Psychohistory and Enlightenment

When I first read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy as a teenager, I was mightily impressed. Many years later I was glad to see him pick up the Foundation saga’s threads again. I eagerly followed his mature reflections on the early and late life of his greatest character, Hari Seldon. But I’m not ready to adopt either Asimov or Seldon as the patron saint of psychohistory.

Asimov did not originate either the word “psychohistory” or the concepts it now usually describes. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1934 usage of the word, and I suspect there were earlier ones. Freud and others were already enthusiastically practicing psychohistory before Asimov’s first Foundation story saw print in 1942. Moses and Monotheism (1939), for example, is clearly psychohistory as we now know it, though it was so speculative that Freud initially called it a “historical novel.”

“Psychohistory as we now know it” is an important phrase when we discuss what Asimov called psychohistory. It mainly involves the application of psychological concepts and theories (especially but not exclusively psychodynamic theories) to historical movements and historical figures. What Asimov labeled as psychohistory was a fictional combination of approaches now called historiometrics and futuristics. My departmental neighbor Dean Simonton is the most active and influential scholar of historiometrics. In such books as Psychology, Science, and History (Simonton 1990), he applies complex statistical analyses to just the sorts of “mass human behavior” and “variables of cause and effect, probabilities from social behavior, and economic conditions” that Richard Varela identifies as the essence of Asimovian psychohistory. Simonton draws conclusions primarily about the past, but he does sometimes move into a predictive mode, as in Why Presidents Succeed (Simonton 1987). What he never does — but the fictional Hari Seldon does persistently — is to manipulate individuals and social movements to make his predictions come true.

(Incidentally, Dean Simonton tells me that he has never read the Foundation Trilogy, and thus received no inspiration from it. Well after he had established his own historiometric approach, someone gave him a photocopy of several relevant pages from the Trilogy; he recognized certain similarities but didn’t read further. Simonton collects his masses of historical and biographical data from a wide variety of sources, at times including Asimov’s nonfiction reference works on such topics as Shakespeare and the Bible.)

Asimov paid little attention to the psychological and psychoanalytic literature, and indeed appears to have carefully avoided the latter, though his second wife was an analyst. He derived his theoretical concepts concerning psychohistory mainly from an early reading of such historians as Gibbon and Toynbee, with minor later infusions of ideas from such contemporary approaches as systems theory and chaos theory. (Gunn 1982, Hassler 1991.) One of Asimov’s main psychohistorical concepts, however, does overlap in interesting ways with ideas both from psychoanalysis and from social-psychological research. That concept involves the necessity (according to Hari Seldon) of keeping secret the psychohistorians’ analyses and predictions. If such

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knowledge became public, according to Seldon, “freedom of action would be expanded and the number of additional variables introduced would become greater than our psychology could handle” (Asimov 1951-1953: p. 74).

A quarter-century ago, a social psychologist named Kenneth Gergen described (without reference to Asimov) a phenomenon that he called “enlightenment effects.” (Gergen 1973). According to Gergen, the spread of psychological knowledge inexorably alters the minds of us all — alters them so radically, indeed, that a lasting science of human behavior is impossible. Gergen contended that people avoid behaving in ways that psychologists explicitly or implicitly condemn; they look for different ways to behave when they see their behavior patterns neatly categorized; they even act directly contrary to ways predicted by psychological theories, to assert their freedom or individuality.

The term “enlightenment effects” was new with Gergen, but the general idea was not. As early as 1911 Sigmund Freud was warning other analysts, “The more the patient has learnt of the practice of dream-interpretation, the more obscure do his later dreams as a rule become” (Freud 1911: p. 95). Freud recommended that therapists cope with the problem by guarding against “displaying very special interest in the interpretation of dreams” (Freud 1911: pp. 92-93).

Asimov’s psychohistorians instead try to disguise their operations and keep their findings secret. I suspect Kenneth Gergen would feel that such attempts to forestall enlightenment effects are ethically indefensible, even though the psychohistorians may be working toward good ends. Rather than advocating a dishonest and hard-to-maintain secrecy to protect their science, Gergen proposed that social psychologists give up their scientific pretensions and resign themselves to practicing a sort of contemporary social history. If enlightenment effects are so powerful and inescapable that the fabric constituting the social sciences falls to tatters almost as it is being woven, why waste time trying to develop predictive hypotheses and integrative theories?

I doubt that social-scientific research delivers nearly as many enlightenment effects as Gergen assumes. People display an amazing capacity to ignore hard-won knowledge and to fasten instead upon astrology, advertising slogans, pseudo-psychiatric quackery, and a host of other alternatives. But if we can have any genuinely enlightening impact upon the general public, we should go for it. A great deal of direct feedback has led me to believe, for instance, that Stanley Milgram’s research on obedience to authority has made contemporary college students and graduates more hesitant about accepting authoritative commands unhesitatingly — and that’s mostly a good thing.

Asimov’s psychohistorians were at times pretty dubious characters, though they claimed to be working to save galactic civilization from a new Dark Age. One thing they didn’t do, as far as I can recall, was to use enlightenment effects in positive ways. With their ingenuity and technology, they could have publicized their findings in ways that would have truly enlightened the Galactic Empire and made its citizens more resistant to the grand and petty tyrants who sometimes gained a throne. As psychohistorians of a rather different stripe, we can aim our work at least partly in a similar direction.

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