The Science of History
11th June 2007
Issac Asimov wrote a series of short stories in the 40s that were collected into a novel called Foundation. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_%28novel%29) It told the story of Harri Seldon who created the science of psychohistory in a far future galactic civilization. Since reading that novel as a teenager, I always wondered if it would ever by possible to create a “science” of history that would explain current civilization and enable the controlled manipulation of future events.
Over the years I have collected books and ideas about a science of history. You will find many references to psychohistory but most are not related to the Asimov series of novels. They deal with a blend of psychotherapy and sociology intended to shed light on historical occurances. Asimov’s system employed principles from physics, mathematics and other “hard” sciences. One author of a recent novel preferred “cliology” from the Greek goddess Clio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clio) as a name for an Asimov approach to creating a science of history.
For a long time, I didn’t believe that such a “hard” science was possible despite continued attempts to create it by a number of people. Sociodynamics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociodynamic) employs a blend of systems theory and sociology much closer to Asimov’s idea. But the big problem with such approaches lies in the hierarchical nature of human society and infrastructure. There are many situations where the action of a single individual motivated by subjective factors can result in a huge impact on society and history. No system based on the interaction of many identical entities such as chemistry can provide the principles needed for a science of history.
I now think that the best bet for exploring the science of history lies in computer modeling of personalities, groups, institutions and nation states. Of course, the physical environment and technological infrastructure will have to be included. Fortunately, our computers are evolving rapidly toward providing the computational power necessary for such hyper complex sophisticated global models.