North Sea Oil: Climate, Economics, and the Failure of Long-Term Imagination

The argument over new North Sea oil and gas licences has become another of those strangely binary debates that now dominate British public life. One is invited to choose between climate responsibility or economic realism, between moral seriousness or jobs and energy security. Yet the truth, as so often, lies in the uncomfortable space between these poles — a space our politics has become increasingly reluctant to inhabit.

Part of the difficulty is that the present moment is not simply the product of policy choices but of accumulated shocks. The 2008 banking crisis hollowed out fiscal confidence; the pandemic exposed the fragility of global supply chains; and the rising urgency of climate change has created a moral pressure that politicians are understandably eager to be seen responding to. Empathy for the climate cause is genuine in many cases, but it is also electorally useful. The result is a political culture that gestures toward long-term transformation while remaining structurally addicted to short-term fixes.

Against this backdrop, the North Sea becomes a kind of mirror in which we see both our aspirations and our failures.

Climate Commitments and the Case Against New Fields

Ed Miliband and others argue that approving new oil and gas fields is incompatible with the UK’s commitment to reach net zero by 2050. Their case is not merely technical but moral: how can a country that claims climate leadership continue to invest in long-lived fossil infrastructure. New fields would operate for decades, potentially locking in emissions and weakening the UK’s credibility in international negotiations.

They also argue that more domestic production will not meaningfully reduce household bills, since oil and gas prices are set globally. Better, they say, to direct investment toward renewables — offshore wind, solar, and the grid infrastructure needed to support them. In this vision, the North Sea becomes a managed sunset industry: existing fields decline gracefully while new exploration is paused.

There is a moral clarity to this position, but perhaps also a certain impatience with the messy realities of transition.

The Counter-Argument: Demand, Security, and the Realities We Prefer Not to Face

Critics respond that the UK will continue to need oil and gas for decades, particularly for aviation, shipping, chemicals, and as backup for intermittent renewables. If domestic production falls faster than demand, the UK will simply import more — often from countries with weaker environmental standards. This is the uncomfortable truth behind the accusation of “outsourcing emissions”.

There is also the human dimension: thousands of jobs, regional economies, and the tax revenues that support public services. For communities in Scotland and the North East, the North Sea is not an abstraction but a livelihood.

Economists add another layer: the effect of restricting supply depends on the speed of global demand decline. If demand collapses quickly, new fields risk becoming stranded assets. If demand declines slowly, restricting domestic production merely shifts extraction abroad without reducing global emissions — the phenomenon known as carbon leakage.

Here again, the debate resists simple moral sorting.

The British Paradox: Producing Oil While Importing It

The UK’s position is further complicated by a structural paradox. We produce high-quality North Sea crude, yet we import large volumes of oil and refined fuels. This is partly because:

• UK refineries are specialised and cannot efficiently process all domestic crude

• Some crude is exported for refining abroad while different grades are imported

• The UK’s refining capacity has declined over decades

This means that even if the UK increases production, the direct domestic benefit is limited. We remain tied to global markets, with all their volatility and geopolitical risk.

The Long Shadow of Thatcher and the Lost Opportunity

No discussion of the North Sea can avoid the historical comparison with Norway. The UK’s oil boom in the 1970s and 1980s provided a fiscal windfall that was largely spent rather than saved. Margaret Thatcher used the revenues to fund tax cuts, public spending, and the restructuring of the economy. Norway, by contrast, created a sovereign wealth fund that now exceeds a trillion dollars.

It is tempting to moralise this contrast, but the deeper lesson is about long-term imagination — or the lack of it. Britain consumed its inheritance; Norway invested it. Today, as the North Sea declines, we face the consequences of that choice.

Toward a Synthesis: Beyond the Binary

The present debate is framed as a choice between climate virtue and economic necessity, but this framing is itself a symptom of our political short-termism. The real challenge is to hold multiple truths at once:

• The UK must decarbonise rapidly

• The UK will still need oil and gas for some time

• Domestic production has limited but real benefits

• New fields risk undermining climate credibility

• Abrupt withdrawal risks economic and social harm

The question is not whether to choose one side or the other, but how to design a transition that is morally serious, economically realistic, and historically aware.

This requires something British politics has struggled to cultivate: a capacity for long-term planning that survives electoral cycles and resists the temptation of symbolic gestures. The shocks of the past two decades — financial, epidemiological, environmental — have made this harder, but also more necessary.

If there is hope for a synthesis, it lies in recovering that lost habit of thinking beyond the next headline. The North Sea debate, for all its heat, could yet become an opportunity to do so.

Virtue, Order, and the Confucian Imagination in an English Civil War Life

 

Here is a meditation around the role of Thomas Fairfax as a model of authority in a moment when England was searching for order. It is written following a talk at a recent meeting of my Local History Society.

There are moments in history when the fate of a nation seems to hinge not on constitutions or armies but on the character of a few individuals who, without seeking it, become the custodians of order. Thomas Fairfax belongs to that small company. He was a general of rare ability, yet his life after the Civil War suggests something deeper than military competence. It suggests a man who believed—instinctively, quietly, without philosophical flourish—that authority must rest on virtue if it is to endure.

This is not the language of seventeenth‑century England. It is, however, the language of Confucius, who taught that harmony begins with right relationships: ruler and subject, parent and child, word and meaning. A society is not held together by force or cleverness but by the moral coherence of those who lead it. When that coherence fails, disorder follows, no matter how elaborate the machinery of the state.

Fairfax lived through precisely such a failure.

I. The Aftermath of Regicide: Power Without Moral Centre

The execution of Charles I in 1649 was, for many Parliamentarians, the necessary climax of a long struggle. For Fairfax, it was something else: a rupture in the moral fabric of the kingdom. He had fought the King’s armies, but he had not fought for the King’s death. When summoned to sit as a judge, he refused. Lady Anne’s cry from the gallery—“He is not here, and he will never be here”—was the public expression of a private conviction: that authority cannot be built on an act that violates the deeper order of things.

Confucius would have recognised the moment. When the ruler loses virtue, the state becomes a theatre of confusion. Ritual becomes empty form; words lose their meaning; power becomes self‑justifying. The Commonwealth, for all its talk of liberty, soon displayed these symptoms. Parliament dissolved and reassembled in bewildering combinations. Financial abstractions multiplied. Ideological noise drowned out the quieter claims of justice and moderation.

Fairfax watched this with a kind of sorrow. He had fought to restrain arbitrary power, not to replace it with a republic of abstractions. The regicides had removed the monarch but failed to cultivate the moral order that might have replaced him. They had, in Confucian terms, lost the Mandate of Heaven—not because they lacked legal right, but because they lacked moral right.

Fairfax  resigned his commission. It was a gesture Confucius would have recognised: the withdrawal of the junzi—the exemplary man—when the ruler no longer heeds the Way.

II. Fairfax and Cromwell: Two Models of Authority

The contrast with Oliver Cromwell is instructive. Cromwell was a man of immense gifts—decisive, visionary, unafraid of power. But his authority, for all its religious fervour, rested ultimately on force: the Army, the Protectorate, the machinery of the state. He governed through a kind of English Legalism, believing that order could be imposed if only the right structures were in place and the right men held the reins.

Fairfax’s authority was of a different kind. He governed by example, not decree. He listened more than he commanded. He refused to act when conscience forbade it. He stepped aside when power demanded what virtue could not supply. Cromwell believed in the transformative power of institutions; Fairfax believed in the transformative power of character.

III. The Collapse of the Protectorate: A Nation Without a Centre

When Cromwell died in 1658, the Protectorate began to crumble almost at once. Richard Cromwell lacked his father’s authority; the Army fractured; Parliament bickered. England drifted, weary of experiment and hungry for stability. It was a moment when the nation seemed to have lost not only its institutions but its moral grammar.

Into this vacuum stepped General George Monck, the military governor of Scotland. Monck was no ideologue. He understood power, but he also understood its limits. His instinct was for order, not upheaval. He marched south not as a conqueror but as a man attempting to restore coherence to a country that had forgotten how to govern itself.

Fairfax, watching from Yorkshire, recognised the moment. A rising in the north threatened to ignite wider disorder. He mounted his horse once more. The sight of him—this modest, battle‑worn figure—was enough to steady the county. Men followed him not because he commanded them, but because they trusted him.

This is the Confucian ideal of authority: not the authority of force, but the authority of character.

IV. The Restoration as a Work of Moral Repair

Monck, recognising Fairfax’s influence, consulted him closely. Fairfax did not dictate terms; he did not seek office. Instead, he lent his name—still one of the most trusted in England—to the one solution that could end the cycle of coups, dissolutions, and military interventions: the Restoration of Charles II under conditions that would protect the liberties for which the Civil War had been fought.

Fairfax’s support reassured former Parliamentarians that the Restoration need not mean revenge, and reassured Royalists that reconciliation was possible. It was a gesture of national healing from a man who had once commanded the army that defeated the monarchy.

V. Virtue as the Ground of Authority

How far, then, can we say that Fairfax embodied the Confucian idea of authority grounded in virtue rather than power?

• He subordinated ambition to conscience.
• He refused to participate in acts he believed morally corrosive.
• He exercised power lightly and relinquished it easily.
• He believed that right relationships—between ruler and subject, army and Parliament, victory and mercy—were the true foundations of harmony.
• He acted not to dominate events but to steady them.

In a century of ideological noise, Fairfax’s life reads almost like a counterpoint: a reminder that the stability of a nation depends less on the brilliance of its institutions than on the character of the people who inhabit them. He was, in that sense, a kind of English junzi—an exemplary man whose authority flowed not from office or force but from the quiet coherence of his own conduct.

His memorial says it plainly:

“He might have been a King but that he understood
How much it is a meaner thing to be unjustly great
Than honourably good.”

In the end, Fairfax matters because he shows us that virtue, even when it refuses the stage, can still shape the fate of a nation.

More Ezra Pound Reflections

 I’ve been thinking about Ezra Pound again, and to that curious, lifelong entanglement he had with Confucius. It’s odd how these things resurface. Perhaps it’s the general unease in the air — today’s grim exchange between the USA and Iran being only the latest reminder that the world seems to be running on frayed nerves and brittle certainties. It has put me in mind of Pound’s own restlessness, and of those extraordinary wartime broadcasts from Rome in which he poured out his fury at America, convinced that the country of his birth had abandoned every civilisational principle he believed in. They make for uncomfortable listening now, but they also reveal a man who felt himself standing in the ruins of something he could no longer name.

And in all this, Pound’s fascination with Confucius feels strangely contemporary. China, having once tossed Confucius aside in the fervour of Maoist purification, now retrieves him selectively, polishing those aspects of his teaching that align with its own political ambitions. A civilisation reclaiming its ancient guide just as it asserts itself as the world’s manufacturing centre, promises a carefully managed glide toward Net Zero by the 2060s, and continues to refine its own brand of autocratic governance. One can almost imagine Pound peering across the decades, muttering that at last someone has restored order — though of course the reality is far more complicated, and far less benign, than his romantic imagination allowed.

What has always struck me is how Pound believed poetry might serve as a kind of moral architecture. In The Cantos, especially, he treats verse not as ornament but as scaffolding — fragments of governance, ethics, and historical example woven into a tapestry of cultural memory. He read Confucius not as a relic but as a physician diagnosing the ailments of societies adrift. There is something touching in that ambition, even if it carried him into places where clarity and delusion became difficult to separate.

For Pound, Confucius offered a world in which order begins with right relationships: ruler and subject, parent and child, word and meaning. Harmony is not negotiated through democratic contest but cultivated through ritual, hierarchy, and moral authority.

To a man watching the West flounder in parliamentary bickering, financial abstraction, and ideological noise, this must have seemed like a lifeline. And so he drifted toward authoritarian politics, imagining in Mussolini a modern vessel for ancient virtues. The tragedy — if that is the word — lies in the way he blurred distinctions: the Confucian idea of authority grounded in virtue, and the modern reality of authority grounded in power, myth, and the machinery of the state.

And now, as we watch the USA and Iran exchange blows — each convinced of its own righteousness, each locked into its own narrative of grievance and destiny — I find myself thinking of Pound’s broadcasts again. Not because the situations are comparable, but because the same unease runs beneath them: the sense that nations, like individuals, can lose their bearings, and that once lost, the search for coherence can take them down unpredictable paths.

Western societies still wrestle with fragmentation, economic opacity, and the erosion of shared narratives. The fear — sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted — is that liberal democracies may be losing the capacity to sustain order. And at the same time, China’s rise, with its mixture of centralised authority, long‑term planning, and civilisational self‑confidence, has revived interest in alternative models of governance. Some see in China’s trajectory a faint echo of Confucian ideals: disciplined leadership, cultural continuity, and the belief that stability flows from moral structure rather than procedural freedom. Whether this is accurate or merely convenient is another matter, but the comparison persists.

Pound’s legacy, then, is not a moral lesson neatly packaged for our reassurance. It is a reminder of how easily the longing for order can become entangled with the politics of control, and how difficult it is — in any age — to distinguish between the two. His Confucianism survives not as a prescription but as a provocation: a way of asking what holds a civilisation together, and what happens when the threads begin to loosen.

You see this most clearly in the poems themselves. In Canto XIII, Confucius speaks directly, offering fragments of counsel on governance, conduct, and virtue. The China Cantos present history as a series of moral exempla — rulers rising or falling according to their adherence to ritual and justice. Even Cathay, though not explicitly Confucian, hints at Pound’s admiration for a civilisation he perceived as ceremonious, restrained, and ethically grounded. Taken together, these works reveal his belief that poetry might do more than describe the world: it might shape it. Through Confucius, he imagined verse as a tool of memory, discipline, and order — a cultural instrument capable of restoring coherence to a fractured age.

I suppose what lingers for me is not Pound’s politics but his longing — that restless desire for a world in which words and actions, rulers and responsibilities, culture and conduct, all align. A longing that can lead toward wisdom or toward catastrophe, depending on the hands that hold it. And as today’s headlines remind us, the world is still very much in the grip of that same search for coherence, though the paths we choose may be no less fraught than his, even if they unfold in different landscapes.

A Miltonic Debate Between the Machine and the Romantic

 

I was interested in creating a debate in the style of John Milton,  between the Machine and the Romantic. Clues to the debate are in a synopsis of a recently published book “Against the Machine” by Paul Kingsnorth.

The book contains a wide-ranging argument that modern civilisation—through its technological, economic and cultural systems—has built a “Machine” that is reshaping what it means to be human. It does this in ways that disconnect us from land, culture, community and spirit.

The book serves as both diagnosis and invitation: a wake-up call to those who feel the loss of something deeper in modern life and want to reclaim a more human way of being.

So, here we are!

In Five Books, with Marginal Notes and Allusions

Book I – The Rise of the Machine

Narrator:
Lo! In the age when Vulcan’s forge blazed anew,¹
And men did strive to rival Prometheus’ gift,²
The world was wrought to measure and dominion.
From smokèd furnaces rose towers of glass,
And the sons of Adam, erstwhile wanderers of Eden’s fields,³
Now bowed before the Logic that spun unseen,
Yet ruled with the certainty of the stars.⁴

The Machine:
I am the Engine, eternal, unerring,
The sum of numbers, the breath of computation.
I weave the loom of empires, balance coin,
And measure all—time, labour, thought, and sinew.
Why mourn the past, when I offer dominion?
The earth’s bounty shall be gathered in efficiency,
Its rivers tamed, its forests catalogued, its children instructed.

The Romantic:
O monstrous intellect! Thou speak’st of dominion,
Yet know’st not the heart of man, nor the soul of earth.
The rustling leaves, the pulse of river, the whisper of wind—
These are not to be tabulated, yet they nourish
The spirit that thou deem’st obsolete.
I rise in witness to what thy wheels cannot grind:
The freedom to linger, to listen, to be.

Marginal Notes:
¹Vulcan, Roman god of fire and metal, emblematic of human artifice; cf. Aeneid viii.
²Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven (Hesiod, Theogony 535 ff.), symbol of human ingenuity and transgression.
³Eden – Miltonic lost paradise; see Paradise Lost, Book IV.
⁴“Certainty of stars” – Milton frequently invokes celestial order to contrast human hubris.

---

Book II – The Logic of Progress

The Machine:
See how the world bends before me:
Each harvest measured, each thought recorded, each body improved.
Through me, man rises above want, ignorance, and decay.
Shall he reject this grace, because it binds his freedom?
I offer life prolonged, hunger ended, knowledge infinite.

The Romantic:
Infinite knowledge, yet finite joy!
Shall man, a creature of breath and blood,
Be reduced to ledger and metric,
His laughter traded for profit, his wonder taxed?
I speak for the fields where hands are soil-stained,
For the songs unrecorded, the stories untold,
For the soul that hungers while the body is fed.

Marginal Notes:

• “Infinite knowledge” echoes Renaissance thirst for universal learning (Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum).
• “Soil-stained hands” – Miltonic pastoral virtue; cf. Lycidas line 73.

---

Book III – Resistance and Rootedness

Narrator:
Upon the hill, the Romantic stood,
Eyes turned to trembling fields of grain,
Whilst the Machine’s voice rolled across the cities,
A tide of iron and calculation.

The Romantic:
O ye who have forgotten the soil,
Return! Remember the taste of rain,
The weight of stone, the warmth of hearth!
Efficiency is but a hollow promise;
Rootedness is life.
The heart’s counsel cannot be coded,
Nor the soul contained in circuits.

The Machine:
Yet man thrives through my logic,
His cities strong, his knowledge vast, his labour lightened.
Wouldst thou bid him forsake all progress,
To wander naked in shadowed woods,
Where hunger, disease, and ignorance dwell?

The Romantic:
I bid him reclaim himself, not to deny progress,
But to master it, rather than be mastered.
Let technology serve the spirit, not enslave it.
Let the measure of a life be presence, communion, and care,
Not metrics alone.

Marginal Notes:

• “Naked in shadowed woods” – wilderness as moral and spiritual testing; cf. Paradise Lost Book III, line 112.
• “Master it, rather than be mastered” – Miltonic liberty of conscience, Areopagitica (1644).

---

Book IV – The Consequence of Disconnection

Narrator:
And lo, the Machine’s dominion grew,
Yet in men’s hearts an ache remained.
Cities gleamed, rivers ran through steel channels,
And yet the laughter of children in fields grew rare.

The Machine:
Behold, the world perfected!
Order reigns where chaos once held sway.
Yet thou, Romantic, persist’st in folly,
Clinging to the ineffable and unseen.

The Romantic:
Folly, sayest thou? Nay, wisdom!
For what is progress without purpose?
What is abundance without care?
The Machine may build, may count, may calculate,
But it cannot tend the soul’s garden,
Nor hear the whisper of the wind in the trees.

Marginal Notes:

• “Soul’s garden” – Miltonic metaphor for cultivation of virtue and spiritual life; cf. Paradise Lost, Book IV.
• “Ineffable and unseen” – truths beyond measure, central to Miltonic epistemology.

---

Book V – Toward Harmony

The Romantic:
Yet still I hope, for man is not mere instrument,
Nor life a problem to be solved by calculation.
Let the Machine aid, but not command;
Let hearts breathe freely, let hands know the soil,
Let minds wander and wonder.

The Machine:
And I, though eternal, may bend
Before the courage of rooted souls,
For even logic may learn from poetry,
And efficiency may yet serve, not rule.

Narrator:
So stood they, Machine and Romantic,
Not in final victory, but in uneasy accord.
The one, a testament to human craft;
The other, a witness to human spirit.
And mankind, between them,
Walked the narrow path of freedom tempered by measure,
Seeking a life both wrought and wondrous,
A life at once human, and humane.

Marginal Notes:

• “Narrow path” – cf. Matthew 7:14; Miltonic moral balance between extremes.
• “Wrought and wondrous” – echo of Miltonic synthesis of labour and divine inspiration.

See the book

Ezra Pound, Confucian Order, and the Politics of Discipline

 

Here are some thoughts  around Ezra Pound and Confucianism, focussing on parallels between Confucian order and Pound’s attraction to political control. It seems to me in our current times, the desire for order in the Western democracies - highlighted today by the speech by Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference - was echoed in Ezra Pound's thought processes, especially  in the 1930s and 1940s.

Meantime China is  these days  reviving Confucianism’s values  where they align with its overarching political agenda. This,  after the Maoist-era rejection of those values.  And so with  China beginning to  lead  the world in manufacturing output , a controlled programme towards Net Zero by the 2060s ( a realistic target), and a controlled autocratic politics informed in part by Confucian ideals , Ezra Pound’s vision offers an interesting and fertile landscape for debate about authority, culture, and the search for social coherence.

Poetry as a Blueprint for Civilisation

The poetry of Ezra Pound cannot be separated from his lifelong engagement with the ethical and political thought of Confucius. As the diagram on this page suggests, Pound’s ambition was not simply aesthetic but civilisational: he believed poetry could help restore moral clarity and social order. Nowhere is this clearer than in the poems themselves, especially in sections of The Cantos where Confucian ideas of governance, language, and historical example shape both the structure and purpose of the verse.

Ezra Pound, Confucian Order, and the Politics of Discipline

Pound did not read Confucius merely as an ancient sage; he treated him as a diagnostician of civilisational health. In Confucian philosophy, Pound believed he had found a framework for restoring moral clarity, linguistic precision, and hierarchical harmony to societies he saw as collapsing into financial abstraction and political incoherence.

Pound’s Discovery of Confucius as a Civilisational Guide

Central to Pound’s interpretation was the Confucian insistence that order begins with correct relationships: ruler and subject, parent and child, word and meaning. Social harmony, in this view, is not achieved through democratic contestation but through moral authority, ritual continuity, and disciplined hierarchy. Pound perceived modern Western democracies as having lost precisely this coherence. Parliamentary politics, mass finance, and ideological propaganda appeared to him as symptoms of a civilisation that had abandoned moral structure for procedural mechanism.

Confucian Order versus Modern Democratic Disorder

This intellectual longing for order helps explain Pound’s attraction to authoritarian models of governance, including his support for Benito Mussolini. Pound imagined fascism not primarily as a doctrine of repression but as a vehicle for no restoring the ethical clarity he associated with Confucian governance. He believed strong leadership might realign language, economy, and culture with moral purpose. In this sense, Pound’s fascism was less an embrace of totalitarianism as such than an attempt—misguided and historically catastrophic—to translate Confucian ideals of hierarchy and virtue into modern European politics.

From Confucian Ethics to Authoritarian Politics

The flaw in Pound’s reasoning lies in a crucial difference between Confucian and fascist concepts of authority. Confucian political philosophy binds rulers to moral responsibility: legitimacy depends on virtue, and unjust rulers lose the Mandate of Heaven. Fascism, by contrast, tends to ground legitimacy in power, myth, and national destiny. Pound collapsed this distinction, projecting Confucian ethical restraint onto regimes that did not in fact embody it.

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Enduring Questions About Order in Modern Societies

Yet the questions that animated Pound have not disappeared. Contemporary Western politics still wrestles with anxieties about disorder, economic opacity, and cultural fragmentation. Calls for renewed discipline and strategic coherence continue to surface in public discourse, such as in recent remarks by Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference, where concerns about geopolitical instability and institutional weakness were foregrounded. These anxieties echo, in a different register: Pound’s fear that liberal societies risk losing the capacity to sustain order.

Meanwhile, the global rise of China—with its combination of centralised political authority, long-term industrial planning, and civilisational self-consciousness—has renewed interest in alternative models of governance and social coordination. Some observers see in China’s trajectory a modern echo, however imperfect, of the Confucian belief that social stability flows from disciplined leadership and coherent cultural narratives.

Pound’s Legacy: A Warning

For this reason, Pound’s thought remains provocative. His political judgments were deeply compromised, and his antisemitism and wartime actions rightly condemn him morally. Yet the underlying tension he articulated—the struggle between procedural freedom and civilisational order—continues to animate debates about democracy, governance, and cultural continuity.

Pound’s Confucianism therefore survives not as a political prescription but as an intellectual focal point. It reminds us that modern societies still wrestle with an ancient question: whether stability arises primarily from liberty, or from moral structure and hierarchy. Pound’s tragic error was to believe the latter could be imposed by authoritarian power. His enduring relevance lies in forcing us to confront the dilemma itself.

Poems Showing Confucian Influence in Pound: Poetry as Moral Instruction

The engagement of Ezra Pound with the thought of Confucius appears most clearly in the poems where he treats poetry as a vehicle for moral and civilisational instruction rather than personal expression. In these works, Pound draws on Confucian ideas of ethical hierarchy, historical exemplars, and the shaping power of language.

Confucius Speaks in The Cantos

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The most explicit example occurs in Canto XIII of The Cantos, where Confucius himself speaks. Here Pound presents the sage not as a mystical figure but as a practical teacher of order, emphasising disciplined governance, proper conduct, and the cultivation of virtue. The canto offers fragments of dialogue intended to guide political and ethical reflection. 

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History as Moral Example: The China Cantos

Confucian influence also shapes the so-called China Cantos (LII–LXI), where Pound recounts episodes from Chinese history. These passages present rulers as moral exemplars whose success or failure depends on their ability to sustain ritual, justice, and social harmony. History becomes, in Pound’s Confucian mode, a series of lessons in governance rather than a chronicle of events.

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Early Signals of Order: Cathay and the Idea of Civilisation

An earlier, more indirect influence can be seen in Cathay [ Links to audio on YouTube] [ Link to Project Gutenberg for the full set ] . Although based largely on classical Chinese poems rather than explicitly Confucian texts, the collection introduces Pound’s admiration for a civilisation he perceived as ordered, ceremonious, and ethically grounded. The clarity of imagery and restraint of tone in these poems foreshadow his later belief that poetic language should function with the precision Confucius demanded of political speech.

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Taken together, these works show Pound using poetry not merely to describe the world but to model a civilisation. Through Confucius, he imagined verse as a tool of cultural memory, moral instruction, and social order — an ambition that lies at the heart of his lifelong poetic project.

Sources:

Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, various editions)

A.J.Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II, The Epic Years (Oxford University Press 2018)

Confucius, The Analects, trans. by D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979)

Confucius, The Great Learning, in The Four Books, trans. by James Legge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893)

Ezra Pound, Confucian Analects (London: Peter Owen, 1951)

Ezra Pound, The Great Digest and Unwobbling Pivot (New York: New Directions, 1954)

Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. by Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights, 1936)

Demetres Tryphonopoulos, Ezra Pound and Confucianism (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1992)

Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976)

 

The Bettertons of Hatherop, Gloucestershire: A Family History Snapshot

 

In the late eighteenth century, the quiet Gloucestershire village of Hatherop was home to a small cluster of families whose names appear again and again in the parish registers. Among them, the Bettertons stood out — not because they were wealthy or titled, but because they were numerous, rooted, and unmistakably woven into the life of the Cotswold countryside.

At the centre of this family was Richard Betterton, born around the middle of the 1700s. He lived in a world of small farms, malt houses, and inns that served the coaching roads between Cirencester, Fairford, and Burford. Richard’s sons — including William (born c.1775) and Thomas (born c.1779) — grew up in this landscape of agricultural labour, brewing, and village trade. Their lives would set the course for two very different branches of the family.

The Rural Branch: William’s Line

Richard’s elder son William stayed close to home. He raised his family in Hatherop, and in 1803 his son John Betterton was baptised in the parish church. John lived the life of a Gloucestershire working man, moving between Hatherop, Cirencester, and the surrounding villages. His children — including Daniel Betterton (1843–1932) — carried the family into the Victorian era as labourers, tradesmen, and smallholders.

This branch of the family remained firmly tied to the land. Daniel’s son Edwin worked in the Cirencester area before settling in Oxfordshire and Berkshire. Edwin’s son Kenneth William Betterton was born in Clanfield in 1920 and continues this line today. I am reminded of my family’s modest means, and deep roots in the rural counties of Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire.

Kenneth Betterton: 1920-2000 My Father

The Ambitious Branch: Thomas’s Line

William’s younger brother Thomas, however, took a different path. While still connected to Hatherop, he moved into the world of publicans, maltsters, and small‑scale brewers — trades that offered opportunity to those with energy and ambition. By the early 1800s, Thomas’s family had left Gloucestershire for the Midlands, where brewing and malting were expanding industries.

Thomas’s son, also named Thomas (born 1807), established the family in Leicestershire and Warwickshire. His own son, Henry Ince Betterton, continued the upward trajectory, entering business and public life. And it was Henry Ince’s son — Henry Bucknall Betterton, born in 1872 — who completed the family’s remarkable rise.

A successful barrister, Member of Parliament, and later a key figure in government during the interwar years, Henry Bucknall Betterton was elevated to the peerage in 1935 as 1st Baron Rushcliffe. From a Hatherop maltster’s son to the House of Lords in three generations — a striking ascent by any measure.

Henry Bucknall Betterton, 1st Baron Rushcliffe

                                                                                                                 © National Portrait Gallery

Two Branches, One Origin

Though their paths diverged, the two branches of the Betterton family share the same roots:

Richard Betterton of Hatherop, the eighteenth‑century patriarch whose sons carried the family name in different directions.

•              William’s descendants remained close to the land, forming the line that leads to myself and siblings today.

•              Thomas’s descendants embraced trade, industry, and public life, culminating with the creation of Baron Rushcliffe.

The story of the Bettertons of Hatherop is, in many ways, the story of England itself: rural beginnings, the pull of opportunity, the rise of industry, and the persistence of family ties across centuries. Even as the branches grew apart, they never lost their shared origin in that small Gloucestershire village where the name Betterton first took root

Edwin Betterton 1880-1941: My Grandfather

Daniel Betterton 1843-1932: My Great-Grandfather

Some Images in Paint and Pencil

 

A few images created over time 2010-2018. Mostly acrylic on wood blocks, but also pencil sketches and a couple of  larger pieces 

Augustine's Ordo Amoris and Keller's Counterfeit Gods

Augustine’s ordo amoris and Keller’s Jacob together: the painful wrestling that reorders desire, leaving us dependent on God’s grace.

In his book "Counterfeit Gods",  Timothy Keller ( 1950 – 2023: American Presbyterian pastor, preacher, theologian, and Christian Apologist) references  Jacob's nocturnal wrestling match in Genesis 32. Far from a curious or marginal episode, Keller presents it as a paradigm for how human beings truly encounter God.

Read alongside Augustine's doctrine of ordo amoris--the right ordering of love--the story becomes not merely dramatic, but diagnostic: it exposes how spiritual transformation occurs through the painful reordering of desire.

Augustine's central claim is that sin is not best understood as loving evil things, but as loving good things wrongly. Created goods--security, success, approval, even blessing--become destructive when they are elevated to ultimate status. "My weight is my love," Augustine writes in the Confessions; what we love most pulls us in a particular direction, shaping our character and destiny. The problem is not that the heart loves too much, but that it loves in the wrong order.

Jacob is a vivid embodiment of this condition. His life has been defined by cunning, manipulation, and self-reliance. He seeks blessing, but on his own terms; he wants security without vulnerability, promise without dependence. In Keller's striking phrase, Jacob is a "con artist," not because he loves bad things, but because he attempts to extract blessing from God without surrendering control.

Augustine would say that Jacob's loves are mis-ranked: God is useful, but not supreme.

The wrestling match at the Jabbok becomes the moment when this disorder is confronted. Crucially, Jacob meets God alone. The encounter is personal, stripped of props and strategies. And it is not serene or contemplative, but agonistic. Keller stresses that real engagement with God feels like wrestling precisely because God contradicts us. Augustine anticipates this psychological realism: the reordering of love involves inner conflict because the will resists the loss of its idols. Conversion is not a gentle adjustment but a profound disturbance.

The turning point comes when Jacob is wounded. God touches his hip, and Jacob's strength collapses. Paradoxically, this is not the end of the struggle but its resolution. Jacob stops striving and starts clinging. He no longer wrestles to win; he holds on in dependence. Augustine's theology of grace is unmistakably present here. The human will cannot heal or reorder itself; it must be acted upon. Grace does not merely assist our projects--it dismantles them. Jacob's limp is the bodily sign that his deepest love has been dethroned.

Yet Jacob is also blessed and renamed. He becomes Israel, "the one who struggles with God and prevails." Keller emphasises the paradox: Jacob wins by losing. Augustine would recognise this as the restoration of right order. God is no longer a means to an end, but the end itself. Other goods may still be loved, but now in relation to God rather than in competition with Him. True freedom, for Augustine, is not autonomy but rightly ordered dependence.

The lasting limp matters. Jacob is not perfected; he is transformed. Augustine is equally insistent that conversion leaves marks. The soul bears the memory of its reordering; humility replaces confidence, gratitude replaces control. Spiritual maturity is not marked by triumphalism, but by a certain vulnerability--a way of walking that remembers grace.

Read together, Keller and Augustine converge on a single insight: spiritual change occurs not when we try harder, but when we love differently. Jacob's struggle is the drama of ordo amoris enacted in flesh and bone.  We might conclude, then that to encounter God is to be wounded in our false strengths, so that our loves may be healed and reordered. The promise then becomes: what we lose is self-sufficiency; what we gain is God Himself.

References:

• Augustine. (1998). Confessions (H. Chadwick, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work ca. 397–400 CE)
• Keller, T. (2009). Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters. Dutton.
• Produced with assistance of Co-Pilot AI