Why Hari Seldon Was Part of the Problem and Not Part of the Solution

Psychohistory Is Not a Scientific Research Program, and That’s Not Okay

Asimov made no bones about the fact that he had made liberal use of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when he was writing his Foundation stories, and it shows. In the first chapter of the first book of his Foundation series, the character Salvor Hardin exclaims with frustration:

“It isn’t just you. It’s the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin’s idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject — written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weigh the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don’t you see that there’s something wrong with that?”

Here we have an enlightened man’s rejection of an epistemology that is too skewed toward the argument from authority, which was, according to the Enlightenment, one of the great failings of the European Middle Ages (or, if we are allowed to use the earlier term, the Dark Ages). For Salvor Hardin, the entire galaxy is falling into a dark age, and one of the reasons for this is giving too much weight to authority and not enough weight to the individual inquirer’s engagement with evidence.

The character of Hari Seldon appears in the first of the stories included in Foundation, as the originator of the method of psychohistory, which is a predictive science of history that has allowed Seldon not only to forecast the coming failure of the galactic empire, but to make preparations so that the coming galactic dark age will not be as long or as deep as it might have been, without Seldon’s intervention. (Isaac Arthur produced a video on psychohistory, and Isaac Asimov in his later years wrote prequels of the Foundation books that gave much more detail about the life of Hari Seldon.)

In the unfolding of Seldon’s plan with the establishment of the Foundation on Terminus, Seldon himself has passed away, though when a “Seldon Crisis” occurs he appears in some kind of recorded format, explaining how he had predicted the crisis that is occurring or has occurred.

Though Terminus was supposedly settled by scientists in order to further the work of the Foundation, Hari Seldon has taken his secrets with him to the grave. No one else really understands what he has done. He has set in motion a clockwork universe of his own design, and it is only for his descendants to listen to his prognostications, recorded hundreds of years previously, and to be impressed by what he has done. There is no “school” of psychohistory, and psychohistory has not become a scientific research program incrementally revised and improved over time. Only Seldon knew what was up, and he apparently wasn’t telling.

In other words, Seldon became the ultimate authority, explaining, after the fact, events that he had predicted long before, and understood better by him than by those who participated in the events that had transpired. Not only is this not a model of how to do science and how to lessen the duration and severity of a period of epistemic collapse, it is moreover a certain way to extend the duration and deepen the severity of such a collapse.

An amusing part of the story is how those on Terminus create an artificial religion that they use to gain political and economic control of local (in a cosmological sense) bellicose kingdoms, but if things had transpired as in the book, it would have been Hari Seldon would have come to be seen as the prophet of a new religion, and the new religion would have been psychohistory itself.

Now, maybe Isaac Asimov addressed of these questions in later books. I don’t know. I haven’t read them. And, in fact, I didn’t read Foundation during my active science fiction reading years in my teens. I only listened to the book last year, 2019, for the first time. And a friend with whom I was corresponding said that it was “too late” for the Foundation books for me. Certainly, if I had read them decades ago I would have thrilled to them, and I still enjoyed the unfolding of the plot, but perhaps my friend was right that it was too late for me.