Foundation and the dangers of trying to control the course of history
Can we predict and control the future without losing our souls?
What does it mean to change the world - to shape the course of history?
I love sweeping histories that tell grand stories of the rise and fall of civilisations, especially when they are engaged with the changes in ideas and beliefs that can make such a difference to societies over time - books like Tom Holland’s Dominion, or with more of a history-of-ideas approach, Francis Schaeffer’s How Shall We Then Live? or Richard Tarnas’s The Passion of the Western Mind. I’m also fascinated by projects like the Long Now Foundation, which “encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization - the next and last 10,000 years”.
Science fiction is a natural vehicle for exploring both our hopes and fears about the future, and also for interrogating how we make sense of the past. As we look ahead, we dream of better futures, as well as fearing disasters, apocalypses and dystopias that might end life as we know it, or change it out of all recognition. I’m going to explore how Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, Frank Herbert’s Dune and Ursula LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven tackle these themes.
The Foundation according to Asimov and Apple
A classic of this type is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, inspired by Gibbon’s The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, and takes many of the themes of that historical work. The different “Seldon Crises” that mark turning points in the history of the Foundation and of the galaxy showcase the impact of different historical forces, such as religion and trade and technology.
Apple TV+ has very loosely adapted Foundation, with the full series now available on their streaming platform. It’s visually impressive but dramatically surprisingly unimpactful, and very different from the books.
If Foundation were adapted faithfully, then we would need to jump to a new time period every few episodes in a very anthology-style series, and there would be a paucity of big action - typically in the books the crises are not resolved by the actions of individuals. Instead, the individuals involved come to realise how the crisis has come to resolve itself through the action of those larger forces beyond themselves, as seen and anticipated by Hari Seldon’s “science” of psychohistory.
However, in the attempt to make Asimov’s heady philosophical set-pieces more “relatable”, Apple has tried to pad out the story with extra human dramas, and to find every trick possible for keeping a consistent cast over the story’s jumps forward in time - clones, suspended animation, holograms, flashbacks. It’s also made human agency much more front and centre, which perhaps might make for better drama, but radically undermines the themes and concepts that Asimov was exploring.
Instead, the thematic focus of Apple’s version of Foundation is on being an allegory for the climate emergency. Seldon’s psychohistory predicts the downfall of the galactic Empire, but his warnings go unheeded by those in authority, much as as a global society we have failed to adequately act to avert the coming climate disaster. Seldon has a plan, however, establishing a Foundation to preserve knowledge, to shorten the coming dark age from 30,000 years to a mere millennium. (Or so he claims… the actual plan is rather more complicated than that!)
Foundation and the Church
What I find intriguing is how the role of the Foundation parallels the role of the Christian church in preserving knowledge and order in Europe following the fall of the Roman Empire. While the myth of the Dark Ages has been greatly exaggerated to suit the needs of Renaissance and Enlightenment propagandists, there’s little denying the impact of the medieval church in terms of creating the shared social order of Christendom, and how the first universities and seeds of modern science grew out of the church in the high medieval age.
In Asimov’s Foundation, one of the early stages of the Foundation’s history involves the organisation promulgating the invented religion of Scientism - technology as mystery religion, under the control of the priests trained by the Foundation. Of course, the spiritual aspect to these beliefs is purely invented, and the Foundation’s use of religion is purely a method of social control. However, part of the power of the Foundation is their belief in the narrative that Seldon has set out for them: that through psychohistory, he has mapped out the future, and out of the Foundation, a new Empire will eventually arise to return civilisation to the galaxy.
The concept behind the ‘science’ of psychohistory in Foundation is that at sufficiently large population sizes, the behaviour of masses becomes predictable, so that with sufficiently advanced mathematical modelling, the future of galactic society can be predicted (though not the actions of individuals). It’s the ultimate fantasy of big data, that with sufficient information that we can know the future over vast stretches of time.
To riff off Clarke’s Law, any sufficiently advanced modelling is indistinguishable from prophecy.
Psychohistory and divine providence
‘Psychohistory’ and the optimistic dynamism that it gives the Foundation is a secularised analogue of the church’s belief in the Kingdom of God. Christianity historically has had a tremendous cultural dynamism arising from the belief that the Kingdom of God had dawned with the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ, and with the hope of his return to restore and rule the world fully.
Christianity gave Western culture a deep-rooted sense of historical direction and purpose, one that still deeply underpins our cultural narratives, whether we are religious believers or not - consider the assumptions packed into the idea of “being on the right side of history”. We assume that history is (or at least should be) a narrative of moral and technological progress. The Enlightenment relocated the hinge of history from Christ’s incarnation to the invention of the scientific method, but this kind of progressive thinking is very much a development of the Christian outlook on history.
Asimov’s ‘psychohistory’ was always more of an intriguing macguffin than a plausible scientific possibility. It acts as a scientific version of divine providence, of God’s will mysteriously at work in the pattern of history, if only we have the faith and insight to perceive it. And while Asimov was at pains to maintain a semblance of scientific plausibility by excluding individual choices from the scope of what psychohistory can predict, in the Apple TV series, psychohistory functions even more directly as a hidden providence acting in the lives of individuals such as Salvador Hardin, ensuring that she is able to rescue the Foundation against the odds.
Asimov offers an optimistic view of this capability, where psychohistory is used to accelerate the resurgence of a largely positive galactic civilization, a new Empire to bring prosperity and stability to the galaxy. (The TV series goes in an opposite direction, acting on the reflexive impulse that the Galactic Empire is intrinsically Bad and Oppressive, and positioning the Foundation as an ersatz Rebel Alliance, which is a depressingly derivative and simplistic choice).
Dune and the dangers of artificial messiahs
Much more successful in the classic sci-fi adaptation stakes is Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movie, which makes it onto screen with a dramatic clarity that Apple’s Foundation is sorely lacking.
Villeneuve’s “Part One” movie only takes us about half-way into the first book, but Frank Herbert’s novel is both inspired by Asimov’s Foundation and a deliberate counterpoint to it. Also set in a declining galactic empire, it too has an organisation with powers of prescience that’s working over the course of centuries to control the balance of power.
But rather than the benign scientist-wizards of the Foundation, they are the Bene Gesserit, a pseudo-religious matriarchal order, who arrive witch-like cloaked in black, and have been working through selective breeding to create the Kwisatz Haderach, a man with mental powers capable of bridging space and time.
Paul Atreides, the young protagonist of Dune, is the Kwisatz Haderach, born ahead of Bene Gesserit schedule due to his mother Jessica’s love for Duke Leto and choice to bear him as a child. But his rise to power as Muad’Dib leads to violent jihad across the galaxy, and his rejection of the control of the Bene Gesserit. Far from Paul being held up as a paragon and White Messiah, Dune warns of the dangers of attempting to harness religious devotion to take control of the events of history.
The Lathe of Heaven and danger of utopian dreams
Another classic sci-fi novel that warns of the danger of trying to force the world towards perfection by some utilitarian calculus is 1971’s The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin, also known for A Wizard of Earthsea. It’s a little different in that it’s about the reshaping of the present rather than control of the future, but thematically it speaks to many of the same issues and concerns.
In this novel, George Orr discovers that his dreams have the power to change reality - but this is a terrifying prospect as he has no control over his dreams. He seeks the help of psychologist Dr William Haber, who through the use of hypnosis to direct George’s dreams, tries to harness them to alter the world for the better.
Unfortunately his efforts come with unintended consequences. When he tries to alter the world so that humanity is at peace with itself, it is only the arrival of alien invaders that is able to unite the planet. George’s dreams operate subconsciously, pre-rationally, having to work with human nature in all its follies and contradictions. As he attempts to explain to Huber:
“I guess I can’t, or my subconscious can’t, even imagine a warless world. The best it can do is substitute one kind of war for another. You said, no killing of humans by other humans. So I dreamed up the Aliens. Your own ideas are sane and rational, but this is my unconscious you’re trying to use, not my rational mind. Maybe rationally I could conceive of the human species not trying to kill each other off by nations, in fact rationally it’s easier to conceive of than the motives of war. But you’re handling something outside reason. You’re trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn’t suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?”
Huber’s attempts to reshape reality always come with a dystopian twist. It’s a vivid metaphor for how attempting to create heaven on earth typically results in hell on earth instead.
Stories shape our future
Stories shape the future. Shape the story people believe about past, present and future, and you have incredible power to influence the course of history. But stories and dreams are unpredictable and the consequences are rarely what those who create them expect.
The stories we believe ourselves to be part of shape the way we live. If you interpret the shape of history as cyclical, as a march of progress, as a “long defeat”, as a rise and fall, or whatever other pattern, that will to some degree shape the way you engage with and live in the world in the present.
We can’t help but long for a better world. As James K A Smith puts it,
…to be human is to desire “the kingdom,” some version of the kingdom, which is the aim of our quest. Every one of us is on a kind of Arthurian quest for “the Holy Grail,” that hoped-for, longed-for, dreamed-of picture of the good life—the realm of human flourishing—that we pursue without ceasing.
Desiring the Kingdom (Baker, 2009) p. 54
One of the most influential narratives in the 20th century was the Marxist view of history, which led to revolutions and upheavals as Communists tried to bring about the future that Marx had predicted as the inevitable outcomes of the dialectical forces of history. (Ironically both the Russian and Chinese Revolutions departed significantly from Marx’s predictions, in that they did not take place in the advanced democracies which Marx had expected to be first to collapse due to their internal contradictions, and also because those revolutions were driven more by revolutionary forces harnessing the power of the peasant classes, rather than the industrial proletariat.)
But there’s something uncomfortably megalomaniac about the idea of anticipating the course of history and attempting to control it. The Communist project is a case study of how easily utopian dreams turn into real-world nightmares, with many millions killed for the cause of international revolution, through the gulags and Cultural Revolution and all those who starved due to the failures of Communist policy.
But what if coercion is necessary? What if authoritarianism is the only way to save the world, whether from pandemics or climate change?
Right now one of the most urgent questions facing our civilization is how to face the challenge of our current climate emergency. Foundation on Apple TV makes this a central metaphor, with the Emperors’ refusal to believe psychohistory’s ‘scientific’ predictions of the coming downfall of the Empire echoing climate skepticism and inaction by global leaders today.
But I don’t believe that Climate Science vs Climate Skepticism is really the fundamental political issue. Rather the key policy issue is between authoritarian or liberal solutions to addressing the issue. There is, of course, a general correlation between how urgently people interpret the crisis to be and to what extent they see the necessity of drastic political and legal coercive action across governments globally. But it’s also entirely possible to see the climate emergency as being a very real problem, and be concerned that a concentrating of global power to address the issue is a bad idea that will have dangerous unintended consequences.
When our desire for a better world is coupled to a narrative of historical inevitability or necessity, it brings with it a danger of fanaticism and totalitarianism, of the ends justifying the means. While the actual histories of the Crusades and Inquisition are much more complicated than the pop culture stereotypes, there are plenty of instances of how the Christian narrative has itself been a justification for oppression, for using warfare, violence and coercion, supposedly in pursuit of the kingdom of God.
I believe the best stories and beliefs about the future combine two things:
Firstly, a positive vision for the future.
Secondly, affirming the necessity of freedom, both in whether or not to accept that story, and in working out how to live according to it.
The Christian story has a subversive power that combines both of these. At the heart of this story is Jesus, a crucified Messiah who didn’t lead by violence or coercion, but by preaching a message of the coming of the Kingdom of God, in which the justice of God restores the world, and which we are called to participate in. Jesus was crucified by the Roman Empire for his message, which is on the side of the poor and marginalised and powerless.
If you were designing a religion to control the masses, then Christianity wouldn’t be it! Wherever it has been used to those kind of purposes, it has been at odds with its founding message. The message of Jesus calls people to faith in a kingdom that is not of this world, and to a love of God and neighbour that must arise truly from the heart rather than be coerced from the outside.
I hope to explore this further in future: how can Christians be a genuine force for good in the world, living up to the standards of love and freedom that are foundational to Jesus’ message?
But whatever story you believe about history, we all have to grapple with the question of how we work to realise our dreams of a better world without turning them into nightmares.
Over to you: what vision do you have for a better world? Does the story you believe about the world offer both vision and freedom? How can we work to change the world for the better without losing our souls?
From the archive: Advent, anticipation, and The Force Awakens
A long, long time ago, the first of the Star Wars sequel trilogy was something that we were looking forward to - check out my reflection on the connections between anticipating a new instalment in a much-loved series and the season of Advent.