God it's great to have the podcast back. A month feels like a long time, especially when you've been binging to catch up!
I will say that while I loved your discussion of this story, I didn't like "Westwind" much as a story — a rare occurrence in my reading of Wolfe, where I am often baffled but rarely simply unmoved. It felt, to me, uncharacteristically heavy-handed. I wonder how much of this is simply because (unlike a great deal of Wolfe's readership) I'm an atheist (and a Jewish atheist, at that), and therefore I didn't find the metaphor personally comforting as Glenn says he did (and Wolfe, too, seems to have done).
In fact, I would go so far as to say that "Westwind" reminded me of how creepy (to an atheist) a theistic worldview can seem: in a state that is portrayed as a dictatorship — I kept thinking of "Dear Leader" — the dictator is a stand-in for God. A dictator who (for some reason) refuses to help people openly and who uses his supposed universal love as an excuse for not stopping those who harm other people — all of which, were this story not by Wolfe, might make me at least try to read it as a religious critique. I certainly can imagine a story rather like this one which does function that way — in which everyone's believing they are Westwind is seen, not as a sign of love, but as a rather pathetically obvious trick through which a dictator keeps people pacified; in which the supposed universal love which the dictator self-claimedly has for everyone is demonstrably false, given the state of the world he himself runs; in which his claim (or the protagonist's claim on his behalf, clearly repeating the dictator's own line) that that love is why he doesn't interfere with the society's villains is in fact nothing more than an excuse to hide his complicity with the corrupt forces that run the world . But this would be my drash (as we Jews say) on the story: I don't see any signs of it in the story itself. The closest it comes to this is the (strongly implied) critique of official religion by depicting it as "the department of truth", and asking why you need interpreters when you have the leader's words; but otherwise the 'we-should-love-dear-leader-and-believe-his-love-is-real-despite-this-crummy-world' viewpoint is, I think, taken straight, even if I react crookedly against it. I may see a critique to be read, but I don't see Wolfe as doing much with it — at least as far as theism (as opposed to organized religion) goes.
Although I will say that, as I wrote this, it struck me that "why do you need interpreters, you have the words", is an oddly protestant view for the Catholic Wolfe to take.
Don't get me wrong: there is much to like in this story — the worldbuilding is admirably economical, as you point out, the characters are drawn — it's still by Wolfe, after all. But it feels to me that, quite uncharacteristically for Wolfe, it adds up to less than the sum of its parts.
I must admit I also had a non-theistic dystopian reading of the story (though I realize that given Wolfe's background, the Christian reading is probably closer to his intention). When reading the story my basic thought was "wow what a great way for a dictator to keep power......convince everyone that they are his personal special agent."
Stephen, it's great to be back! Your reading of this story was my first reading, too, but of course I had to find a way around it for all the reasons you outline.
We should have talked more (at all?) about (medieval) Christian political philosophy, which is a class I taught in the Fall of 2018 that was completely inspired by Operation Ares. Christian thinkers in the Roman empire argued that Christians aren't supposed to care about the present world because it is only temporary, and therefore people should just "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" and go about their lives. If a ruler is doing something wicked, well, it's just a test for Christians to see if they will lose their faith in dire circumstances. And so not only should we not doing anything to get rid of a wicked ruler, we should celebrated him as a part of God's plan for us.
This view was troubling in the Middle Ages and there were a number of ways that thinkers interpreted scripture to allow for rebelling against tyrants and wicked rulers, but this late antique view came back with Martin Luther and is still a big part of Protestant and some Catholic thinking (though not all). We saw this in our own politics in 2018 when members of the United Methodist Church lodged complaints that Attorney General Sessions (a Methodist) was violating the precepts of Christianity by locking up children seeking refuge in the United States. The Church had to formally respond to those charges and took the same out that Augustine and others did: Christians really shouldn't be involved in politics anyway because this world is only temporary and doesn't matter.
Many Methodists were incensed by this (my father is a Methodist minister), of course, but it made for a great start to my course. And one of the central ideas we tracked over the twelve centuries we studied was whether a thinker thought that Christians should ignore the material world or whether they should work to make it good. Or, to put it another way, which passage did individual thinkers prefer:
1) "Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist, purchase to themselves damnation. … For he is God’s minister to thee, for good. But if thou do that which is evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword in vain. For he is God’s minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil. Wherefore be subject of necessity, not only for wrath, but also for conscience’ sake." (Romans 13: 1-5)
or
2) "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in; I needed clothes and you clothed me; I was sick and you looked after me; I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you? The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’" (Matthew 25: 35-40)
To my mind, "Westwind" is Wolfe's own attempt to balance these views. God created a perfect world, but of course humans screwed it up about five minutes into it, and so now it is a cruel place. But since sin is now a part of the world and a part of us, what matters is how we treat other people -- and that matters the most in the direst of circumstances. But God loves each of us and even through our terrible material existence, he is concerned about our spiritual well-being and is always watching.
This is not my Christian political philosophy (and I'm not really sure it was Wolfe's, either) but it is an important and often officially-sanctioned political philosophy, and I got a lot out of seeing that made literal in this SF dystopia.