THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY -- ASIMOV'S GALACTIC EPIC, by Charles Carreon
I discovered Isaac Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy" in the Brophy College Preparatory School Library, operated by Father Fox, S.J., who was flagrantly gay and rumored to cruise the night streets of Phoenix in the conspicuous pink Ford Mustang that was parked in the St. Francis Church private parking lot. So it was considered decidedly uncool to hang around the library, for fear of being associated with Fr. Fox; nevertheless, I found The Foundation Trilogy there, and was delighted to discover that Asimov had articulated his vision of the Galactic Empire I had first visited in The Stars Like Dust into an ambitious space opera spanning the breadth of the galaxy and millennial time spans. The three books of the Trilogy are Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation.
To enter Asimov’s world, you need only lean on the fast forward button very hard, for a very long time. Watch the outward migration of humanity into interstellar space. Observe the long ages of high tech barbarism, planetary enslavement, brutal serfdom, every manner of horror perpetuated on thousands of new earths, until at last a Galactic Empire emerges to bring order to the galaxy. Watch as the Empire expands its influence, and then, watch as it ossifies ‘round the bureaucratic gravitational pull of the Galactic center, Trantor, a planet of metal populated by forty-billion government servants, who “found themselves all too few for the complications of the task.” Yes, two principles well known to our present age remain in effect in Asimov’s projected future -- Parkinson’s Law (work expands to fill the time available for its completion) and The Peter Principle (in business and government, people rise to their level of incompetence and stay there). Thus, Trantor’s bureaucrats, through laziness and isolation, sowed the seeds of the Empire’s fall.
Producing nothing, Trantor, like the United States in our present time, ran a serious trade deficit, although Asimov puts it more dramatically for the sake of future history: “Its dependence on the outer worlds for food and, indeed, for all necessities of life, made Trantor increasingly vulnerable to conquest by siege. In the last millennium of the Empire, the monotonously numerous revolts made Emperor after Emperor conscious of this, and Imperial policy became little more than the protection of Trantor’s delicate jugular vein …” Adopting a historical tone, Asimov cribs his facts from a most reliable source, The Encyclopedia Galactica. This seems appropriate in the first book, Foundation, where most of the drama is on a group of people who get shipped off to a distant planet on a mission to gather all of human knowledge into a single compilation, in order to establish a nucleus of culture that will survive the storm of the Empire’s inevitable fall. These Encyclopedists, as they are known, are the disciples of Hari Seldon, the founder of the science of psychohistory.
In the Prologue to the third book, Second Foundation, Asimov describes his scholar-hero and his new science of psycho-history, that he uses to predict the behavior of large populations of human beings:
“Hari Seldon was the last great scientist of the First Empire. It was he who brought the science of psycho-history to its full development. Psycho-history was the quintessence of sociology; it was the science of human behavior reduced to mathematical equations.
The individual human being is unpredictable, but the reactions of human mobs, Seldon found, could be treated statistically. The larger the mob, the greater the accuracy that could be achieved. And the size of the human masses that Seldon worked with was no less than the population of the Galaxy which in his time was numbered in the quintillions.”
At the age of thirteen, this sounded sensible to me. It really made sense that the larger the number of people you were dealing with, the easier it would be to predict their behavior. Certainly Aldous Huxley, in his book on mob psychology, Brave New World Revisited, embraced the idea that crowds are stupider, by far, than the individuals that comprise them. It is generally easier to predict the acts of the stupid than the acts of the clever.
The ability to predict is often proof of the ability to control, and indeed, by the second book, Foundation and Empire, it becomes evident that Hari Seldon’s purpose in founding the colony of Encyclopedists was to control the outcome of human history. The Encyclopedists establish their mission, which becomes known as “The Foundation,” funded with Imperial seed money, on Terminus, a small planet in a solar system at the very rim of the Milky Way.
Seldon enacted the Plan for a noble purpose -- to reduce the period of barbarism between the fall of the Empire until the establishment of a new galactic order from thirty-thousand years to a single millennium. As Asimov states in the Prologue to the third book, “Carefully, he set up two colonies of scientists that he called ‘Foundations.’ With deliberate intention, he set them up ‘at opposite ends of the Galaxy.’ One Foundation was set up in the full daylight of publicity. The existence of the other, the Second Foundation, was drowned in silence.”
Not only did he create redundant Foundations at opposite ends of the galaxy, Seldon made sure none of the original Encyclopedists were psycho-historians. According to fundamental laws of psycho-history, for members of the subject group to understand the science would undermine the predictability of the group’s behavior. Foundationers who did not know psycho-history could not interfere with the operation of its laws, and therefore could not upset the Seldon Plan.
Volume one of the Trilogy recounts the struggles of the first generations of Encyclopedists on Terminus to evolve from librarians to self-governing citizens. They do this by adopting representative democracy, freedom of the press, and free enterprise as the logical approach to governing a world where everyone is smart enough to see that everyone puts on their spacesuit one leg at a time. The chapter headings of the first volume read like the record of a predictable march of progress by determined, decent folks: Part I, The Psychohistorians; Part II, The Encyclopedists; Part III, The Mayors; Part IV, The Traders; and, Part V, The Merchant Princes.
Shortly after arriving at Terminus, the Encyclopedists discover they have moved into a bad neighborhood. The other two inhabited planets that share a sun with Terminus have slid into virtual barbarism, and are governed by falcon-breeding hereditary nitwits eagerly seeking nukes to fling at each other. These testosteroned fools are technically neutered, unable to manufacture nuclear weapons, but making do with just plain savagery. The wave of barbarism Seldon predicts will ultimately shatter the galactic core is already in well underway out in the galactic arms, so for the librarians, surviving the shakedowns from the local nobility becomes item one on the survival agenda.
The Encyclopedist geeks therefore manipulate neighboring Lord of the planet Anacreon by providing him with technological benefits only in the guise of religion, sending cadres of techno-priests to don ceremonial robes and run power plants like cathedrals, dispensing the rewards of science as the blessings of a generous, happy, god domesticated by the librarians. By this strategy, the Foundation wooed the natives with technological baubles, while concealing the true workings of technology.
Salvor Hardin was the Foundation’s first mayor. Hardin’s motto was “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Wow, growing up in Nixon’s Amerika, that was a refreshing thought. I was surrounded by millions of incompetent people, thrashing with violent thoughts, wanting to pound peaceniks, hippies, beatniks, potheads and draft dodgers into mush, wanting to burn Vietnamese people with napalm and defoliate their forests, wanting to bust white radicals and black panthers, yeah yeah yeah. Those incompetents! I, on the other hand, thought myself to be a reasonable young man, and at thirteen, a pacifist. Like Hardin, I resolved, armed with cleverness, I would be competent.
My society was in crisis. I could see that. People afraid of getting drafted, going to Canada. My own brother wearing an Air Force ROTC uniform. We needed guidance, a voice of sanity. So it was with pleasure that I saw Asimov had designed ongoing guidance for the Foundationers to help them through the rough spots. Every now and then, the Foundation faces a “Seldon Crisis,” when things get so bad they have to have a chat with old Hari Seldon, whose image appears via hologram to talk about where he thinks they should be in the Plan. After the conclusion of the second Seldon Crisis, the founder appears to the assembled Foundation leaders to announce:
“According to our calculations, you have now reached domination of the barbarian kingdoms immediately surrounding the Foundation. … However, I might warn you here against overconfidence. It is not my way to grant you foreknowledge in these recordings, but it would be safe to indicate what you have now achieved is merely a new balance….”
Seldon’s congratulatory tone gives way to a somber note, as he adjures the assembled dignitaries to “never forget that there was another Foundation established eighty years ago; a Foundation at the other end of the Galaxy, at Star’s End. They will always be there for consideration. Gentlemen, nine hundred and twenty years of the Plan stretch ahead of you. The problem is yours! Go to it!”
The characters in the Trilogy are all carried along in the vast sweep of the plot, that spans thousands of years, sustaining suspense across the millennia as generations of Encyclopedists, Traders, Merchant Princes, etcetera, work their way through the Seldon Plan, the blind agents of Psychohistory. Only one character raises the possibility of the Plan being knocked off course -- the redoubtable Mule, who evokes the character of Napoleon, who knocked the course of European history into a cocked hat, destroying the raison d' etre of monarchy even as he sought to crown himself.
The Foundation Trilogy attempts to be a work of psychohistory in itself. In addition to prognosticating the evolution of computing power along the lines foreseen by Moore's Law, Asimov occasionally drops some anachronistic bloopers. I particularly like his voice-activated word processor that types the words out on paper as they are dictated. That's one device that will never be built. But then again, the science of psychohistory doesn't say that it is possible to preduct the evolution of particularly product lines, merely the general trend of development, and we do have voice-transcribing word processors.
Fundamentally, I disagree with one of Asimov's necessary plot assumptions -- that humanity will somehow survive a hundred thousand years despite continuing to fool around with nuclear power for trivial purposes, engage in nutcase aggression garbed as diplomacy, and treat planets and solar systems like feudal domains. Personally, I don't think we'll ever get off this planet alive before the sun goes nova and engulfs the planet in five billion years unless we get very organized and save the oxygen-producing flora on the planet for starters, the drinkable water as an important second issue, and the arable land for a third.
If humanity ever migrates off planet Earth, Asimov's Trilogy will seem utterly hilarious to our far-future descendants. Yet, the Trilogy powerfully communicates another valuable idea with which no one can disagree -- we must learn to discern historical trends and establish stores of human knowledge if we are to prevent relapses into barbarism when ignorant technocrats choke off creativity and innovation, the wellsprings of human evolution and social development. This idea will be meaningful until the end of time. Nor can we doubt that Asimov meant to instruct when he forged Hardin's aphorism, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." It is possible that some young person will truly understand the meaning of this statement, and try to lead humanity in a truly competent fashion. Of course that person may already have lived, and been unable to find a market for their ideas. The science of psychohistory might explain why such an occurrence is highly likely.