More Life

If there is a common theme in 'The Stars My Destination' and 'The Book of the New Sun' and my worrying about right and right (adaptive, functional and moral, upright) and perhaps the gospel, it is the power of wanting and believing in More Life.

Gully Foyle spends six months in a wrecked spaceship fighting for enough food and water and air, and gets to know himself as a thing deserving and demanding more life. He finishes by stripping moral and real power from the few and imposing it on the many who had chosen to lead empty formalities instead of lives.

Severian, weighing the consequences of a white fountain (an energy emitting singularity) entering our solar system and interrupting life on Urth, remembers how the long tortured clients would lose hope of justice or vindication, and wish only for sunlight and air, for more life. The despair of an Urth in which everything has been tried and come only to frustration, is absolute. But even to be destitute, to despair, there must be something better that is despairing. In the end the only dimension that matters is more life.

This is Nietzsche's 'yes to everything' morality; a morality that works differently from 19th century morality of good and evil. To the 19th century late-christian morality, evil was a kind of monstrosity, a self-justifying wickedness that (like virtue) was its own reward. Nietzsche thought this was more an artifact result of an artificial (and therefore wrong) morality.

This week I saw a paper on Arxiv on a recasting of certain statistics to revolve around an analogue of Absolute Zero in thermodynamics. The goal was to create statistical tests for which more evidence would always be additive - to find a way of expressing an absolute zero for evidence.

I think Christianity needs to get back to its moral work of asserting that 'to be is good'. There is more and less good, but there is a limit to evil, an absolute zero of good. The fundamental communication from public christians to 'the world' has been 'no to everything' when it should have been More Life.*

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PS.  There is not space to point out that such a view is already, exactly the non-Manichean, Evil only as absence of good, view of Christianity.

PPS.  The Absolute Zero metaphor of evil is actually made a real thing somewhere in The Reality Dysfunction series by Peter F Hamilton.