TOMU 2-27 Construction Post
Aug. 24th, 2011 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerin~700 words old.
4:30-5:15 (~1600 words, +900)
5:30-6:00 (~2000 words, +400)
3:00-3:30 (~2400 words, +400)
3:30-4:00 (~2800 words, +400)
[As of one hour of work on 8/24]
"Here's a question. What nation has the highest average standard of living for its people?" Hart said. "Anybody? Come on, this isn't a quiz... it's a discussion. A lot of you are being quiet because you're thinking it's probably Magisteria, but you're also thinking I wouldn't be asking if it actually was Magisteria. Well, let me just tell you: it's not Magisteria."
"It's got to be Thylea," someone said. "That's what we're talking about, right?"
"It can't be," someone else said. "He's probably trying to make us think that. There's got to be a trick, right?" He looked at Hart, who just sort of tilted his head and shrugged.
If others hadn't been voicing these thoughts out loud, I probably would have been thinking them... but hearing other people say them, I couldn't help notice how it was sort of backwards in relation to the point of the class. It was like trying to pass a test by getting inside the teacher's head... it was possible, and the better students tended to be better at it. But it wasn't the same thing as learning the material... or learning about the material, which seemed like the higher goal.
Of course, I also couldn't help thinking that it probably was Thylea, for no better reason than that was the topic Hart had wanted to talk about.
"It could be the Mother Isles," another student said. "I mean, they're Thylea's neighbor and we're talking about how Thylea relates to stuff throughout history, so this could be about how Thyleans raided the Mother Isles because they're rich."
"Okay, any discussion's an improvement over no discussion, but let's try to steer clear of the meta-analysis here," Hart said. "Anatomy of an Aaron Hart Class will be a fascinating academic topic and a required course for all students in the year 300 onward, I'm sure, but let's talk about reasons why a nation would have a high standard of living, not reasons why I'd bring it up." He turned to the student who'd said the Mother Isles. "Like, you said 'they're rich.' How do you mean that?"
"Well... the Mother City's all palaces and columns and stuff," he said. "Palatine looks like that, but it's like a tenth the size and not even a tenth as old."
"It's a big empire, though," Hart said. "Not everybody lives in palaces."
"No, but it's a really modern nation," the student said. "You're right, I would have expected the Imperial Republic to have the highest standard, but if it's not us, it's got to be the older version of us."
"Except," another student said, "if we're talking about averages, then... well, maybe the Mother City or Palatine by themselves would have really high standards of living, but there are all the outlying provinces and the little backwater towns and the places that imperial protections don't really protect, right?"
"What's a 'modern nation', anyway?" a different student chimed in. "Isn't every nation that's around right now 'modern'? Are older countries more modern, or newer ones?"
"I meant modern in, you know, outlook," the student who'd used the phrase said. "I don't think it's got anything to do with how old something is... a really old country could be advanced because they've had time to get advanced, or they could be living in the past because they've got a lot of tradition and things weighing them down. It all depends."
"Okay, but I think the point stands," Hart said. "How are you defining a modern outlook? Is it circular... is it an outlook similar to nations that strike you as modern? Or do you have some actual criteria in mind?"
"I don't think you could define criteria without pointing to a 'modern nation' as an example of why," one student said. "So maybe it is all circular. Or maybe it's a case of knowing things when you see them."
"What does this have to do with the question? Aren't we getting off-topic?"
"Well, if I may engage in a bit of 'meta-analysis' myself," Fenwick said, "I suspect the ultimate goal of Aaron's question was to foment discussion, which it has."
"The answer was Thylea, by the way," Hart said. "The Thylean Federation has a higher per capita income, a very low percent of their population living below the poverty line, and just overall happier people, as measured on several different indexes, than either of the two empires. This contrasts pretty strongly with our stereotypical views of the northlands and the people who live there."
[]
"Professor Hart... um, I mean, Aaron," she said. "I found it interesting when you were talking about the relations between the old empire and the Thyleans that you mentioned they were white. Is that actually significant?"
"Extremely," Hart said. "Humans... white humans... have a bad history when it comes to relating to humans of other colors as humans. See? I'm doing it right now. I tend to think of my field of expertise as being 'human history', but it's the history of the human people from the part of the world where white people were best established in the days before halfway reliable global travel was a possibility."
"I just... it seems racist," the girl said.
"It is incredibly racist," Hart said. "Both the tendency I'm talking about, and the way the humans from the Mother Isles ended up relating to the Thyleans as opposed to how they treated the Argenti, or others."
"It sounds like you're admitting that you're racist," she said.
"Well, I hate to put it that baldly," Hart said. "And everybody does, which is why we usually end up changing the subject. Which I'm going to do in a few minutes here, but I'll come back to that. But... yeah. I said the word 'humans' and I meant 'specifically the humans who look like me, share a cultural background with me, and will look the most 'normal' to most anyone in a position of authority over me'. Do you have a better word for that than 'racist'?"
"How about 'human'?" Fenwick suggested. "It seems like you're being a bit hard on yourself, to be quite honest."
"See, you're doing it, too," Hart said. "I'm not being 'hard on' myself, Fenwick, I'm simply turning the same kind of critical eye I'd use to appraise the actions of people in some foreign culture at some past age on my own actions, as a member of this culture. How can I examine the mindset of the Old Imperial Man from the Mother Isles hundreds of years ago if I'm going to flinch away from performing the same kind of divination on the mind of the closest living relative on hand, the Modern Magisterian Man?"
"I just don't think it helps anything to try to make everything about race," the girl who'd asked the question said. "I try not to see color."
"Well, then you picked a great university to come to, though really you were sort of spoiled for choices," Hart said. "Look around the room. Look around the campus. 'Not seeing color' isn't much of an accomplishment when you're going to college in Palesville, the capital of Greater Chalkwhitonia."
"It's funny you say that, because I actually have an Argenti-Imperial suitemate," she said.
"I'm surprised you noticed," Hart said.
"I don't treat her any differently than anyone else," she said.
"How many times a day do you bring up your other suitemates as examples in conversation?" Hart asked.
"I would if an applicable subject ever came up," she said. "It's not racist that there's something different about her."
"Right, but if we talk about how that difference might make her experiences going through life different from... or more difficult than... yours," Hart said, "then coins-to-crullers someone is going to pop up and say, 'Why make this about race? I don't even see color.'"
"I just wanted to know what whiteness had to do with it," she said. "How can we say that if everything else had been the same but they had been black, or brown, or whatever, that things wouldn't have gone exactly the same?"
"Well, first of all, as I'm one-eighth whatever on my mother's side, I thank you for that little gesture of inclusiveness," Hart said. "And you mean hypothetically? We can talk about this as a hypothetical. We have that luxury. To the people of the Argentus, or many points east and south, it's less an abstract historical 'what if?' to be mooted about and more a little thing called 'history', also known as 'ongoing reality'.
"But let's try to answer your question, all the same. Was it significant? Yes. It meant that the Metro folk could see themselves in the Thyleans' shoes, in their skins, and vice-versa. It meant that when a Thylean settlement sprung up on their shores, then after the initial unsettled period where everything is axes and pitchforks the newcomers could be almost seamlessly integrated. It means they could look at a Thylean infant and think, 'That could be son. That could be my grandson.' These things matter. As far as we know, nobody from the Argentus sailed to the Mother Isles and set up a colony, but if they had they'd be a lot more visible than Thylean settlers were. You're kidding yourself if you don't think that matters.
"I mean, look at this: the stories, the lore we got from Thylean sources... they became accepted as parts of our culture. The oldest known Pax-language epic poems are about Thylean heroes in Thylean lands. We don't erase that identity from them, and we don't treat the poetic cycles as exotic and foreign. That's not at all how we treat stories from other human cultures, but in this case it just passes without comment. You won't find these poems or their adaptations shelved away from everything else in special 'Thylean Interest' sections. We don't think of ourselves as Thyleans, or as Thyleans as us... but in how we interact with them, they're treated as less foreign than native-born citizens of our own Imperium whose ancestors came here by way of the Argentus Archipelago.
"Now I mentioned changing the subject. To be perfectly honest, I don't feel qualified to lead a discussion about the intricacies of endoracism and exoracism. Certainly not off the cuff. And it's not actually the topic we chose for the day, by which I mean all of us. This is your class and If you all want to talk about it on a future day, we'll talk about it, but be warned: as long as I'm here, it's not going to be a feel-good circle-j... back-patting session where we all come out agreeing that Racism Is Baaaaad Thank Khersis It's Over. Just bear that in mind."
"Well... that was, ah, ah invigorating if perhaps overly passionate beginning," Fenwick said. "Didn't one of us mention that this isn't a lecture course?"
"That wasn't a lecture, it was a rant," Hart sad. "Just as a point of order. But, let's move on. Who's got a question, or a topic?"
A few hands went up around the room. I kept mine down. I knew I'd need to participate to get a good grade, but the things that were popping up in my head all had to do with the off-the-table-for-now topic of racism.
"I wonder about Thylean religion," he said. "Aren't they a Khersian nation now?"
"In the sense of 'nation' meaning 'people', mostly, yeah," Hart said. "I don't believe they have a state religion."
"Yes," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate. In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons. The formal census figures show that at least one in ten Thyleans still venerate the old pantheons, though this number may be higher... less formal methods of investigation have greater measures of success in outlying rural areas, and they tend to suggest a robust and vigorous interest in the old 'gods'."
"Modern humans worshipping giants?" someone said.
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become."
"Didn't somebody say something about this not being a lecture class?" Hart said.
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants," Fenwick continued, "one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes," Fenwick said. "They would be unbelievably powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they would have to rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring. What does that sound like to you?"
The strange thing was that I'd heard really similar reasoning before, that "god" was just a word for someone powerful enough to say they're a god and not have anyone dare dispute it. Of course, the person who'd said that had been an enemy of the actual gods... or at least the target of one god, and physically vulnerable to the presence and power of them as a whole.
"Wow, Fenwick," Hart said. "That's more... I don't know what word to put there. But it's certainly more than I would have expected. Now, spinning off of this... []
[]
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
[]
[Progress!]
"Here's a question. What nation has the highest average standard of living for its people?" Hart said. "Anybody? Come on, this isn't a quiz... it's a discussion. A lot of you are being quiet because you're thinking it's probably Magisteria, but you're also thinking I wouldn't be asking if it actually was Magisteria. Well, let me just tell you: it's not Magisteria."
"It's got to be Thylea," someone said. "That's what we're talking about, right?"
"It can't be," someone else said. "He's probably trying to make us think that. There's got to be a trick, right?" He looked at Hart, who just sort of tilted his head and shrugged.
If others hadn't been voicing these thoughts out loud, I probably would have been thinking them... but hearing other people say them,
"It could be the Mother Isles," another student said. "I mean, they're Thylea's neighbor and we're talking about how Thylea relates to stuff throughout history, so this could be about how Thyleans raided the Mother Isles because they're rich."
"Okay, any discussion's an improvement over no discussion, but let's try to steer clear of the meta-analysis here," Hart said. "Anatomy of an Aaron Hart Class will be a fascinating academic topic and a required course for all students in the year 300, I'm sure, but let's talk about reasons why a nation would have a high standard of living, not reasons why I'd bring it up." He turned to the student who'd said the Mother Isles. "Like, you said 'they're rich.' How do you mean that?"
"Well... the Mother City's all palaces and columns and stuff," he said. "Palatine looks like that, but it's like a tenth the size and a tenth as old."
"It's a big empire, though," Hart said. "Not everybody lives in palaces."
"No, but it's a really modern nation," the student said. "You're right, I would have expected the Imperial Republic to have the highest standard, but if it's not us, it's got to be the older version of us."
"Except," another student said, "if we're talking about averages, then... well, maybe the Mother City or Palatine by themselves would have really high standards of living, but there are all the outlying provinces and the little backwater towns and the places that imperial protections don't really protect, right?"
[]
"Professor Hart... um, I mean, Aaron," she said. "I found it interesting when you were talking about the relations between the old empire and the Thyleans that you mentioned they were white. Is that actually significant?"
"Extremely," Hart said. "Humans... white humans... have a bad history when it comes to relating to humans of other colors as humans. See? I'm doing it right now. I tend to think of my field of expertise as being 'human history', but it's the history of the human people from the part of the world where white people were best established in the days before halfway reliable global travel was a possibility."
"I just... it seems racist," the girl said.
"It is incredibly racist," Hart said. "Both the tendency I'm talking about, and the way the humans from the Mother Isles ended up relating to the Thyleans as opposed to how they treated the Argenti, or others."
"It sounds like you're admitting that you're racist," she said.
"Well, I hate to put it that baldly," Hart said. "And everybody does, which is why we usually end up changing the subject. Which I'm going to do in a few minutes here, but I'll come back to that. But... yeah. I said the word 'humans' and I meant 'specifically the humans who look like me, share a cultural background with me, and will look the most 'normal' to most anyone in a position of authority over me'. Do you have a better word for that than 'racist'?"
"How about 'human'?" Fenwick suggested. "It seems like you're being a bit hard on yourself, to be quite honest."
"See, you're doing it, too," Hart said. "I'm not being 'hard on' myself, Fenwick, I'm simply turning the same kind of critical eye I'd use to appraise the actions of people in some foreign culture at some past age on my own actions, as a member of this culture. How can I examine the mindset of the Old Imperial Man from the Mother Isles hundreds of years ago if I'm going to flinch away from performing the same kind of divination on the mind of the closest living relative on hand, the Modern Magisterian Man?"
"I just don't think it helps anything to try to make everything about race," the girl who'd asked the question said. "I try not to see color."
"Well, then you picked a great university to come to, though really you were sort of spoiled for choices," Hart said. "Look around the room. Look around the campus. 'Not seeing color' isn't much of an accomplishment when you're going to college in Palesville, the capital of Greater Chalkwhitonia."
"It's funny you say that, because I actually have an Argenti-Imperial suitemate," she said.
"I'm surprised you noticed," Hart said.
"I don't treat her any differently than anyone else," she said.
"How many times a day do you bring up your other suitemates as examples in conversation?" Hart asked.
"I would if an applicable subject ever came up," she said. "It's not racist that there's something different about her."
"Right, but if we talk about how that difference might make her experiences going through life different from... or more difficult than... yours," Hart said, "then coins-to-crullers someone is going to pop up and say, 'Why make this about race? I don't even see color.'"
"I just wanted to know what whiteness had to do with it," she said. "How can we say that if everything else had been the same but they had been black, or brown, or whatever, that things wouldn't have gone exactly the same?"
"Well, first of all, as I'm one-eighth whatever on my mother's side, I thank you for that little gesture of inclusiveness," Hart said. "And you mean hypothetically? We can talk about this as a hypothetical. We have that luxury. To the people of the Argentus, or many points east and south, it's less an abstract historical 'what if?' to be mooted about and more a little thing called 'history', also known as 'ongoing reality'.
"But let's try to answer your question, all the same. Was it significant? Yes. It meant that the Metro folk could see themselves in the Thyleans' shoes, in their skins, and vice-versa. It meant that when a Thylean settlement sprung up on their shores, then after the initial unsettled period where everything is axes and pitchforks the newcomers could be almost seamlessly integrated. It means they could look at a Thylean infant and think, 'That could be son. That could be my grandson.' These things matter. As far as we know, nobody from the Argentus sailed to the Mother Isles and set up a colony, but if they had they'd be a lot more visible than Thylean settlers were. You're kidding yourself if you don't think that matters.
"I mean, look at this: the stories, the lore we got from Thylean sources... they became accepted as parts of our culture. The oldest known Pax-language epic poems are about Thylean heroes in Thylean lands. We don't erase that identity from them, and we don't treat the poetic cycles as exotic and foreign. That's not at all how we treat stories from other human cultures, but in this case it just passes without comment. You won't find these poems or their adaptations shelved away from everything else in special 'Thylean Interest' sections. We don't think of ourselves as Thyleans, or as Thyleans as us... but in how we interact with them, they're treated as less foreign than native-born citizens of our own Imperium whose ancestors came here by way of the Argentus Archipelago.
"Now I mentioned changing the subject. To be perfectly honest, I don't feel qualified to lead a discussion about the intricacies of endoracism and exoracism. Certainly not off the cuff. And it's not actually the topic we chose for the day, by which I mean all of us. This is your class and If you all want to talk about it on a future day, we'll talk about it, but be warned: as long as I'm here, it's not going to be a feel-good circle-j... back-patting session where we all come out agreeing that Racism Is Baaaaad Thank Khersis It's Over. Just bear that in mind."
"Well... that was, ah, ah invigorating if perhaps overly passionate beginning," Fenwick said. "Didn't one of us mention that this isn't a lecture course?"
"That wasn't a lecture, it was a rant," Hart sad. "Just as a point of order. But, let's move on. Who's got a question, or a topic?"
A few hands went up around the room. I kept mine down. I knew I'd need to participate to get a good grade, but the things that were popping up in my head all had to do with the off-the-table-for-now topic of racism.
"I wonder about Thylean religion," he said. "Aren't they a Khersian nation now?"
"In the sense of 'nation' meaning 'people', mostly, yeah," Hart said. "I don't believe they have a state religion."
"Yes," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate. In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons. The formal census figures show that at least one in ten Thyleans still venerate the old pantheons, though this number may be higher... less formal methods of investigation have greater measures of success in outlying rural areas, and they tend to suggest a robust and vigorous interest in the old 'gods'."
"Modern humans worshipping giants?" someone said.
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become."
"Didn't somebody say something about this not being a lecture class?" Hart said.
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants," Fenwick continued, "one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes," Fenwick said. "They would be unbelievably powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they would have to rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring. What does that sound like to you?"
The strange thing was that I'd heard really similar reasoning before, that "god" was just a word for someone powerful enough to say they're a god and not have anyone dare dispute it. Of course, the person who'd said that had been an enemy of the actual gods... or at least the target of one god, and physically vulnerable to the presence and power of them as a whole.
"Wow, Fenwick," Hart said. "That's more... I don't know what word to put there. But it's certainly more than I would have expected. Now, spinning off of this... []
[]
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
[]
[I actually left this window open without pasting in my first bout of work today, so a little bit of record of progress has been lost. This is what I "inherited" from the last chapter, plus that, plus what I wrote between 5:30 and 6:00.]
"Professor Hart... um, I mean, Aaron," she said. "I found it interesting when you were talking about the relations between the old empire and the Thyleans that you mentioned they were white. Is that actually significant?"
"Extremely," Hart said. "Humans... white humans... have a bad history when it comes to relating to humans of other colors as humans. See? I'm doing it right now. I tend to think of my field of expertise as being 'human history', but it's the history of the human people from the part of the world where white people were best established in the days before halfway reliable global travel was a possibility."
"I just... it seems racist," the girl said.
"It is incredibly racist," Hart said. "Both the tendency I'm talking about, and the way the humans from the Mother Isles ended up relating to the Thyleans as opposed to how they treated the Argenti, or others."
"It sounds like you're admitting that you're racist," she said.
"Well, I hate to put it that baldly," Hart said. "And everybody does, which is why we usually end up changing the subject. Which I'm going to do in a few minutes here, but I'll come back to that. But... yeah. I said the word 'humans' and I meant 'specifically the humans who look like me, share a cultural background with me, and will look the most 'normal' to most anyone in a position of authority over me'. Do you have a better word for that than 'racist'?"
"How about 'human'?" Fenwick suggested. "It seems like you're being a bit hard on yourself, to be quite honest."
"See, you're doing it, too," Hart said. "I'm not being 'hard on' myself, Fenwick, I'm simply turning the same kind of critical eye I'd use to appraise the actions of people in some foreign culture at some past age on my own actions, as a member of this culture. How can I examine the mindset of the Old Imperial Man from the Mother Isles hundreds of years ago if I'm going to flinch away from performing the same kind of divination on the mind of the closest living relative on hand, the Modern Magisterian Man?"
"I just don't think it helps anything to try to make everything about race," the girl who'd asked the question said. "I try not to see color."
"Well, then you picked a great university to come to, though really you were sort of spoiled for choices," Hart said. "Look around the room. Look around the campus. 'Not seeing color' isn't much of an accomplishment when you're going to college in Palesville, the capital of Greater Chalkwhitonia."
"It's funny you say that, because I actually have an Argenti-Imperial suitemate," she said.
"I'm surprised you noticed," Hart said.
"I don't treat her any differently than anyone else," she said.
"How many times a day do you bring up your other suitemates as examples in conversation?" Hart asked.
"I would if an applicable subject ever came up," she said. "It's not racist that there's something different about her."
"Right, but if we talk about how that difference might make her experiences going through life different from... or more difficult than... yours," Hart said, "then coins-to-crullers someone is going to pop up and say, 'Why make this about race? I don't even see color.'"
"I just wanted to know what whiteness had to do with it," she said. "How can we say that if everything else had been the same but they had been black, or brown, or whatever, that things wouldn't have gone exactly the same?"
"Well, first of all, as I'm one-eighth whatever on my mother's side, I thank you for that little gesture of inclusiveness," Hart said. "And you mean hypothetically? We can talk about this as a hypothetical. We have that luxury. To the people of the Argentus, or many points east and south, it's less an abstract historical 'what if?' to be mooted about and more a little thing called 'history', also known as 'ongoing reality'.
"But let's try to answer your question, all the same. Was it significant? Yes. It meant that the Metro folk could see themselves in the Thyleans' shoes, in their skins, and vice-versa. It meant that when a Thylean settlement sprung up on their shores, then after the initial unsettled period where everything is axes and pitchforks the newcomers could be almost seamlessly integrated. It means they could look at a Thylean infant and think, 'That could be son. That could be my grandson.' These things matter. As far as we know, nobody from the Argentus sailed to the Mother Isles and set up a colony, but if they had they'd be a lot more visible than Thylean settlers were. You're kidding yourself if you don't think that matters.
"I mean, look at this: the stories, the lore we got from Thylean sources... they became accepted as parts of our culture. The oldest known Pax-language epic poems are about Thylean heroes in Thylean lands. We don't erase that identity from them, and we don't treat the poetic cycles as exotic and foreign. That's not at all how we treat stories from other human cultures, but in this case it just passes without comment. You won't find these poems or their adaptations shelved away from everything else in special 'Thylean Interest' sections. We don't think of ourselves as Thyleans, or as Thyleans as us... but in how we interact with them, they're treated as less foreign than native-born citizens of our own Imperium whose ancestors came here by way of the Argentus Archipelago.
"Now I mentioned changing the subject. To be perfectly honest, I don't feel qualified to lead a discussion about the intricacies of endoracism and exoracism. Certainly not off the cuff. And it's not actually the topic we chose for the day, by which I mean all of us. This is your class and If you all want to talk about it on a future day, we'll talk about it, but be warned: as long as I'm here, it's not going to be a feel-good circle-j... back-patting session where we all come out agreeing that Racism Is Baaaaad Thank Khersis It's Over. Just bear that in mind."
"Well... that was, ah, ah invigorating if perhaps overly passionate beginning," Fenwick said. "Didn't one of us mention that this isn't a lecture course?"
"That wasn't a lecture, it was a rant," Hart sad. "Just as a point of order. But, let's move on. Who's got a question, or a topic?"
A few hands went up around the room. I kept mine down. I knew I'd need to participate to get a good grade, but the things that were popping up in my head all had to do with the off-the-table-for-now topic of racism.
"I wonder about Thylean religion," he said. "Aren't they a Khersian nation now?"
"In the sense of 'nation' meaning 'people', mostly, yeah," Hart said. "I don't believe they have a state religion."
"Yes," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate. In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons. The formal census figures show that at least one in ten Thyleans still venerate the old pantheons, though this number may be higher... less formal methods of investigation have greater measures of success in outlying rural areas, and they tend to suggest a robust and vigorous interest in the old 'gods'."
"Modern humans worshipping giants?" someone said.
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become."
"Didn't somebody say something about this not being a lecture class?" Hart said.
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants," Fenwick continued, "one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes," Fenwick said. "They would be unbelievably powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they would have to rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring. What does that sound like to you?"
The strange thing was that I'd heard really similar reasoning before, that "god" was just a word for someone powerful enough to say they're a god and not have anyone dare dispute it. Of course, the person who'd said that had been an enemy of the actual gods... or at least the target of one god, and physically vulnerable to the presence and power of them as a whole.
"Wow, Fenwick," Hart said. "That's more... I don't know what word to put there. But it's certainly more than I would have expected. Now, spinning off of this...
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
4:30-5:15 (~1600 words, +900)
5:30-6:00 (~2000 words, +400)
3:00-3:30 (~2400 words, +400)
3:30-4:00 (~2800 words, +400)
[As of one hour of work on 8/24]
"Here's a question. What nation has the highest average standard of living for its people?" Hart said. "Anybody? Come on, this isn't a quiz... it's a discussion. A lot of you are being quiet because you're thinking it's probably Magisteria, but you're also thinking I wouldn't be asking if it actually was Magisteria. Well, let me just tell you: it's not Magisteria."
"It's got to be Thylea," someone said. "That's what we're talking about, right?"
"It can't be," someone else said. "He's probably trying to make us think that. There's got to be a trick, right?" He looked at Hart, who just sort of tilted his head and shrugged.
If others hadn't been voicing these thoughts out loud, I probably would have been thinking them... but hearing other people say them, I couldn't help notice how it was sort of backwards in relation to the point of the class. It was like trying to pass a test by getting inside the teacher's head... it was possible, and the better students tended to be better at it. But it wasn't the same thing as learning the material... or learning about the material, which seemed like the higher goal.
Of course, I also couldn't help thinking that it probably was Thylea, for no better reason than that was the topic Hart had wanted to talk about.
"It could be the Mother Isles," another student said. "I mean, they're Thylea's neighbor and we're talking about how Thylea relates to stuff throughout history, so this could be about how Thyleans raided the Mother Isles because they're rich."
"Okay, any discussion's an improvement over no discussion, but let's try to steer clear of the meta-analysis here," Hart said. "Anatomy of an Aaron Hart Class will be a fascinating academic topic and a required course for all students in the year 300 onward, I'm sure, but let's talk about reasons why a nation would have a high standard of living, not reasons why I'd bring it up." He turned to the student who'd said the Mother Isles. "Like, you said 'they're rich.' How do you mean that?"
"Well... the Mother City's all palaces and columns and stuff," he said. "Palatine looks like that, but it's like a tenth the size and not even a tenth as old."
"It's a big empire, though," Hart said. "Not everybody lives in palaces."
"No, but it's a really modern nation," the student said. "You're right, I would have expected the Imperial Republic to have the highest standard, but if it's not us, it's got to be the older version of us."
"Except," another student said, "if we're talking about averages, then... well, maybe the Mother City or Palatine by themselves would have really high standards of living, but there are all the outlying provinces and the little backwater towns and the places that imperial protections don't really protect, right?"
"What's a 'modern nation', anyway?" a different student chimed in. "Isn't every nation that's around right now 'modern'? Are older countries more modern, or newer ones?"
"I meant modern in, you know, outlook," the student who'd used the phrase said. "I don't think it's got anything to do with how old something is... a really old country could be advanced because they've had time to get advanced, or they could be living in the past because they've got a lot of tradition and things weighing them down. It all depends."
"Okay, but I think the point stands," Hart said. "How are you defining a modern outlook? Is it circular... is it an outlook similar to nations that strike you as modern? Or do you have some actual criteria in mind?"
"I don't think you could define criteria without pointing to a 'modern nation' as an example of why," one student said. "So maybe it is all circular. Or maybe it's a case of knowing things when you see them."
"What does this have to do with the question? Aren't we getting off-topic?"
"Well, if I may engage in a bit of 'meta-analysis' myself," Fenwick said, "I suspect the ultimate goal of Aaron's question was to foment discussion, which it has."
"The answer was Thylea, by the way," Hart said. "The Thylean Federation has a higher per capita income, a very low percent of their population living below the poverty line, and just overall happier people, as measured on several different indexes, than either of the two empires. This contrasts pretty strongly with our stereotypical views of the northlands and the people who live there."
[]
"Professor Hart... um, I mean, Aaron," she said. "I found it interesting when you were talking about the relations between the old empire and the Thyleans that you mentioned they were white. Is that actually significant?"
"Extremely," Hart said. "Humans... white humans... have a bad history when it comes to relating to humans of other colors as humans. See? I'm doing it right now. I tend to think of my field of expertise as being 'human history', but it's the history of the human people from the part of the world where white people were best established in the days before halfway reliable global travel was a possibility."
"I just... it seems racist," the girl said.
"It is incredibly racist," Hart said. "Both the tendency I'm talking about, and the way the humans from the Mother Isles ended up relating to the Thyleans as opposed to how they treated the Argenti, or others."
"It sounds like you're admitting that you're racist," she said.
"Well, I hate to put it that baldly," Hart said. "And everybody does, which is why we usually end up changing the subject. Which I'm going to do in a few minutes here, but I'll come back to that. But... yeah. I said the word 'humans' and I meant 'specifically the humans who look like me, share a cultural background with me, and will look the most 'normal' to most anyone in a position of authority over me'. Do you have a better word for that than 'racist'?"
"How about 'human'?" Fenwick suggested. "It seems like you're being a bit hard on yourself, to be quite honest."
"See, you're doing it, too," Hart said. "I'm not being 'hard on' myself, Fenwick, I'm simply turning the same kind of critical eye I'd use to appraise the actions of people in some foreign culture at some past age on my own actions, as a member of this culture. How can I examine the mindset of the Old Imperial Man from the Mother Isles hundreds of years ago if I'm going to flinch away from performing the same kind of divination on the mind of the closest living relative on hand, the Modern Magisterian Man?"
"I just don't think it helps anything to try to make everything about race," the girl who'd asked the question said. "I try not to see color."
"Well, then you picked a great university to come to, though really you were sort of spoiled for choices," Hart said. "Look around the room. Look around the campus. 'Not seeing color' isn't much of an accomplishment when you're going to college in Palesville, the capital of Greater Chalkwhitonia."
"It's funny you say that, because I actually have an Argenti-Imperial suitemate," she said.
"I'm surprised you noticed," Hart said.
"I don't treat her any differently than anyone else," she said.
"How many times a day do you bring up your other suitemates as examples in conversation?" Hart asked.
"I would if an applicable subject ever came up," she said. "It's not racist that there's something different about her."
"Right, but if we talk about how that difference might make her experiences going through life different from... or more difficult than... yours," Hart said, "then coins-to-crullers someone is going to pop up and say, 'Why make this about race? I don't even see color.'"
"I just wanted to know what whiteness had to do with it," she said. "How can we say that if everything else had been the same but they had been black, or brown, or whatever, that things wouldn't have gone exactly the same?"
"Well, first of all, as I'm one-eighth whatever on my mother's side, I thank you for that little gesture of inclusiveness," Hart said. "And you mean hypothetically? We can talk about this as a hypothetical. We have that luxury. To the people of the Argentus, or many points east and south, it's less an abstract historical 'what if?' to be mooted about and more a little thing called 'history', also known as 'ongoing reality'.
"But let's try to answer your question, all the same. Was it significant? Yes. It meant that the Metro folk could see themselves in the Thyleans' shoes, in their skins, and vice-versa. It meant that when a Thylean settlement sprung up on their shores, then after the initial unsettled period where everything is axes and pitchforks the newcomers could be almost seamlessly integrated. It means they could look at a Thylean infant and think, 'That could be son. That could be my grandson.' These things matter. As far as we know, nobody from the Argentus sailed to the Mother Isles and set up a colony, but if they had they'd be a lot more visible than Thylean settlers were. You're kidding yourself if you don't think that matters.
"I mean, look at this: the stories, the lore we got from Thylean sources... they became accepted as parts of our culture. The oldest known Pax-language epic poems are about Thylean heroes in Thylean lands. We don't erase that identity from them, and we don't treat the poetic cycles as exotic and foreign. That's not at all how we treat stories from other human cultures, but in this case it just passes without comment. You won't find these poems or their adaptations shelved away from everything else in special 'Thylean Interest' sections. We don't think of ourselves as Thyleans, or as Thyleans as us... but in how we interact with them, they're treated as less foreign than native-born citizens of our own Imperium whose ancestors came here by way of the Argentus Archipelago.
"Now I mentioned changing the subject. To be perfectly honest, I don't feel qualified to lead a discussion about the intricacies of endoracism and exoracism. Certainly not off the cuff. And it's not actually the topic we chose for the day, by which I mean all of us. This is your class and If you all want to talk about it on a future day, we'll talk about it, but be warned: as long as I'm here, it's not going to be a feel-good circle-j... back-patting session where we all come out agreeing that Racism Is Baaaaad Thank Khersis It's Over. Just bear that in mind."
"Well... that was, ah, ah invigorating if perhaps overly passionate beginning," Fenwick said. "Didn't one of us mention that this isn't a lecture course?"
"That wasn't a lecture, it was a rant," Hart sad. "Just as a point of order. But, let's move on. Who's got a question, or a topic?"
A few hands went up around the room. I kept mine down. I knew I'd need to participate to get a good grade, but the things that were popping up in my head all had to do with the off-the-table-for-now topic of racism.
"I wonder about Thylean religion," he said. "Aren't they a Khersian nation now?"
"In the sense of 'nation' meaning 'people', mostly, yeah," Hart said. "I don't believe they have a state religion."
"Yes," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate. In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons. The formal census figures show that at least one in ten Thyleans still venerate the old pantheons, though this number may be higher... less formal methods of investigation have greater measures of success in outlying rural areas, and they tend to suggest a robust and vigorous interest in the old 'gods'."
"Modern humans worshipping giants?" someone said.
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become."
"Didn't somebody say something about this not being a lecture class?" Hart said.
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants," Fenwick continued, "one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes," Fenwick said. "They would be unbelievably powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they would have to rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring. What does that sound like to you?"
The strange thing was that I'd heard really similar reasoning before, that "god" was just a word for someone powerful enough to say they're a god and not have anyone dare dispute it. Of course, the person who'd said that had been an enemy of the actual gods... or at least the target of one god, and physically vulnerable to the presence and power of them as a whole.
"Wow, Fenwick," Hart said. "That's more... I don't know what word to put there. But it's certainly more than I would have expected. Now, spinning off of this... []
[]
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
[]
[Progress!]
"Here's a question. What nation has the highest average standard of living for its people?" Hart said. "Anybody? Come on, this isn't a quiz... it's a discussion. A lot of you are being quiet because you're thinking it's probably Magisteria, but you're also thinking I wouldn't be asking if it actually was Magisteria. Well, let me just tell you: it's not Magisteria."
"It's got to be Thylea," someone said. "That's what we're talking about, right?"
"It can't be," someone else said. "He's probably trying to make us think that. There's got to be a trick, right?" He looked at Hart, who just sort of tilted his head and shrugged.
If others hadn't been voicing these thoughts out loud, I probably would have been thinking them... but hearing other people say them,
"It could be the Mother Isles," another student said. "I mean, they're Thylea's neighbor and we're talking about how Thylea relates to stuff throughout history, so this could be about how Thyleans raided the Mother Isles because they're rich."
"Okay, any discussion's an improvement over no discussion, but let's try to steer clear of the meta-analysis here," Hart said. "Anatomy of an Aaron Hart Class will be a fascinating academic topic and a required course for all students in the year 300, I'm sure, but let's talk about reasons why a nation would have a high standard of living, not reasons why I'd bring it up." He turned to the student who'd said the Mother Isles. "Like, you said 'they're rich.' How do you mean that?"
"Well... the Mother City's all palaces and columns and stuff," he said. "Palatine looks like that, but it's like a tenth the size and a tenth as old."
"It's a big empire, though," Hart said. "Not everybody lives in palaces."
"No, but it's a really modern nation," the student said. "You're right, I would have expected the Imperial Republic to have the highest standard, but if it's not us, it's got to be the older version of us."
"Except," another student said, "if we're talking about averages, then... well, maybe the Mother City or Palatine by themselves would have really high standards of living, but there are all the outlying provinces and the little backwater towns and the places that imperial protections don't really protect, right?"
[]
"Professor Hart... um, I mean, Aaron," she said. "I found it interesting when you were talking about the relations between the old empire and the Thyleans that you mentioned they were white. Is that actually significant?"
"Extremely," Hart said. "Humans... white humans... have a bad history when it comes to relating to humans of other colors as humans. See? I'm doing it right now. I tend to think of my field of expertise as being 'human history', but it's the history of the human people from the part of the world where white people were best established in the days before halfway reliable global travel was a possibility."
"I just... it seems racist," the girl said.
"It is incredibly racist," Hart said. "Both the tendency I'm talking about, and the way the humans from the Mother Isles ended up relating to the Thyleans as opposed to how they treated the Argenti, or others."
"It sounds like you're admitting that you're racist," she said.
"Well, I hate to put it that baldly," Hart said. "And everybody does, which is why we usually end up changing the subject. Which I'm going to do in a few minutes here, but I'll come back to that. But... yeah. I said the word 'humans' and I meant 'specifically the humans who look like me, share a cultural background with me, and will look the most 'normal' to most anyone in a position of authority over me'. Do you have a better word for that than 'racist'?"
"How about 'human'?" Fenwick suggested. "It seems like you're being a bit hard on yourself, to be quite honest."
"See, you're doing it, too," Hart said. "I'm not being 'hard on' myself, Fenwick, I'm simply turning the same kind of critical eye I'd use to appraise the actions of people in some foreign culture at some past age on my own actions, as a member of this culture. How can I examine the mindset of the Old Imperial Man from the Mother Isles hundreds of years ago if I'm going to flinch away from performing the same kind of divination on the mind of the closest living relative on hand, the Modern Magisterian Man?"
"I just don't think it helps anything to try to make everything about race," the girl who'd asked the question said. "I try not to see color."
"Well, then you picked a great university to come to, though really you were sort of spoiled for choices," Hart said. "Look around the room. Look around the campus. 'Not seeing color' isn't much of an accomplishment when you're going to college in Palesville, the capital of Greater Chalkwhitonia."
"It's funny you say that, because I actually have an Argenti-Imperial suitemate," she said.
"I'm surprised you noticed," Hart said.
"I don't treat her any differently than anyone else," she said.
"How many times a day do you bring up your other suitemates as examples in conversation?" Hart asked.
"I would if an applicable subject ever came up," she said. "It's not racist that there's something different about her."
"Right, but if we talk about how that difference might make her experiences going through life different from... or more difficult than... yours," Hart said, "then coins-to-crullers someone is going to pop up and say, 'Why make this about race? I don't even see color.'"
"I just wanted to know what whiteness had to do with it," she said. "How can we say that if everything else had been the same but they had been black, or brown, or whatever, that things wouldn't have gone exactly the same?"
"Well, first of all, as I'm one-eighth whatever on my mother's side, I thank you for that little gesture of inclusiveness," Hart said. "And you mean hypothetically? We can talk about this as a hypothetical. We have that luxury. To the people of the Argentus, or many points east and south, it's less an abstract historical 'what if?' to be mooted about and more a little thing called 'history', also known as 'ongoing reality'.
"But let's try to answer your question, all the same. Was it significant? Yes. It meant that the Metro folk could see themselves in the Thyleans' shoes, in their skins, and vice-versa. It meant that when a Thylean settlement sprung up on their shores, then after the initial unsettled period where everything is axes and pitchforks the newcomers could be almost seamlessly integrated. It means they could look at a Thylean infant and think, 'That could be son. That could be my grandson.' These things matter. As far as we know, nobody from the Argentus sailed to the Mother Isles and set up a colony, but if they had they'd be a lot more visible than Thylean settlers were. You're kidding yourself if you don't think that matters.
"I mean, look at this: the stories, the lore we got from Thylean sources... they became accepted as parts of our culture. The oldest known Pax-language epic poems are about Thylean heroes in Thylean lands. We don't erase that identity from them, and we don't treat the poetic cycles as exotic and foreign. That's not at all how we treat stories from other human cultures, but in this case it just passes without comment. You won't find these poems or their adaptations shelved away from everything else in special 'Thylean Interest' sections. We don't think of ourselves as Thyleans, or as Thyleans as us... but in how we interact with them, they're treated as less foreign than native-born citizens of our own Imperium whose ancestors came here by way of the Argentus Archipelago.
"Now I mentioned changing the subject. To be perfectly honest, I don't feel qualified to lead a discussion about the intricacies of endoracism and exoracism. Certainly not off the cuff. And it's not actually the topic we chose for the day, by which I mean all of us. This is your class and If you all want to talk about it on a future day, we'll talk about it, but be warned: as long as I'm here, it's not going to be a feel-good circle-j... back-patting session where we all come out agreeing that Racism Is Baaaaad Thank Khersis It's Over. Just bear that in mind."
"Well... that was, ah, ah invigorating if perhaps overly passionate beginning," Fenwick said. "Didn't one of us mention that this isn't a lecture course?"
"That wasn't a lecture, it was a rant," Hart sad. "Just as a point of order. But, let's move on. Who's got a question, or a topic?"
A few hands went up around the room. I kept mine down. I knew I'd need to participate to get a good grade, but the things that were popping up in my head all had to do with the off-the-table-for-now topic of racism.
"I wonder about Thylean religion," he said. "Aren't they a Khersian nation now?"
"In the sense of 'nation' meaning 'people', mostly, yeah," Hart said. "I don't believe they have a state religion."
"Yes," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate. In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons. The formal census figures show that at least one in ten Thyleans still venerate the old pantheons, though this number may be higher... less formal methods of investigation have greater measures of success in outlying rural areas, and they tend to suggest a robust and vigorous interest in the old 'gods'."
"Modern humans worshipping giants?" someone said.
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become."
"Didn't somebody say something about this not being a lecture class?" Hart said.
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants," Fenwick continued, "one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes," Fenwick said. "They would be unbelievably powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they would have to rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring. What does that sound like to you?"
The strange thing was that I'd heard really similar reasoning before, that "god" was just a word for someone powerful enough to say they're a god and not have anyone dare dispute it. Of course, the person who'd said that had been an enemy of the actual gods... or at least the target of one god, and physically vulnerable to the presence and power of them as a whole.
"Wow, Fenwick," Hart said. "That's more... I don't know what word to put there. But it's certainly more than I would have expected. Now, spinning off of this... []
[]
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."
[]
[I actually left this window open without pasting in my first bout of work today, so a little bit of record of progress has been lost. This is what I "inherited" from the last chapter, plus that, plus what I wrote between 5:30 and 6:00.]
"Professor Hart... um, I mean, Aaron," she said. "I found it interesting when you were talking about the relations between the old empire and the Thyleans that you mentioned they were white. Is that actually significant?"
"Extremely," Hart said. "Humans... white humans... have a bad history when it comes to relating to humans of other colors as humans. See? I'm doing it right now. I tend to think of my field of expertise as being 'human history', but it's the history of the human people from the part of the world where white people were best established in the days before halfway reliable global travel was a possibility."
"I just... it seems racist," the girl said.
"It is incredibly racist," Hart said. "Both the tendency I'm talking about, and the way the humans from the Mother Isles ended up relating to the Thyleans as opposed to how they treated the Argenti, or others."
"It sounds like you're admitting that you're racist," she said.
"Well, I hate to put it that baldly," Hart said. "And everybody does, which is why we usually end up changing the subject. Which I'm going to do in a few minutes here, but I'll come back to that. But... yeah. I said the word 'humans' and I meant 'specifically the humans who look like me, share a cultural background with me, and will look the most 'normal' to most anyone in a position of authority over me'. Do you have a better word for that than 'racist'?"
"How about 'human'?" Fenwick suggested. "It seems like you're being a bit hard on yourself, to be quite honest."
"See, you're doing it, too," Hart said. "I'm not being 'hard on' myself, Fenwick, I'm simply turning the same kind of critical eye I'd use to appraise the actions of people in some foreign culture at some past age on my own actions, as a member of this culture. How can I examine the mindset of the Old Imperial Man from the Mother Isles hundreds of years ago if I'm going to flinch away from performing the same kind of divination on the mind of the closest living relative on hand, the Modern Magisterian Man?"
"I just don't think it helps anything to try to make everything about race," the girl who'd asked the question said. "I try not to see color."
"Well, then you picked a great university to come to, though really you were sort of spoiled for choices," Hart said. "Look around the room. Look around the campus. 'Not seeing color' isn't much of an accomplishment when you're going to college in Palesville, the capital of Greater Chalkwhitonia."
"It's funny you say that, because I actually have an Argenti-Imperial suitemate," she said.
"I'm surprised you noticed," Hart said.
"I don't treat her any differently than anyone else," she said.
"How many times a day do you bring up your other suitemates as examples in conversation?" Hart asked.
"I would if an applicable subject ever came up," she said. "It's not racist that there's something different about her."
"Right, but if we talk about how that difference might make her experiences going through life different from... or more difficult than... yours," Hart said, "then coins-to-crullers someone is going to pop up and say, 'Why make this about race? I don't even see color.'"
"I just wanted to know what whiteness had to do with it," she said. "How can we say that if everything else had been the same but they had been black, or brown, or whatever, that things wouldn't have gone exactly the same?"
"Well, first of all, as I'm one-eighth whatever on my mother's side, I thank you for that little gesture of inclusiveness," Hart said. "And you mean hypothetically? We can talk about this as a hypothetical. We have that luxury. To the people of the Argentus, or many points east and south, it's less an abstract historical 'what if?' to be mooted about and more a little thing called 'history', also known as 'ongoing reality'.
"But let's try to answer your question, all the same. Was it significant? Yes. It meant that the Metro folk could see themselves in the Thyleans' shoes, in their skins, and vice-versa. It meant that when a Thylean settlement sprung up on their shores, then after the initial unsettled period where everything is axes and pitchforks the newcomers could be almost seamlessly integrated. It means they could look at a Thylean infant and think, 'That could be son. That could be my grandson.' These things matter. As far as we know, nobody from the Argentus sailed to the Mother Isles and set up a colony, but if they had they'd be a lot more visible than Thylean settlers were. You're kidding yourself if you don't think that matters.
"I mean, look at this: the stories, the lore we got from Thylean sources... they became accepted as parts of our culture. The oldest known Pax-language epic poems are about Thylean heroes in Thylean lands. We don't erase that identity from them, and we don't treat the poetic cycles as exotic and foreign. That's not at all how we treat stories from other human cultures, but in this case it just passes without comment. You won't find these poems or their adaptations shelved away from everything else in special 'Thylean Interest' sections. We don't think of ourselves as Thyleans, or as Thyleans as us... but in how we interact with them, they're treated as less foreign than native-born citizens of our own Imperium whose ancestors came here by way of the Argentus Archipelago.
"Now I mentioned changing the subject. To be perfectly honest, I don't feel qualified to lead a discussion about the intricacies of endoracism and exoracism. Certainly not off the cuff. And it's not actually the topic we chose for the day, by which I mean all of us. This is your class and If you all want to talk about it on a future day, we'll talk about it, but be warned: as long as I'm here, it's not going to be a feel-good circle-j... back-patting session where we all come out agreeing that Racism Is Baaaaad Thank Khersis It's Over. Just bear that in mind."
"Well... that was, ah, ah invigorating if perhaps overly passionate beginning," Fenwick said. "Didn't one of us mention that this isn't a lecture course?"
"That wasn't a lecture, it was a rant," Hart sad. "Just as a point of order. But, let's move on. Who's got a question, or a topic?"
A few hands went up around the room. I kept mine down. I knew I'd need to participate to get a good grade, but the things that were popping up in my head all had to do with the off-the-table-for-now topic of racism.
"I wonder about Thylean religion," he said. "Aren't they a Khersian nation now?"
"In the sense of 'nation' meaning 'people', mostly, yeah," Hart said. "I don't believe they have a state religion."
"Yes," Fenwick said. "The most common religion in the modern Thylean Federation is in fact Khersianity, though they tend to follow the Reformer's path, with a greater emphasis on individual accountability and... somewhat paradoxically... the implacability of fate. In older times, the Thyleans followed what we might call more primal ways... some of the more powerful giants were included among their pantheons. The formal census figures show that at least one in ten Thyleans still venerate the old pantheons, though this number may be higher... less formal methods of investigation have greater measures of success in outlying rural areas, and they tend to suggest a robust and vigorous interest in the old 'gods'."
"Modern humans worshipping giants?" someone said.
"Yes, well, when we imagine giant-worship, we tend to picture a group of primitive individuals, usually orcs or ogres, dancing around a brutish hill giant or rocky-skinned stone giant," Fenwick said. "But these creatures, though they are the most common giants left in the world, are the least of all giants. A giant is not simply a humanoid being built to a larger scale. A giant is not an unusually large denizen of the world. An ordinary giant is a normal-sized creature, scaled to a world that is greater in every sense of the world than the one we know today. A world larger, a world more terrible, a world more powerful than we can imagine.
"The ruder giants we're most familiar with, are ones that have grown degraded in order to maintain their purchase on this plane. Each subsequent generation of such giants may be a little bit smaller and a little bit rougher. They are not just smaller, they are less intelligent and less well-formed. The great giants of old were known to often be clever or beautiful. Those giants still exist somewhere out there, and they can still reach out to or visit our world... though those who make a serious study of giant lore have suggested that the 'nearer' to our world a clan of giants lingers, the more diminished they become."
"Didn't somebody say something about this not being a lecture class?" Hart said.
"Now, consider the vastness and power of a more 'distant' clan of giants," Fenwick continued, "one found at the exact equilibrium point where the difficulty of reaching our plane is such that their great power only just allows it. Beyond this point there may be greater giants still, but they are so far past the terminus that they may as well exist in our imagination. These giants, the truest and greatest giants who may reach our plane... is it so hard to imagine them being regarded as gods? Does it seem that blasphemous?
It did sound blasphemous to me... not that I was particularly pious, but my grandmother's upbringing was in play. Even if I didn't attach much judgment to the term, I had a working definition of "blasphemy" in my head and Professor Fenwick Hall was pretty much hitting it square on the head.
"They would be immortal, for all our purposes," Fenwick said. "They would be unbelievably powerful. With communication between the planes at a premium, they would have to rely on 'local' intermediaries for most things, and would necessarily find it more useful to convey their wishes in terms of general edicts rather than responding to each situation as it arises. Direct intervention would be rare, but spectacular and awe-inspiring. What does that sound like to you?"
The strange thing was that I'd heard really similar reasoning before, that "god" was just a word for someone powerful enough to say they're a god and not have anyone dare dispute it. Of course, the person who'd said that had been an enemy of the actual gods... or at least the target of one god, and physically vulnerable to the presence and power of them as a whole.
"Wow, Fenwick," Hart said. "That's more... I don't know what word to put there. But it's certainly more than I would have expected. Now, spinning off of this...
"In the distant past of our direct cultural forebears, Thyle was the name given to the lands across the cold, forbidding expanse of the Thylean Sea," Fenwick said. "Their experience of the inhabitants of those lands was of fierce raiders who came on like a nightmare out of a stormy sea. In more recent eras, with the power of a great empire consolidated in the Mother Isles and a vast shared border on the mainland, the narrative has changed a bit... where Thyleans were once 'sea wolves', they are now 'barbarians' in the popular consciousness of the Old Empire. We in Magisteria have inherited both visions of the northmen."