Prelude to Foundation?

God I hope not.

Upon arriving in the Poconos, where Martha and I are living for the next couple months, I immediately headed for the closest used bookshop since there’s almost nothing to do here unless you wish to spend a lot of time in vape shops and/or indoor water parks. And while I always enjoy spending a lazy Sunday afternoon browsing the local selection of artisanal vape pens, that still leaves plenty of time for reading.

I bought two books, although now that I reflect on my purchases, I realize I bought two versions of the same story. The first is entitled 1177B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline. The second is Isaac Asimov’s Prelude to Foundation. If you’re unfamiliar with the Foundation series, it, too, is about the fall of civilization – in this case, galactic rather than parochial. Whatever could my subconscious be trying to tell me?

Asimov is one of my favorite writers, both for the scope of his work and for its inherent optimism. And why shouldn’t he have been optimistic? Born in 1920, Asimov was a Russian émigré who became an American citizen at the age of 8. His life traced the rise of the American empire. Although his early days here would have paralleled the Great Depression, his adulthood coincided with the great American boom, a boom which only seemed to be accelerating by the time of his death in 1992.

(While reading up on Asimov, I learned that, although the cause of his death was listed as kidney/heart failure, he actually died from AIDS, which he contracted following a blood transfusion in 1983. The family kept the diagnosis private for fear of public backlash at a time when the disease’s victims were stigmatized, which I would say is hard to believe that we could ever have been so callous towards our fellow human beings, but it is, in fact, incredibly easy to believe.)

Which explains, I think, why Asimov treats the notion of “empire” as something, perhaps, distasteful for its tendency towards abuse but also as a stabilizing force. It explains why Asimov’s most famous character, Hari Seldon, works to preserve as much order as possible after his mathematical theory, known as “psychohistory,” predicts the galactic empire will fall.

Old Isaac with his signature mutton chops

Asimov believed in the capacity of people to do good. He believed in technology’s capacity to further the aims of the human species, but he also recognized that the deployment of new technology also has a moral component; his “Three Laws of Robotics” are still being used as ethical guidelines as we advance AI and, of course, robotics.

Asimov was president of the American Humanist Association from 1985-1992, succeeding the great Kurt Vonnegut, whose own faith in humanity was tempered by his combat experiences in World War II.

I don’t know why humanism has kind of fallen off the map in recent decades. Maybe it’s got kind of crunchy-granola type of association to it, although there’s nothing particularly hippy-dippy about the movement. Humanism is simply a way of thinking of the world which prioritizes human agency as the engine of humanity as opposed to any sort of supernatural entity. Their website has the slogan “Good without God,” which encapsulates their worldview better than anything I can explain. I guess I would consider myself a humanist, too, although I’m not anti-religion in the way that (I suspect) humanists may be. Asimov himself seemed to take a dim view of religion, although I think he understood that all things - even rationality - can be corrupted.

What is religion, if not fetishized revelation? The revelation need not be godly. It could be scientific. It could be technological, such as in the case of a cargo cult. It might be revelation from a charismatic leader – “I alone can fix it.” Regardless, religion begins where rational thought ends. A lifelong atheist, Asimov understood this, although the deep irony of the Foundation series is that Hari Seldon himself becomes something of a godlike figure after he departs the earthly plane, communicating with humanity across the centuries through a series of pre-recorded holograms which take on the weight of scripture.

I wonder what Asimov would make of our current state of affairs. I don’t think he’d be very much surprised by it. After all, he based the Foundation series on Gibbons’ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a history which saw more than its share of fools and knaves.

I think Asimov understood human foibles better than most. He certainly understood the bottomless capacity people have for allowing themselves to be conned. He understood that most people don’t want to think, don’t want to challenge conventional wisdom, and don’t want to buck the system. He understood that individuals are unpredictable but humanity is not. And it was this belief, that the sum of our parts as a species is greater than any one of us, which informed his techno-optimism, an optimism which can be understood as a drive to the stars which, in a very real sense, is a drive to immortality.

Maybe we’ll get there one day. Maybe we won’t. It’s hard to make any predictions right now. When our daily concerns seem so weighty, it’s hard to look too far afield. America had just won the Cold War when Asimov died, and the new wars had not yet begun. It seemed as though free speech and rationality had defeated the insular and irrational. He probably foresaw decades of American hegemony, which he would have viewed as a mostly positive development although he well understood the potential dangers of an unchecked American empire because he understood that people are people. There are good among us and bad, and there’s nothing special about Americans. If anything he seemed dubious of his countrymen. I’ll leave you with this quote from Asimov about his adopted homeland:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

Is it 1177 BC again? I wish we had a Hari Seldon around to help us figure it out. Because we don’t, though, we will have to take comfort and hope in each other. Which, I suspect, would have Asimov’s advice in the first place.