convert its civilian atomic power program into a Manhattan Project. Occupation is inevitable. So Hardin begins to lay plans for Terminus’ eventual liberation.
In the background looms a deus ex machina. In the days leading up to the imminent invasion, a time vault is scheduled to open from which a recording of Seldon will make a pronouncement. Board member Dr. Jord Fara believes that Seldon will have foreseen their predicament and point the way forward.
When the recording plays, Seldon reveals the true purpose of the Foundation and that he did in fact foresee their current predicament. Moreover, he states that the solution is obvious. So obvious he doesn’t say what it is! As the story closes, Hardin is left considering Seldon’s cryptic statement and Terminus’ next move.
I found this story to be ham-fisted on a technical level but fun and interesting nevertheless. It made me wonder what learned people who weren’t in orbit around John W. Campbell believed about the actual science of psychology’s Promethean possibilities in 1942. If you’re in the know about the history of psychology, leave a comment or drop me a line.
Positivism and Psychohistory
In my recent review of The Syndic, I wrote, “Positivism is an orb science fiction enthusiasts should ponder because it seems to run parallel to at least some schools of thought associated with the genre.” I proceeded to give a sketchy description of lower case-p positivism and linked it up with psychohistory, i.e., what “Foundation” mostly refers to as psychology. After writing my review of The Syndic, I decided I should take my own advice and do some orb pondering.
Positivist philosophy was founded by French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and lay at the root of a lot of modern social science especially sociology. Comte had some pretty batty ideas and others that have an internal logic but which also seem flawed. For example, a major doctrine of Positivism is that human society goes through three phases based on how people understand the universe: (1) the theological phase where people rely on supernatural or religious explanations; (2) the metaphysical phase where abstract ideas begin to replace theological constructs and people begin to notice facts; and (3) the positive phase which is the ultimate phase where people have learned to discern natural laws especially as they apply to human society itself. It’s a neat schema but it also manages to characterize society based totally on what is going on between people’s ears.
Perhaps a more useful aspect of Comte’s life’s work was that he was an advocate for applying the scientific method to understanding human social organization. And this meshes well with Asimov’s psychohistorians. The social engineer in me likes The Thousand Year Plan as one of the alternate titles for Foundation. It implies a high level of social scientific acumen even if there’s something devious about Seldon setting people in motion in a way that removes free will from the equation.
In preparation for this post, I read/skimmed the first essay in J. H. Bridges’ 1908 translation of Comte’s A General View of Positivism, a short (in my e-reader) 286 page book meant to be a primer to get you ready for his major work translated into English and condensed down to a mere 862 pages as The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte by Harriet Martineau. One thing that struck me is how openly motivated by morality and sentiment Comte was. He says that in the positive phase the intellect will be the servant of the heart. He implies at various points that morality is scientifically discernible from natural laws. So elsewhere in A General View of Positivism in the executive summaries of other essays when he simultaneously calls for a dictatorship to educate the people and on the working classes to be a bulwark of the people’s liberty (i.e., the liberty to be educated by a scientific ruling class), you know at least his heart was in it and his moral compass was involved.
In the limited view of Seldon we get in “Foundation,” he comes across as basically amoral. He enjoys the clever game of tricking the encyclopedists and other colonists and their descendants to something like the fortieth generation into carrying out his wishes even as they’re in the dark about what those wishes are. It’s obvious that there’s something to galactic civilization that Seldon finds worth protecting. Otherwise why bother? But is his craft at work to preserve knowledge for its own sake or does he view himself as doing science in the service of the people? If psychohistory were real, in a free society, most individuals would need to be schooled in psychohistory to protect themselves from this kind of manipulation.
As I continue to ponder the orb of Positivism there may be more to say on these topics but I’ll try a different angle when I get into the next installment in the Foundation series “Bridle and Saddle” some weeks from now. In the meantime, do subscribe if you haven’t already and watch your inbox for a review of Galaxy Science Fiction December 1950 later this week.
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