The fall of the foundation

Note: Spoilers follow for the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.

At the World Science Fiction Convention two years ago in Kansas City, I attended a panel where an audience member asked a question about Donald Trump. There were audible groans from the room, but one of the panelists—I think it was David Brin—drew a parallel between Trump and Nehemiah Scudder, the religious demagogue who casts an ominous shadow across Heinlein’s Future History. It was a clever comparison, but as time goes on, I’ve come to realize that there’s an even better surrogate from the golden age of science fiction. I’ve seen it mentioned here and there online, but the most thorough treatment is by Chris Taylor of Mashable, who writes of the psychohistorians of Asimov’s Foundation series:

They hope to preserve all the knowledge of civilization after the collapse of the Empire, as predicted by foresighted futurist Hari Seldon. We see them overcome various “Seldon crises,” gaining more and more star systems—until the Empire collapses halfway through the second book, Foundation and Empire, ahead of schedule. At this point in the story, the Foundation seems as secure as Obama-era technocracy did. It’s the end of history, basically—and though a group of underground democrats grumble about its rigid political system, the rational, enlightened, science-friendly Foundation has clearly triumphed over the forces of darkness and anarchy…Then out of nowhere comes the Mule, a terrifying warlord who conquers the entire Foundation in the space of a year. Seldon’s…prediction turns out to be badly wrong—as useless, say, as pre-election polling in November 2016. He didn’t see the Mule coming…[The Mule] turns out to have developed a one-in-a-trillion genetic mutation that gives him a strange power: the ability to implant the emotion of his choice in others. So the Mule instills his followers with ecstatic, fanatical loyalty, and sticks his opponents with despair and “a miserable sense of defeat.”

Taylor’s excellent article, which is worth reading in its entirety, highlights passages from Asimov’s stories—much of which the Mule spends in disguise as a clown—that have taken on an uncanny resonance. Here, for instance, we see Han Pritcher, a decorated military hero who once opposed the Mule, only to be converted by him after a failed assassination attempt:

Pritcher caught a mental breath and tried to think back. How had he been before the Mule had Converted him from the diehard democrat that he had been? It was hard to remember. He could not place himself mentally. He could not break the lining wires that bound him emotionally to the Mule…There had been no sensation the first time. There had been no pain, no mental jar—not even a feeling of discontinuity. He had always loved the Mule. If there had ever been a time long before—as long before as five short years—when he had thought he hadn’t loved him, that he had hated him—that was just a horrid illusion. The thought of that illusion embarrassed him.

And a little while later, when the First Speaker of the Second Foundation addresses the Mule directly at last:

Emotional contact such as you and I possess is not a very new development…but the faculty of direct emotional contact tended to atrophy with the development of speech a million years back…[But] you were born with it…We calculated the extent to which a megalomania would take control of you and we thought we were prepared…The added psychic distortion due to your inferiority complex passed us by. We allowed only for megalomania—not for an intensely psychopathic paranoia as well.

And if you’re wondering whether these parallels might have occurred to anyone within the Republican Party itself—well, it’s possible. Here’s what one prominent conservative wrote two decades ago in a book titled To Renew America, which seems now like a slightly less catchy version of Trump’s favorite slogan:

While Toynbee was impressing me with the history of civilizations, Isaac Asimov was shaping my view of the future in equally profound ways…For a high school student who loved history, Asimov’s most exhilarating invention was the “psychohistorian” Hari Seldon. The term does not refer to Freudian analysis but to a kind of probabilistic forecasting of the future of whole civilizations. The premise was that, while you cannot predict individual behavior, you can develop a pretty accurate sense of mass behavior. Pollsters and advertisers now make a good living off the same theory.

The author was Newt Gingrich, whose love of science fiction has been amply documented elsewhere—he wrote science fiction novels, participated in Jerry Pournelle’s think tank on the Strategic Defense Initiative, gave a controversial speech at the Nebula Awards, and mused during his last presidential campaign about placing a permanent base on the moon. And he really likes the Foundation series. As Ray Smock, the former historian of the House of Representatives, wrote in a fascinating article on the subject: “The greatest influence on Newt Gingrich, the conservative Republican, was the liberal atheist Isaac Asimov…Newt saw not just entertainment but a master plan using the Foundation trilogy as his political handbook, a guide to how one man creates a new force for civilized life.”

Gingrich, like the economist Paul Krugman, wanted to be Hari Seldon, and at first, he pursued his goals in the manner of any aspiring psychohistorian. (As Smock writes with a straight face: “While Hari Seldon created the Foundation to carry out his work, Newt used a variety of foundations and organizations to foster his work.”) So how did he become such a vocal defender of our generation’s equivalent of the Mule? Helpfully, Gingrich published an entire book on the subject, Understanding Trump, which includes a passage that sheds some light on the problem, mostly by speaking of Trump as if he were a super empath:

[Donald Trump] has a sixth sense about connecting with the American people. For instance, Trump routinely spoke to crowds of ten to twenty thousand people, but if you watched his gestures and body language, you saw that he was connecting with audience members one by one…Trump’s familiarity and comfortableness with working-class Americans also enables him to intuit what people care about and what they are looking for…In addition to giving strength and resolve to his supporters, I am sure the rallies were critical to maintaining Trump’s spirit as well. He was able to stay in tune with, and be guided by, the will of the people.

And if you want to understand the fundamental strangeness of what remains of the Republican Party, it helps to see it as an organization of men who thought fondly that they were a foundation of Hari Seldons, but who turned out to be embarrassingly eager to throw in their lot with the Mule, contenting themselves with “wins” on specific issues even as their party was irrevocably transformed. Trump, like the Mule, seems to have only gradually understood the extent of his power: “Slowly, I learned that I could reach into those minds and turn the pointer to the spot I wished, that I could nail it there forever.” Now he clearly knows what he can do. And he fooled many of us for a long time into thinking that he was a clown.

The war of ideas

Over the last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about a pair of tweets. One is from Susan Hennessy, an editor for the national security blog Lawfare, who wrote: “Much of my education has been about grasping nuance, shades of gray. Resisting the urge to oversimplify the complexity of human motivation. This year has taught me that, actually, a lot of what really matters comes down to good people and bad people. And these are bad people.” This is a remarkable statement, and in some ways a heartbreaking one, but I can’t disagree with it, and it reflects a growing trend among journalists and other commentators to simply call what we’re seeing by its name. In response to the lies about the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School—including the accusation that some of them are actors—Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post wrote:

When people act like cretins, should they be ignored? Does talking about their misdeeds merely give them oxygen? Maybe so. But the sliming—there is no other word for it—of the survivors of last week’s Florida high school massacre is beyond the pale…Legitimate disagreement over policy issues is one thing. Lies, conspiracy theories and insults are quite another.

And Paul Krugman went even further: “America in 2018 is not a place where we can disagree without being disagreeable, where there are good people and good ideas on both sides, or whatever other bipartisan homily you want to recite. We are, instead, living in a kakistocracy, a nation ruled by the worst, and we need to face up to that unpleasant reality.”

The other tweet that has been weighing on my mind was from Rob Goldman, a vice president of advertising for Facebook. It was just one of a series of thoughts—which is an important detail in itself—that he tweeted out on the day that Robert Mueller indicted thirteen Russian nationals for their roles in interfering in the presidential election. After proclaiming that he was “very excited” to see the indictments, Goldman said that he wanted to clear up a few points. He had seen “all of the Russian ads” that appeared on Facebook, and he stated: “I can say very definitively that swaying the election was not the main goal.” But his most memorable words, at least for me, were: “The majority of the Russian ad spend happened after the election. We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered it because it doesn’t align with the main media narrative of Tump [sic] and the election.” This is an astounding statement, in part because it seems to defend Facebook by saying that it kept running these ads for longer than most people assume. But it’s also inexplicable. It may well be, as some observers have contended, that Goldman had a “nuanced” point to make, but he chose to express it on a forum that is uniquely vulnerable to being taken out of context, and to unthinkingly use language that was liable to be misinterpreted. As Josh Marshall wrote:

[Goldman] even apes what amounts to quasi-Trumpian rhetoric in saying the media distorts the story because the facts “don’t align with the main media narrative of Trump and the election.” This is silly. Elections are a big deal. It’s hardly surprising that people would focus on the election, even though it’s continued since. What is this about exactly? Is Goldman some kind of hardcore Trumper?

I don’t think he is. But it also doesn’t matter, at least not when his thoughts were retweeted approvingly by the president himself.

This all leads me to a point that the events of the last week have only clarified. We’re living in a world in which the lines between right and wrong seem more starkly drawn than ever, with anger and distrust rising to an unbearable degree on both sides. From where I stand, it’s very hard for me to see how we recover from this. When you can accurately say that the United States has become a kakistocracy, you can’t just go back to the way things used to be. Whatever the outcome of the next election, the political landscape has been altered in ways that would have been unthinkable even two years ago, and I can’t see it changing during my lifetime. But even though the stakes seem clear, the answer isn’t less nuance, but more. If there’s one big takeaway from the last eighteen months, it’s that the line between seemingly moderate Republicans and Donald Trump was so evanescent that it took only the gentlest of breaths to blow it away. It suggests that we were closer to the precipice than we ever suspected, and unpacking that situation—and its implications for the future—requires more nuance than most forms of social media can provide. Rob Goldman, who should have known better, didn’t grasp this. And while I hope that the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas do better, I also worry about how effective they can really be. Charlie Warzel of Buzzfeed recently argued that the pro-Trump media has met its match in the Parkland students: “It chose a political enemy effectively born onto the internet and innately capable of waging an information war.” I want to believe this. But it may also be that these aren’t the weapons that we need. The information war is real, but the only way to win it may be to move it into another battlefield entirely.

Which brings us, in a curious way, back to Robert Mueller, who seems to have assumed the same role for many progressives that Nate Silver once occupied—the one man who was somehow going to tell us that everything was going to be fine. But their differences are also telling. Silver generated reams of commentary, but his reputation ultimately came down to his ability to provide a single number, updated in real time, that would indicate how worried we had to be. That trust is clearly gone, and his fall from grace is less about his own mistakes than it’s an overdue reckoning for the promises of data journalism in general. Mueller, by contrast, does everything in private, avoids the spotlight, and emerges every few months with a mountain of new material that we didn’t even know existed. It’s nuanced, qualitative, and not easy to summarize. As the coverage endlessly reminds us, we don’t know what else the investigation will find, but that’s part of the point. At a time in which controversies seem to erupt overnight, dominate the conversation for a day, and then yield to the next morning’s outrage, Mueller embodies the almost anachronistic notion that the way to make something stick is to work on it diligently, far from the public eye, and release each piece only when you’re ready. (In the words of a proverbial saying attributed to everyone from Buckminster Fuller to Michael Schrage: “Never show fools unfinished work.” And we’re all fools these days.) I picture him fondly as the head of a monastery in the Dark Ages, laboriously preserving information for the future, or even as the shadowy overseer of Asimov’s Foundation. Mueller’s low profile allows him to mean whatever we want to us, of course, and for all I know, he may not be the embodiment of all the virtues that Ralph Waldo Emerson identified as punctuality, personal attention, courage, and thoroughness. I just know that he’s the only one left who might be. Mueller can’t save us by himself. But his example might just show us the way.

The right kind of randomness

Yesterday, while talking about my search for serendipity in the New York Times, I wrote: “What the [Times‘s] recommendation engine thought I might like to see was far less interesting than what other people unlike me were reading at the same time.” The second I typed that sentence, I knew it wasn’t entirely true, and the more I thought about it, the more questions it seemed to raise. Because, really, most readers of the Times aren’t that much unlike me. The site attracts a wide range of visitors, but its ideal audience, the one it targets and the one that embodies how most of its readers probably like to think of themselves, is fairly consistent: educated, interested in the politics and the arts, more likely to watch Mad Men than Two and a Half Men, and rather more liberal than otherwise. The “Most Emailed” list isn’t exactly a random sampling of interesting stories, then, but a sort of idealized picture of what the perfect Times subscriber, with equal access to all parts of the paper, is reading at that particular moment.

As a result, the “serendipity” we find there tends to be skewed in predictable ways. For instance, you’re much more likely to see a column by Paul Krugman than by my conservative college classmate Ross Douthat, who may be a good writer who makes useful points, but you’d never know it based on how often his columns are shared. (I don’t have any hard numbers to back this up, but I’d guess that Douthat’s columns make the “Most Emailed” list only a fraction of the time.) If I were really in search of true serendipity—that is, to quote George Steiner, if I was trying to find what I wasn’t looking for—I’d read the most viewed or commented articles on, say, the National Review, or, better yet, the National Enquirer, the favorite paper of both Victor Niederhoffer and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. But I don’t. What I really want as a reader, it seems, isn’t pure randomness, but the right kind of randomness. It’s serendipity as curated by the writers and readers of the New York Times, which, while interesting, is only a single slice of the universe of randomness at my disposal.

Is this wrong? Not necessarily. In fact, I’d say there are at least two good reasons to stick to a certain subset of randomness, at least on a daily basis. The first reason has something in common with Brian Uzzi’s fascinating research on the collaborative process behind hit Broadway shows, as described in Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine. What Uzzi discovered is that the most successful shows tended to be the work of teams of artists who weren’t frequent collaborators, but weren’t strangers, either. An intermediate level of social intimacy—not too close, but not too far away—seemed to generate the best results, since strangers struggled to find ways of working together, while those who worked together all the time tended to fall into stale, repetitive patterns. And this strikes me as being generally true of the world of ideas as well. Ideas that are too similar don’t combine in interesting ways, but those that are too far apart tend to uselessly collide. What you want, ideally, is to live in a world of good ideas that want to cohere and set off chains of associations, and for this, an intermediate level of unfamiliarity seems to work the best.

And the second reason is even more important: it’s that randomness alone isn’t enough. It’s good, of course, to seek out new sources of inspiration and ideas, but if done indiscriminately, the result is likely to be nothing but static. Twitter, for instance, is as pure a slice of randomness as you could possibly want, but we very properly try to manage our feeds to include those people we like and find interesting, rather than exposing ourselves to the full noise of the Twitterverse. (That way lies madness.) Even the most enthusiastic proponent of intentional randomness, like me, has to admit that not all sources of information are created equal, and that it’s sometimes necessary to use a trusted home base for our excursions into the unknown. When people engage in bibliomancy—that is, in telling the future by opening a book to a random page—there’s a reason why they’ve historically used books like Virgil or the Bible, rather than Harlequin romance: any book would generate the necessary level of randomness, but you need a basic level of richness and meaning as well. What I’m saying, I guess, is that if you’re going to be random, you may as well be systematic about it. And the New York Times isn’t a bad place to start.