What's So Great About Ushas

b sharp · 11 Jul 2008, 14:01 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

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From: bsharporflat at hotmail.com (b sharp)
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:01:00 -0400
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas
Message-ID: <BAY103-W560D3C354485A0F9FE96B9D7900 at phx.gbl>

If I understand Paul B correctly, he interprets BotNS without any sense of religious allegory.
Perhaps Wolfe isn't even trying to address the Problem Of Evil? It is just a cool tale about a 
gothic hero and some weird aliens in robes and their winged, hermaprhodite leader?

I couild be wrong, but I think that view is missing something.  The bad guys have the names of
pre-Christian monsters and the leader of the good guys has the name of an archangel.  If there 
is no religion here, why not just name them Zork and Urg and Fred?

  I think Jeff Wilson asks a key question:

>Would you agree that it can be good for the Increate to do something 
>that it would be evil to be done by a man?

It seems to me Wolfe is giving an affirmative answer to that question.  For some reason this analogy 
popped into my head- an adult chances upon a small child who found a nest of new born mice
in a field and is smushing them with a rock. The adult might tell the child that the action is wrong and 
cruel yet he/she uses a mousetrap in his/her home.  Isn't the adult, with greater powers of
perception of the future and of consequences, a superior moral agent to the child?  I think the child
would tend to think his/her field mouse smashing is morally equivalent to  a mousetrap in a home while
the adult (though not all adults) recognizes a difference. 

Similarly, wouldn't aliens or angels with superior perceptive powers be superior moral agents to humans? 
The hierogrammates are described as far away from the Increate but still far closer to Him than humans.
 "Yours are a race of pawns" says Tzadkiel, meaning able to move only forward in time, usually one step 
at a time. It would seem the Hierogrammates can move forward, backward, sideways and diagonally in 
space and time and thus clearly have a superior understanding  of consequences to humans and are thus
superior moral agents (in Wolfe's view).  

Additionally, Tzadkiel is unwilling to take genocidal action without consent by a representative of the people.
Tzadkiel has the power and moral authority to do it without consent, so why does he/she feel the need for it?  
I think Wolfe adds this to reinforce the moral superiority of Hierogrammates and the Increate (and by allegory 
the superiority of God and angels in our world who have done some very destructive things) by adding the very 
human moral component of consent that almost all of us readers can agree is right.

I can see how cynical atheists might have a different interpretation. The consent Tzadkiel wants is just lip service. 
Tzadkiel and his ilk had all the time in the world (er..universe..er....universes) to wait for a consent. Any human 
representative could seek audience with them but if they didn't give the right answer,  they were sent home, with 
their balls cut off for their trouble.  It seems to me (being something of an atheist myself) to be a reasonable
argument.

But I don't think that view was Wolfe's intention.  Severian seems imperfect yet still brave and heroic, a guy who is 
(almost) always trying to do the right thing.  I think Severian is clearly Wolfe's literary avatar and I doubt this 
transcendent story could have been written by a guy who feels he is a dupe, someone who has spent his life 
worshipping a false, deceptive, immoral God.

(dupe to a kind, caring loving God? yeah, Wolfe might feel that way, like a child who sees through his father's attempts
to trick him into doing the right thing)

-bsharp
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