The ‘Greatest Explainer of his Age’...

Asimov | It’s Been a Good Life!

I prefer coffee to tea! 😍

Nonfiction to fiction! 😍

They’re as different as chalk and cheese! Ain’t they?

One reason I find autobiographies and memoirs so invigorating, inspiring and energizing!

[On an aside, let me also adjoin an added info: Well, we’ve also curated a list of world-famous autobiographies and memoirs to the right of our blog, and it’s there for almost a year now! You may want to have a look at them to your right!]

On this vein, Isaac Asimov, me thought would merit inaugurating the New Year on a positive high for all of us!

Asimov, as we all know, has been called one of the “Big Three” science fiction writers of all time!

His range and his sweep are indeed astonishing and awe-inspiring! More than 500 gripping science fiction and nonfiction books along with a huge ‘three-volume’ autobiography.

Thanks to Asimov's wife, Janet, these ‘three volumes’ of his huge autobiography have been condensed into one for us all!

The very title of his Autobiography in itself exudes enthusiasm to the core!

Titled, It’s Been a Good Life!

Reminded much of Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’, where, after a tiring, arduous ‘journey’, after a ‘cold coming’, ‘worst timing’, ‘sharp weather’, ‘dead of winter’, ‘deep ways’, and ‘melting snows’, times of regret and dreams of sherbet, they finally meet up with ‘dawn’, where they find the place quite ‘satisfactory’!

This cheerfulness and liveliness are at the very heart of his work!

He is not one who looks at the dull, duller facets there is to one’s life!

Rather, he always looks at the bright, brighter aspects there is to one’s life and living!

It’s Been a Good Life is apt example to this, his credo!

And it’s been ‘a good life’, mostly because Asimov, Isaac Asimov, believed in the credentials of humanism, than being bogged down as a religious nut or a religious freak!

No wonder then that the American Humanist Association had named Dr. Asimov the Humanist of the Year.

In his famous 1988 interview with Moyers, Bill Moyers, Isaac Asimov bares his heart out on this, and on many of such principles that are quite close to his heart!

Well, Asimov has been called the ‘greatest explainer of his age’! With such simple words, in such a down-to-earth prose, with no pompous verbosity of any sort, anywhere on his words! And this interview with Bill is ample testament to this fact!

[The interview is here on Bill’s website along with the video as well!]

Bill opens his interview with Asimov on a very interesting note –

Moyers asks him,

“Are you an enemy of religion?”

Asimov replies,

No, I’m not. I feel that, as it seems to me any civilized humane person should feel is that every person has the right to his own beliefs and his own securities and his own likings. What I’m against is attempting to place a person’s belief system onto the nation or the world generally.

You know, we object because we say constantly that the Soviet Union is trying to dominate the world, communize the world.

Well, you know, the United States, I hope, is trying to democratize the world. But I certainly would be very much against trying to Christianize the world, or to Islamize it, or to Judaize it, or anything of the sort.

And my objection to fundamentalism is not that they are fundamentalists, but that essentially they want me to be a fundamentalist, too.

And his takes on religion are so beautifully laid out as well! Says he -

I would like to think — I don’t believe that I’m ever going to heaven or hell. I think that when I die there will be nothingness. That’s what I firmly believe.

That does not mean that I have the impulse to go out and rob and steal and rape and everything else, because I don’t fear punishment.

For one thing, I fear worldly punishment. And for a second thing, I fear the punishment of my own conscience. I have a conscience. It doesn’t depend on religion. And I think it’s so with other people, too.

Besides, even in societies in which religion is very powerful, there’s no shortage of crime and sin and misery and terrible things happening, despite heaven and hell.

I mean, I imagine if you go down death row, bunch of murderers maybe are waiting for execution, ask them if they believe in God. They’ll tell you yes.

Moyers asks, “Why did you say that the price of survival is the equality of women?”

Asimov replies,

Because if women have full ability to enter into all facets of the human condition, if they can enter business, if they can enter religion, science, government, on an equal basis with men, they will be so busy that they won’t feel it as necessary to have a great many children.

As long as you have women under conditions where they don’t feel any sense of value, no self-worth except as mothers, except as baby factories, they’ll have a lot of children.

Because that’s the only way they can prove they’re worth something.

In general, if you look through the world, the lower the status of women, the higher the birth rate.

And the higher the birth rate, the lower the status of women.

So that if you could somehow raise the status of women, I am certain the birth rate will fall drastically through the choice of the women themselves.

Moyers asks,

When I learn something new — and it happens every day — I feel a little more at home in this universe, a little more comfortable in the nest. I’m afraid that by the time I begin to feel really at home, it’ll all be over.

Asimov replies,

I used to worry about that. I said, “I’m gradually managing to cram more and more things into my mind. I’ve got this beautiful mind, and it’s going to die, and it’ll all be gone.”

And then I thought, No, not in my case. Every idea I’ve ever had I’ve written down, and it’s all there on paper. I won’t be gone. It’ll be there.

Today, what people call learning is forced on you. Everyone is forced to learn the same thing on the same day at the same speed in class.

But everyone is different. For some, class goes too fast, for some too slow, for some in the wrong direction.

But give everyone a chance, in addition to school, to follow up their own bent from the start, to find out about whatever they’re interested in by looking it up in their own homes, at their own speed, in their own time, and everyone will enjoy learning.

And yes!

With what beautiful foresight, Isaac Asimov the scientific seer has predicted the ‘teaching machine’ far far ahead of today’s virtual learning that’s happening all around the world –

An intrigued Moyers asks Asimov, “What would a teaching machine look like?”

Asimov replies,

I suppose that one essential thing would be a screen on which you could display things… And you’ll have to have a keyboard on which you ask your questions, although ideally I could like to see one that could be activated by voice.

You could actually talk to it, and perhaps it could talk to you too, and say,

“I have something here that may interest you. Would you like to have me print it out for you?”

And you’d say, “Well, what is it exactly?” And it would tell you, and you might say, “Oh all right, I’ll take a look at it.”

At a period in time, when Artificial Intelligence was literally unheard of by the lay, here’s a gentleman trying to see(r) into the future with such marvelous accuracy!

Equally reminded of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition and Bill Gates’s Business @ the Speed of Thought!

Asimov to continue… 

[image screenshot from Bill's website - billmoyersdotcom]