Foundation

Later this month the television adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation will premiere on Apple+. I had been planning on writing something about it, then doubled down on that plan when I read a piece resorting to that laziest but most common of critical terms of approval these days: the R-word. You know what it is. “Relevant.” As in, and I quote, Asimov’s story is “deeply relevant” and represents “something that feels more relevant than ever these days.” Foundation may be relevant, but if it is, it’s not because Asimov has something useful to say about our lives. Nor is it because Asimov offers us a critique of the late decadent phase of the American imperium. It’s because Asimov’s text begs to be read against itself, as an unconscious window on the late modern technocratic mind that believes itself to be the solution to decadence, when it is actually its principal symptom.

I have, or rather had, a lot more to say about that. But then Alan Jacobs beat me to the punch. He notes how, in both Asimov’s trilogy and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which were all written between 1942 and 1952, each author is “deeply invested in thinking about the ways old political orders give way to self-proclaimed Utopias; and both, also, see that the technocratic Utopia—as distinguished, I think, from the more traditional Utopias of authoritarian and totalitarian states—is a new thing in the world.”

Let me add one thing, which concerns the protagonist, Hari Seldon, and his Foundation scheme that sets the plot going. Not only is Seldon a pure projection of Asimov, or Asimov as he imagines himself and his ilk to be. The so-called science that Seldon has cracked is the science of predicting the future based on the past with perfect exactitude. And it’s the cranks who run the Empire who are fools not to believe his probabilistic calculations. I remember, when I first read the initial novel in the trilogy, thinking that Asimov was setting Seldon up to be a fool himself. I mean, imagine thinking “psychohistory” to be a legitimate empirical-mathematical enterprise in which the custodians of trillions of living souls should place their trust! But I was the foolish one. Naturally, that is exactly what Seldon-Asimov thinks world leaders should do: believe the science—in this case, the pseudo-science of technocrats tinkering with their algorithmic prediction machines. Knowing the unlikelihood of being believed, Seldon-Asimov sets in motion a series of events leading to the hoped-for future founding of a new intergalactic civilization with far less bloodshed and destruction than otherwise would have occurred (in the absence, that is, of his genius). His well-timed appearances and messages in the centuries to come are a running deus ex machina, only the god in the machine is Hermes, bringing one more message, just in the nick of time, from the omniscient Seldon-Asimov (speaking from the past). Not to put too fine a point on it, whereas the Foundation he establishes is meant to contain all the knowledge humans have amassed across the millennia, the cornerstone of the Foundation is—you guessed it—psychohistory. (It doesn’t help that every time just what the Foundation is preserving is mentioned it’s always, or almost always, the deliverances of the technical and empirical sciences, and never, or rarely, the treasures of the humanistic arts. You can be sure the gadgets of Steve Jobs reside safely in some Foundation vault; less so the works of Bach or Rembrandt.)

All that said, the book is worth a read, not least for its influence on Frank Herbert and George Lucas. And it’s still a fun, if not especially well written, yarn. And I might check out the show; it would be nice if the showrunners signaled their having grasped the unintended subtext of the story instead of buying into its ostensible prescience and relevance to the year of our Lord 2021. But I’m not holding my breath.

John Lukacs on what makes history

"This short history of the twentieth century is not a philosophical treatise. But at this point I am compelled to add two brief digressions. The first is a summary of my view of history, which goes contrary to the still very widely accepted categorical beliefs of why and how history happened and happens, of course including that of the Second World War. The current, often deemed 'scientific' belief is that history, perhaps especially in the democratic age, is the result of great material and economic factors, of which the lives, acts, and thoughts of people are largely the consequences. That is less than a half-truth. In 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany not just because of the economic crisis of 1930–1933, but because of the political mood of many Germans at that time. It was not the state of the British economy that made the British government reluctant to resist Hitler in the Thirties. It was not inferiority of materials or armaments that led to the collapse of France in 1940. There was no economic reason for the Japanese to plan and then make war on the United States. Of course, it is true that the tremendous material power of the United States (and the enormous size of the armies of the Soviet Union) made the war winnable against Germany and Japan. But there, too, what mattered was the resolution and the near-unanimity of the American people, and the unwillingness of the Russian people to oppose Stalin. What people thought (and think), what they believe, what they choose to think, what they prefer to believe—that is the main essence of their lives, of which their material conditions and economics desires are most often the outcomes, and not the other way around."

—John Lukacs, A Short History of the Twentieth Century (Belknap, 2013), 126-127. Lukacs, who will be 95 in January, was born in Hungary to a Jewish mother and a Roman Catholic father. Since the 1940s, he has lived in the United States and taught and written as a historian. Much of what he writes in this brief but enthralling book he lived through himself—sometimes up close. There is nothing quite like reading a truly independent mind, as evidenced in the quote above. As it happens, to make an odd comparison between two authors, I am currently reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, whose founding premise is the idea of "psycho-history," what Asimov calls "the quintessence of sociology." By its precise mathematical formulas, it can predict (in the novel) what will happen hundreds and thousands of years in the future, treating masses of human beings the way scientists treat elements and atoms. Lukacs, for his part, stands against the materialists and the determinists alike. It's a breath of fresh air.