The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence

by Alexei Panshin

  And yet, after all this has been said—after we have admitted the fakery, doubt and pretension which attend the religion of the Galactic Spirit—a crucial fact remains:

  What actually determines the outcome of “Bridle and Saddle” isn’t halos and flying thrones and other hokum, nor is it the genuine science that underlies them. Rather, what really counts is the allegiance to the new religion that is displayed by the people of Anacreon—the outraged mob which surrounds the palace to protest the attack on the Foundation; the gang of soldiers that seizes Admiral Lefkin instead of obeying his orders; the palace guards who refuse to fire their guns at Salvor Hardin when the Prince Regent commands them to.

  These are sincere believers. For them, this religion is clearly more immediate and compelling than the ambitions of Anacreon’s royal family. When they have to choose between one and the other, again and again they decide in favor of the religion of science, the Foundation, and the Galactic Spirit.

  A number of different states and conditions of belief may be seen among the people of Anacreon:

  Many, perhaps most, are superficialists, ignorant of the realities of science, but capable of being awed by scientific smoke and mirrors.

  Others less credulous may take halos and flying thrones only as symbols of power, but revere the Foundation as the mysterious source of all that is most positive in society—atomic energy, medicine, education and trade.

  More sophisticated yet are the bright young fellows who are picked out to travel to Terminus for training, and then return as priests to their native planet to operate the marvels of technology, even though they do not clearly and completely understand the science that underlies what they are given to say and do.

  Finally, the most advanced people of Anacreon are those youngsters who demonstrate that they have sufficient intelligence, perception and personal balance to be brought within the Foundation and introduced to the pure, unmediated study of science.

  It seems apparent from this hierarchy of understanding that if the priests of the religion of the Galactic Spirit found it necessary to begin their work with the people of the Four Kingdoms by offering them social and scientific gifts wrapped up as mummery and balderdash, it wasn’t just because they were seeking to mislead and take advantage of the ignorant. It was because they were obliged to deal with the state of thought that they actually encountered in Daribow, Konom, Smyrno and Anacreon.

  As Salvor Hardin puts it: “ ‘I started that way at first because the barbarians looked upon our science as a sort of magical sorcery, and it was easiest to get them to accept it on that basis.’ ”765

  But though the religion of the Galactic Spirit may have had to deal in flubdub and hokum at the outset, flubdub and hokum aren’t where it ends. Instead, it takes people from an initial state of ignorance and superstition and leads them along mentally from one stage to the next until they have accumulated the experience, the knowledge and the insight that are a necessity if they are to be able to encounter science on its own terms.

  We might recall Salvor Hardin’s favorite slogan: “ ‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’ ”

  In their initial condition, the people of the Four Kingdoms automatically resort to violence for lack of any more appropriate and practical methods of getting what they crave. However, Hardin’s religion of the Galactic Spirit teaches how they may develop the basis, one step at a time, for another, more effective approach to life—namely scientific competence—and thereby eliminate their need for violence.

  This program of educational development marks a significant difference between the religion of “Bridle and Saddle” and the fictional religions presented by Heinlein in “ ‘If This Goes On—’ ” and Sixth Column. The religion of the Prophets and the religion of Mota both aim to keep people in the dark for the advantage that it brings. But the religion of the Galactic Spirit actively works to take those who are in darkness and give them understanding.

  Unlike Heinlein’s religions, then, Asimov’s religion isn’t a total lie. It is more than just a con game or a power trip.

  But yet it does have an element of human manipulation that cannot be denied. Just as the title “Bridle and Saddle” suggests, Salvor Hardin and the Foundation are engaged in a subtle, long-term program to domesticate the wild men who surround Terminus.

  With every resource at their command—from the simulation of miracles to the construction and maintenance of atomic power plants—the priests of the Galactic Spirit labor to increase the psychic and social dependence of Anacreon, Smyrno, Konom and Daribow upon advanced technology.

  The more involved the barbarians get, and the more committed they become to the new religion, the more necessary and desirable it is for them to pass from awe of science to mastery of science.

  But the price exacted for this development is that the people of the Four Kingdoms must sacrifice the heedlessness, belligerence and self-aggrandizement exemplified by Prince Regent Wienis. They have to learn to discipline their passions and widen their horizons.

  As the barbarians grow more peaceful, and more competent, and more indebted to the Foundation, they become bound ever more tightly into a single religious, scientific and economic community consisting of all of the Four Kingdoms plus Terminus. In no small measure, what we see taking place in “Bridle and Saddle” may be understood as the refusal of this greater community of the Galactic Spirit to allow Wienis to divide it against itself.

  And—as ancient Hari Seldon is ready to confirm upon his second manifestation in the time vault—this grand strategy of scientific education, social therapy and communal interdependence, all passing under the name of religion, is indeed the answer to the internal and external political threats with which the story began.

  If the Four Kingdoms and Terminus perceive themselves as component parts of a single body that includes them all, there can be no need for an Anacreon to attempt to conquer its neighbors and to wrest away the scientific secrets of the Foundation, nor for an Actionist Party to strive at all cost to hang onto precious scientific advantage. Just as soon as they can arrive there, everyone within this community is going to be equally scientific—and equally well-prepared to deal with it.

  So Salvor Hardin has successfully guided the Foundation through a second crisis. But a central question still remains unanswered: Why does the shade of Hari Seldon choose to describe the necessary course of action that has been taken as “Spiritual Power” rather than as what it appears to us to be—an effective job of psychological engineering?

  We are, after all, in the time vault at the Foundation on Terminus, not off somewhere in the Four Kingdoms. And here at home, Salvor Hardin isn’t identified as a religious figure, but rather as a politician looking out for the welfare of his planet. Moreover, whatever doctrine he may have his priests teaching the barbarians, he himself is no believer in the religion of science in any of its variants.

  So why should the grand old man, Hari Seldon, sitting there so knowingly in his wheelchair eighty years in the past, have considered it appropriate to characterize what Hardin and his helpers would be doing—and indeed have been doing—as a case of Spiritual Power overcoming Temporal Power?

  The answer could be this: In the religion being promulgated by Salvor Hardin, there are two separate levels of understanding, one of which is a preparation for the other. Hardin isn’t a believer in the religion of science; he is past the need for that. But he is the most fervent of believers in the religion of the Galactic Spirit—otherwise known as the Plan.

  We are never told directly about Salvor Hardin’s conversion to this higher order transcendence. But clearly it occurred during Hari Seldon’s first appearance in the time vault, in the exhilarating moment when the founder made the announcement that the true destiny of Terminus was not just to be a maker of the ultimate encyclopedia, but to be one of the seeds from which a new and better Second Galactic Empire would grow.

  Hearing this great psychohistorical Plan set forth was an experience
for Salvor Hardin something like the vision on the road to Damascus that turned Saul the Pharisee into Saint Paul, the tireless organizer of the early Christian church. The very next day, at least, or the day after that, Hardin founded his new religion, and set out to unify the wild barbarians. And above and beyond the religion of science—that necessary preliminary—it was in the name of the Galactic Spirit and his prophet, Hari Seldon, that Salvor Hardin would present himself as acting.

  The Mayor is completely sincere in this. What he preaches is what he believes. The question is, how much of what he believes and preaches does he himself truly understand?

  The new higher order transcendence that he would like to serve is many different things at once:

  It is religious.

  It is scientific.

  It has a mathematical component.

  It deals in states of actual and potential human consciousness.

  It is also occult—with secret masters and forgotten knowledge, and an inner core of truth hidden within an inner core of truth, concealed in a universe falling into ruin.

  Above all, it is holistic, an overarching vision of the entire Galaxy restored to an awareness of its own intrinsic unity, and unified once again in fact.

  Salvor Hardin, however, can only dimly appreciate the higher reality that underlies all these apparently different aspects. The truth is that he knows nothing at all about the actualities of psychohistory. As much as this science has always fascinated and attracted him, he has no education or training in it, and no real understanding of how it operates. All his contact with it comes at second hand, chiefly in the wonderful promises set forth by Hari Seldon.

  Beyond this, his own personal conceptual framework is so limited and parochial that it actively serves to prevent him from comprehending the true higher wholeness. Hardin may appear to be a model of competence and wisdom when he is measured against an ignorant barbarian like Prince Regent Wienis. But when he is placed next to someone like Hari Seldon, who possesses the interstellar experience, the breadth of vision, and the higher knowledge that he lacks, Hardin stands revealed for what he really is—a hick from the Galactic outback.

  The narrator tells us frankly that the Mayor is “one whose habits of thought had been built around a single planet, and a sparsely settled one at that.”766 As long as Hardin’s state remains so primitive that he can experience the Kingdom of Anacreon as staggeringly vast, even though it consists of only twenty-five stellar systems, he can’t possibly be prepared to deal with the true magnitude of the Galaxy, with its hundred billion stars.

  In fact, just as with the religion of science, we can discern the existence of a hierarchy of understanding here, with each stage relating to the new transcendence by a different name.

  Hari Seldon and his team of wise men are masters of the metascience of psychohistory. So far and wide are they able to see, and so great is their power, that they can expect the work they do to affect the entire human population of the Galaxy over the span of a thousand years and more.

  However, when the founding father communicates with Salvor Hardin and the other leaders of the Scientific Refuge on Terminus, he can’t talk in terms of the ways and means of psychohistory, about which they know nothing. It is necessary for him to simplify radically. More than that, to accommodate their peculiarities of thought and their limitations of understanding, it is even possible that Seldon may have to resort to what is, for him, flubdub and balderdash.

  In any case, what is a certainty is that Seldon’s initial message to the Foundation is a variation upon a most ancient and powerful mythic theme: The story of the child of destiny, offspring of gods and kings, who is raised in exile ignorant of his true identity. It is his fate to return to the center of things, dethrone the usurpers of power, and reign in righteous glory.

  This is the story of many a hero of Iron Age legend, of the renowned Persian king, Cyrus the Great, and of the long-anticipated Jewish Messiah, as well as of every ambitious orphan from the provinces who ever tried to make good in the city. In Seldon’s version, of course, it is the Foundation that is this fortunate child, unaware of its true origins and its own real nature, but destined after many trials to return in triumph from the Periphery and redeem the unity of the Galaxy.

  This mythic promise that they were born for a purpose—the making of a New Galactic Empire—from the man they revere as their founder and guardian, is known by the people of the Foundation as the Plan.

  But when Salvor Hardin and his fellows travel to the Four Kingdoms to spread the message of Galactic holism and reunification, they can’t possibly talk to the barbarians about Hari Seldon, the master psychohistorian, and the wonderful secret Plan that he has for the Foundation. That would only rouse their fear and suspicion.

  Once again it is necessary to address the people of Daribow, Konom, Smyrno and Anacreon at their own level of understanding. Consequently, Hardin and his priests elect to speak to them in religious terms, of the Galactic Spirit and his prophet, Hari Seldon.

  But whether the name is given as psychohistory, or as the Plan, or as the Galactic Spirit, it is always the same transcendence that is being referred to. The only thing that changes is the perspective from which it is seen.

  In exactly the same way, whether Hari Seldon is regarded as the prophet of a religion of Galactic unity, or as the founding father of a planet of destiny, or as a super-scientist-supreme who is capable of practicing the principles of his craft on a Galactic scale, depends entirely on the state of comprehension of the viewer.

  For his part, Salvor Hardin, when looked at from the higher vantage of the psychohistorian, resembles one of those half-educated priest-technicians from the Four Kingdoms who can be counted upon to watch dials or to throw open switches on command, but who doesn’t actually grasp the whys and wherefores of the advanced science he aspires to serve.

  The Mayor operates on the basis of his highly limited understanding, on what remains of the initial burst of enthusiasm that struck him upon his first encounter with Hari Seldon, and on continuing faith. As best he can, he tries to imitate the founder’s example, and hopes that what he elects to do will prove to be in accordance with the Plan:

  He may not be able to make calculations based upon the essential continuity of human consciousness throughout the Galaxy the way Hari Seldon did—but he can set out to organize the immediate neighborhood.

  He may not at first be able to talk to the barbarians about the awesome and wonderful Plan for New Galactic Empire that leads him—but he can teach them the self-control, scientific competence and sense of community that they must have before the subject of the Plan can be raised.

  Most of all, Hardin may not be able to duplicate for others the heady rush of insight and conviction that swept over him when he first saw Hari Seldon in the time vault and heard him speak, and caught—beyond the founder’s words and calculations and super-science—a brief unfathomable glimpse of underlying transcendent wholeness. But he can express the essence of his intuitive recognition in terms of a new religion of the Galactic Spirit, and carry the word to the Four Kingdoms.

  And thirty years later, these actions by Salvor Hardin would prove to be exactly the right steps to have taken!

  From the point of view of Hari Seldon, of course, that would be something of a foregone conclusion. After all, he knew with a certainty of 98.4% that if he showed up on the fiftieth anniversary of the Foundation and stimulated the imaginations of those assembled in the time vault with the Cyrus the Great/New Galactic Empire origin-and-destiny story, their reaction would be to start a new religion and carry it to the surrounding barbarians. Seldon is only getting the results he anticipated.

  But that kind of assurance has never been available to Salvor Hardin. After his crucial initial decision to found a new religion and use it to tame the wild barbarians, it has been thirty long years of patience and effort and hope. And until everything finally fell into place so neatly and completely, he could never be certain that his religio
n of the Galactic Spirit would stand up to the test and prove a sufficient answer to the likes of Wienis. From Hardin’s point of view, it has all been a blind leap of faith.

  No wonder that on his second appearance in the time vault, Hari Seldon should think it appropriate to treat the Foundation’s successful resolution of this crisis as a triumph of Spiritual Power!

  But then, having endorsed Salvor Hardin’s methods and results, Hari Seldon goes on to play a new game of thought modification with those gathered in the time vault. Before he disappears again, he warns that there are crises ahead that Spiritual Power cannot resolve, and he names three sources of potential conflict:

  One is other centers of local stellar allegiance, which he terms the force of Regionalism or Nationalism.

  Another is the dying giant, the failing but still mighty First Galactic Empire.

  As for the third . . . Hari Seldon says: “ ‘And never forget there was another Foundation established eighty years ago; a Foundation at the other end of the Galaxy, at Star’s End. They will always be there for consideration.’ ”767

  Now whatever is that supposed to mean? Previously, it had always been taken for granted that the two Scientific Refuges were sister organizations devoted to a common purpose. But now, at a word from Hari Seldon, the other Foundation has become transformed into an unknown that must constantly be worried about.

  With this concluding set of provocative remarks by Hari Seldon, Isaac Asimov had certainly provided himself with plenty of room for further stories in this series, if and when the time came that he was ready to write them!

  Asimov finished “Bridle and Saddle” on Sunday, the 16th of November. And the next day, exactly two months after he had received the check for “Foundation,” he took the long-awaited sequel to Campbell’s office.

  So eager was the editor to lay hands on this novelet that he did something he’d never done before in the more than three years that Asimov had been bringing him stories: He sat right down with the manuscript and read it then and there, while Asimov waited to learn what his reaction would be.