“Most of this isn’t going to be a big surprise to you,” Alexios continued. “But a lot of people, when they start studying history, they never really get a foundational theory for how it works.”
“We’re studying history?” Basil said. “I thought we were going to learn how to fight.”
“The battle begins in here.” Alexios said tapped Basil’s forehead. “And to begin here, we have to find out how we got here, right? Do either of you know why you were born? What was happening when you were born? The events that led up to your birth—going back one year, ten years, a hundred years, a thousand?”
Basil and Kassia were silent.
“Now listen,” Alexios said. “If you study science, you learn about all kinds of grand generalizing concepts which are supposed to describe how the entire universe works.”
“Science,” Basil said. “Checking ideas with facts. With evidence in the real world. We learned about that back in Trebizond.”
“Right, very good,” Alexios said. “Now a lot of this is going to sound unfamiliar to you, so just bear with me for a moment.”
“Alright,” Kassia said.
“In science classes in the old world, you learn about Newton’s theory of gravity, Darwin’s theory of evolution, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and—most importantly—the scientific method.”
“I don’t know about any of those things,” Kassia said. “I don’t know any of those names.”
“I asked you to bear with me,” Alexios said. “Alright. I’ll explain really quickly. Newton’s theory of gravity explains why we’re stuck to the ground. Matter—stuff—creates this force called gravity which holds us to the Earth, and even makes the Earth go around the sun.”
“The Earth goes around the sun?” Basil said. “But it doesn’t look like that at all—”
“Just trust me on this one,” Alexios said. “It’s hard to prove without a telescope, which we don’t have, because you need to be able to make a kind of very fine glass in order to build one, and that technology doesn’t exist yet. The important thing about gravity is that it permeates the entire universe. You know all the stars you see in the night sky? Those are suns.”
“How can that be?” Kassia said.
“They’re just as bright as our sun, and sometimes they’re much brighter, but they’re very far away. They create gravity, too, and their gravity is tugging on us at this moment, only the tugging is very faint because of the distances involved. The theory of gravity is a dialectical concept, one which stresses the unity of nature, its connectedness.”
Basil crossed his arms. “I’m doing my best to ‘bear with you,’ as you said.”
“The same is true of Darwin’s theory of evolution. All it says is that life changes in response to the environment over time. Those organisms which are best-adapted to their environment tend to produce more offspring. The environment changes them, and they change the environment in an ever-intensifying dialectical materialist cycle. Over the course of millions of years, different lineages can change so much that you would never know, at first glance, that they ever had any kind of relationship. Did you know, for instance, that Rakhsh’s ancestors and our ancestors were once the same, a very long time ago? Even the grass poking out of the ground here is a distant relative of ours.”
“The grass is my cousin,” Kassia said.
“This sounds like complete nonsense,” Basil said. “Even the craziest people never talk like this.”
“It all seems strange from our limited perspective,” Alexios said. “Nobody here knows about the bones buried in the Earth—how the ancient and long-extinct monsters which will one day be called ‘dinosaurs,’ for instance, have skeletons suspiciously similar to those of birds.”
“But if God made all the animals in the Garden of Eden,” Kassia began, “that means they aren’t related.”
“None of that is true,” Alexios said. “It’s just a folk tale. It seems to make sense now, but once you start discovering that all kinds of life forms died out millions—not thousands—of years ago—”
“But how can you even know that?” Basil said.
“In the future,” Alexios said, “in the old world, I mean, people will figure out how the land changes—how even the land itself is moving. Everything is moving, everything is changing, everything is connected, it just sometimes requires a broader and deeper perspective to see, and some things move faster than others. The land beneath our feet is moving right now—at about the same rate as the growth of your fingernails. But you can even see how things have changed around here—how people once lived in cities which have been forgotten. The only constant is change. Deep beneath our feet, if you dig down, you’ll find even more ruins and skeletons, and if you dig deeper, you’ll find a world where humans never existed at all—where our ancestors were like rats, and before that like fish, and before that like little worms, and before that just organisms called ‘cells’ which you can’t even see without a tool called a microscope.”
“So we just have to trust you when you tell us this,” Basil said. “It’s you versus the priests and pretty much everyone else.”
“That’s right,” Alexios said. “I don’t have the tools I need to prove these ideas to you, so I just have to depend on logic and what I can remember. Sometimes it isn’t easy. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in this place that I forget I came from the old world entirely.”
“Yeah, right,” Basil said.
“The last one, Einstein’s theory of relativity, is the hardest one to wrap your head around. It says all kinds of things, few of which are seemingly connected to our everyday lives—that light itself has a finite speed, that every perspective in the universe is valid, and that different observers moving at different speeds can have different ideas of what ‘now’ is, that space and time are the same thing and can be warped by gravity. And then there’s quantum physics, which I didn’t even mention because it’s even weirder. It says that there’s only so much you can know about the world of atoms, which are these very tiny particles which make up all matter, and that there’s an element of randomness in how they function, among many other things.”
The children stared at him.
“Everybody got that?” Alexios said.
“Not really,” Basil said.
“It’s a lot to digest,” Alexios said. “The point is, in old world science classes, you learn about these theories and many others besides. Then you apply these theories to real-world experiments. If you become a professional scientist, you’re supposed to keep that process going—to find new theories from new experiments, and vice-versa, at least as long as you toe the ideological line for the status quo. The same happens in math class: you get all kinds of theories and then work them out with numbers.”
“Queen Tamar taught us like that,” Kassia said. “She knew a lot about numbers.”
“Did she?” Alexios said. “I guess that shouldn’t surprise me. She’s about as educated as you can get out here.”
“I miss her,” Kassia said.
“So do I. Alright. So we’ve covered science classes. But here’s the thing. When you study history or literature or philosophy, you rarely if ever learn any kind of theoretical foundations like in your science classes. Your teachers just kind of start throwing random facts and books at you. The deepest they ever really go is looking for metaphors in literature, tracing extremely superficial historical connections in history, or reading Plato’s dialogues in philosophy—along with maybe some taoism thrown in for good measure—without ever communicating that there might be other ways of thinking. Not everything these teachers do or say is wrong, but they just never really give you a method to tell the difference between something in the humanities that makes sense and something that doesn’t—unlike in your math and science courses.”
“But shouldn’t it be obvious if something doesn’t make sense?” Basil said.
“Yes and no,” Alexios said. “You might feel that there’s an issue with what you’re learning, but you can’t quite put your finger on it, and then the class moves on to something else before you can figure it out for yourself. You just go through the motions and do as you’re told because you’ll get in trouble if you don’t. And if you actually do resist, they kick you out, and you’ll never be able to get a good job.”
“We were never even going to learn how to read,” Kassia said. “Not until we came to Trebizond.”
“And now you’re going to become the equals of the greatest thinkers,” Alexios said. “You won’t be infallible, but the entire world will make much more sense, and tricking you will be difficult. Current events aren’t going to blindside you as much, either.”
Basil frowned. “Who said they would in the first place?”
“That’s true,” Alexios said. “History moves so much more slowly here, so maybe it can be easier to see things coming. But in the old world, everything happens faster. There are centuries when nothing happens, and weeks where centuries happen. They have weapons that could destroy the entire world in a few minutes.”
“I’m sure,” Basil said.
“So in history class they never tell you to apply the scientific method just as rigorously as you do in something like biology class. There’s never a sense that all of these different subjects are actually bound together. They’re mostly considered separately, and the further you go in your education, the more your teachers hit you with arbitrary demands—testing you to see if you’re going to follow orders. And you’ll almost never see a history teacher and a science teacher teach side-by-side, for instance. The better history textbooks they give you will have quotes and facts and evidence to back their assertions, but the evidence is always very selective, and it never goes far enough. It’s always very nationalistic, too, although sometimes it attempts to cover its tracks by admitting a few minor faults here and there—problems which were thankfully always overcome by the good guys in the end. ‘Rome is flawed, but it’s overall a force for good.’ That sort of thing.”
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Basil sighed.
“I feel you,” Alexios said. “We’re getting there. The point I’m trying to make is, you have to apply the scientific method to human society—which includes the training we’re about to undertake. Human society, as a whole, can be understood just as the natural world can be understood. After all, it’s a part of the natural world, isn’t it?” Alexios laughed to himself. “It sounds like I’m about to start defending something called race science, but having an understanding like this actually allows you to destroy race science.”
“What’s race science?” Kassia said.
“The idea that your skull shape or your genetics or any other hard-to-change physical quality determines every last aspect of your existence,” Alexios said. “That reminds me of how history classes will never study the advent of science itself in any kind of depth. ‘One day,’ these classes say, ‘Europeans figured out how to do science. Some Arabs and Greeks before them also knew a thing or two, but it was the Europeans in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment who really got things going.’ How or why this happened in this time and place is never discussed. The implication is that some innate European quality is what led to the creation of science. It’s the same with industrialization.”
“What are Europeans?” Kassia said.
Alexios laughed. “That’s right, I almost forgot. That category doesn’t even exist now. If I try to explain this word, we’ll get bogged down, but let’s just say it’s another word for Latins, alright?”
Kassia nodded. “Alright. Then I hate them.”
“What they did in Trebizond they’ll also do all over the world if we don’t stop them,” Alexios said. “And what’s funny is that if you say you hate all Latins, some of those Latins are going to say you shouldn’t generalize like that, even if scientists generalize all the time when they study the natural world.”
“What’s your point?” Basil said.
“In this time and place,” Alexios said, “if you take a Latin baby and raise him in Romanía, he becomes a Roman, doesn’t he? If he speaks the Roman language and goes to a Roman church and pays taxes to the emperor and doesn’t even know anything about the Latins, he’s a Roman just like you, isn’t he? And it’s the same with anyone. Anyone—even the Sarakenoi—if their babies are raised here, if they’re baptized, they become Romans, don’t they?”
Kassia nodded. “Yes.”
“That’s because the whole conception of the world is completely different here,” Alexios said. “And in so many ways people are actually much more free. Systems of exploitation are only in their infancy. Where I come from, the ruling class is always trying to force you to fit into so many permanent categories—race, nationality, gender, class—because it’s much easier to exploit people that way. They’re always trying to break things down into the smallest pieces in order to understand and exploit them, but the problem is that they never put these pieces back together.”
“Isn’t this getting a little far from teaching us how to fight?” Basil said.
“It’s all connected,” Alexios said. “Everything is connected. Everything is changing. Opposites are bound together and interpenetrate one another. Their contradictions drive all change. Nothing is separate from anything else. The real world changes ideas, and ideas change the real world. To these rules there are no exceptions. This is how you understand the universe as well as human society.”
“Whoa,” Kassia said.
“Thank you,” Alexios said. “I appreciate that. I’ve been working toward this point for awhile. All this talk about science classes in the old world, which you’ve never even experienced, may have seemed like a detour, but they actually led us exactly where I wanted to go, because all roads lead there eventually.”
“Like Konstantinopolis,” Basil said.
“Right,” Alexios said. “All roads lead to Konstantinopolis. And all questions lead to where we are. Now listen. In the old world this system of thought is called dialectical materialism. Here we call it Mazdakism, after a thinker from Persia who managed to figure a lot of this stuff out awhile back. These ideas have fancy names, but for most people they’re actually not that difficult to understand. The richer you are, however, the harder they are to grasp—the more it seems like nonsense—because dialectical materialism has a tendency to point the finger at the people who have the most wealth and power—the individuals and classes which benefit the most from systems of exploitation.”
“Can you tell us what those things, those ‘systems of exploitation,’ are?” Kassia said.
“They’re all just slightly different ways for the ruling class to squeeze surplus value out of workers,” Alexios said. “Slavery is the system used in Romanía. There, for a rich person to make more money, he needs two things: land and slaves. Get more of both, and he gets richer. That’s it. It works pretty well as long as you can keep conquering different countries and enslaving more people—since mortality rates are so high in this historical period that you can’t really depend on population expansion to provide you with more slaves. Rome ran into problems when it ran out of places to conquer, when it was stopped by vast oceans, deserts, and forests—and when the barbarians figured out that mounted archers could stop Roman infantry.”
“Alright,” Kassia said. “So that’s slavery.”
“That’s what we still have in Romanía,” Alexios said. “It’s a little different, because Romans aren’t conquering much anymore, and most of the slaves are free farmers now who pay taxes straight to the state, while the church tells them that in the afterlife, everyone will be equal as long as you follow the rules down here on Earth. That’s how the Roman ruling class dealt with the problem of running out of slaves. It’s a sort of ‘late slavery,’ I guess—slavery in decline and retreat. The Sarakenoi use the same system, except they’re more vigorous since they’re still able to conquer. The Turks, for instance, are better fighters than the Romans due to all the time they still spend on horseback, but once the Turks settle down, it becomes kind of hard to tell the difference between them and Romans. They become the new slave-owning ruling class. The land here is so rich and fertile, there’s so much commerce, it’s hard to do civilization differently right now.”
“Alright,” Kassia said.
“In Latin countries, however, things took a slightly different turn, partly because the land there just isn’t as rich. The barbarians destroyed the Western Roman Empire there almost a thousand years ago and created something new—a system where it seems like there is no system, only landlords extracting rent from peasants, who have certain rights that slaves lack. Peasants usually get half the produce they make, and they can’t be bought and sold like slaves. You can only buy or sell or conquer the land they live on.”
“That sounds a lot like here,” Basil said.
“It’s slightly different,” Alexios said. “Here, farmers pay taxes directly to the state, and that’s where the ruling class gets its money. In Latin countries, peasants only pay rent to their landlords and a tithe to the church. A slight difference like this on the ground can mean a big difference for the government. In the Latin countries, there is no government—there’s just landlords and the church, who are frequently at odds with each other. In Romanía, in contrast, a government does exist, even if it’s falling apart. The church is also subordinate to it.”
“It’s strange to think that the church can tell nobles what to do,” Kassia said.
“In Romanía sometimes the government doesn’t let people buy or sell land at all,” Alexios said. “In Latin countries most people can get by pretty well without buying or selling anything. Entire villages are more or less self-sufficient. But not so in the old world, where I come from, where the economy is totally different, and far more exploitative than anything you can imagine. There, you must participate in the market or you die. Every day you need to be buying or selling things. The vast majority of people have nothing to sell but their labor.”
“That’s so strange,” Kassia said.
“Believe me, I know,” Alexios said. “This particular economy doesn’t exist here, thank god. It’ll get started in a few hundred years in a place called England—I think Romans call it Thoúlē.”
“Never heard of it,” Basil said.
“When it begins, and peasants get thrown off their farmland because it’s more profitable for landlords to raise sheep, most of those peasants will die of starvation. Many others will become criminals. Some will gravitate toward the cities, where they’ll work in exchange for a wage—which they will ultimately have to spend at businesses owned by the ruling class. Workers can’t spend their money anywhere else. This allows the business owners and landlords to extract so much more of a surplus than either the feudal or slave-owning classes could ever have dreamt of. Instead of a feudal landowner taking half of what a peasant produces, the business owner ends up taking ninety-nine percent of what his worker produces—and thanks to the growing, market-driven power of the tools the worker is using, he can soon produce thousands of times as much as any peasant. On top of that, where the greed of the slave-owner or feudal ruling class is limited by their bellies, the business owner must always reinvest his profits in better tools or other profitable enterprises, or else he, too, will be swallowed up by the bigger fish. The more psychopathic he is—the less he cares about destroying humanity and the natural world in the name of individual profit—the more successful he’ll be. Where I come from, the result of all of this is that a few square miles of land and some laborers, machines, and fertilizer can make enough food to feed entire cities. It means that entire nations get exterminated in the name of profit.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Basil said.
“That system unleashes productive forces beyond the imagination of even the wildest holy fool. The old world I come from is covered with cities which make Konstantinopolis look like a village. You’ve seen buildings that are a few stories tall, haven’t you? In the old world, we have buildings that are hundreds of stories tall. They’re so tall, their tops reach above the clouds.”
Kassia’s jaw dropped.
“Dialectical materialism allows us to understand all of this,” Alexios said. “Even as we’re caught inside it. Richer people, however, don’t usually believe in dialectical materialism. Instead, they tend to believe in something called idealism, and they also try to make everyone else believe in this system of thought, if it can even be called that, because it absolves the ruling class of all guilt. In dialectical materialism, the realm of ideas and the material world are bound together and influence one another. If a poor guy wins the lottery, for instance, his worldview is probably going to change. If a rich guy loses everything he owns, his worldview is also probably going to change. See what I mean?”
“Yes,” Kassia said.
“In idealism, however, it doesn’t work like that. Ideas influence the world, but not the other way around. According to idealism, ideas just kind of appear out of nowhere because God wants them to, I guess, and it’s impossible to understand why, so just shut up and get back to work. It’s a mystical way of thinking, and it can apply even if people don’t consider themselves particularly religious. They might not believe in god, but they just replace him with ideas like ‘the invisible hand’—this originating in medieval Christianity. These ideas function in exactly the same way as gods, influencing the world but never being influenced by it, but the difference is that the most fervent believers cloak their new gods in mysticism, and deny that they’re gods at all. Prehistoric people worshipped animals; ancient Egyptians worshipped people with animal heads; pagans worshipped gods that looked like people; and today Christians worship a god that’s mostly invisible. Where I come from, god or the gods become completely invisible, to the extent that the most zealous believers deny their very existence and get angry if you insist on their fetishism—it’s actually called commodity fetishism. They obey an exploitative system as though it’s a god. Every aspect of their life is defined by their devotion to this deity. Systems of exploitation are the greatest idolatry of all.”
The children were silent.
“Point being,” Alexios said, “when you understand these things, you can begin to fight. When you understand how the world works, you can begin to change it.”
“But what does any of this have to do with the farr?” Basil said.
“The farr, like I told you, is a kind of self-directed luck,” Alexios said. “We can use it, strengthen it, and keep it from fading by working together to destroy systems of exploitation—by seeking to free the exploited.”