Psychohistorian For Hire

Ask anyone who reads science fiction who the greats are and the name “Isaac Asimov” better be one of the first on the tips of their tongue. If it’s not, they are fools and charlatans and deserve nothing but contempt or the back of your hand. The man is one of the most prolific authors I’ve come across. I cut my teeth on the Norby books he wrote with his wife, I wasted after-school hours on his planet and solar system books, but in the end there is a single magnum opus. Foundation by Asimov is not only one of the great classic sci-fi books, it’s the most influential book I’ve ever read.

I’m one of the few people I know who got into sociology not to study a specific topic, but because of a particular orientation towards the world. I always wanted to know things, to apply scientific rigor to asking questions of the world around me. For the longest time, this led to me wanting to grow up and be a biologist. I needed to be able to develop rules that explain and capture the world as it is and that seemed the way to do it.

It was in this mindset that I first came across Foundation. For those of you who have not yet, but hope to read it in the future, you might not want to read the next few sentences. You have been warned. Seriously, there are spoilers here. Hari Seldon is a mathematician who, in applying math to history and society, determines that the Galactic Empire is dying. What is worse is the 30,000 years of barbarism that will follow its fall. While he cannot forestall the Empire’s destruction, what he can do is shorten the following time of darkness. By sending a small colony of scientists to live alone on the edge of the Galaxy, he can save humanity 29,000 years of war and strife. The book follows the initial founding of the Foundation and it’s first 100 years of survival from crisis to crisis.

This book provides a view of human society that is exactly what I wanted. It postulated that history, societal change, and populations themselves could be understood by virtue of mathematical rules and models. People and populations could be statistically predicted. A particular custom had a 85% chance of fixation in a given environment. A particular world had a 97% chance of being conquered by a neighbor. Religious institutions fell to secular institutions at a given likelihood in known situations. This was music to my ears, this was my holy grail. And I thought it was all fiction; at least until I took my first class in university.

Through a weird set of circumstances (tons of AP credit, lingering belief in early morning wake-ups, need for a social science credit, and our particular residential system), I ended up in Demography at 8AM. This class opened with a lecture about understanding population size and dynamics in terms of just fertility, mortality and migration. And just like that, my collegiate search for a calling was over. Here it was, the thing I had read about, given up as just a pipe dream, and it was real.

From that moment, I was hooked. Everything else was just the prologue. I was a demographer from the day I met Hari Seldon.

This post is an entry to a series on “A Book That Changed my Life” for the Creative Collective.