What's So Great About Ushas?

Roy C. Lackey · 13 Jul 2008, 20:58 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:58:53 -0500
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas?
Message-ID: <001401c8e52b$45194ea0$adce4a0c at rclackey.stic.net>

b sharp quoted and wrote:
>You have presented a closed system that, by
>definition, not only excludes challenges from outside the system, it
>dismisses those challenges as down-right impertinent.

>>Not true. I'm saying that if the Hierogrammates are as Gene Wolfe seems to
present them, then humans are no more able to judge their morality than
animals are able to judge the morality of human behavior. Hierogrammates
might reasonably be judged by members of their own race, or by other beings
with equal or greater moral perception.<<

As above. You are trying to define your way out of challenges to your
belief(s) by presenting your belief(s) as axiomatic. Not only that, but
anyone who disagrees with you is necessarily a fool.

Wolfe shows the Hierogrammates to have their own self-serving agenda. He
shows them as powers above the stage manipulating events on Urth, and their
intentions to continue manipulating the humans of Ushas to achieve their
desired, and acknowledged, ends. It's too much to quote it all here, but it
is right there in black and white in the dialogue Severian had with Apheta
immediately after the fight with the sailors. In order to achieve their
goals, the Hierogrammates will have to do unto humans exactly what the
Hieros had done unto them in another universe. As Sev said to Gunnie then,
"That's their justice, their whole reason for being. They bring us through
the pain we brought them through."

If the Hieros of that other universe sinned by cruelly fashioning the
Hierogrammates (which seems to be axiomatic in the Urth Cycle), then the
Hierogrammates will be guilty of the exact same sin in Briah, and will start
the whole ugly cycle all over again. The morality of the actions of
self-serving creatures of Man's creation is not above the reproach of any
man.

One's having power that is greater than another does not define morality.

-Roy

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