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.

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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Poetry as Cultural Architecture

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.

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

Three Revolutions, One Story: How Interfaces, Networks, and Games Shaped the Digital World

 

Here is a summary of the intertwined origins of personal computing, showing how breakthroughs at Xerox PARC and the countercultural ethos of the Whole Earth Catalog converged to redefine technology. Engineers envisioned computers as intimate tools for thought, while idealists promoted access to empowering tools for everyday life. Together, these movements laid both the technical and philosophical foundations of modern computing, shaping a vision of technology as personal, creative, and transformative.

In the second half of the twentieth century, three technological revolutions unfolded in parallel. Each began in a different place, driven by different communities, and aimed at different problems. Yet together they converged to create the digital environment we now inhabit. These revolutions were: the invention of human‑computer interfaces, the creation of computer‑computer networks, and the rise of computer games as a cultural form. Their stories intertwine in surprising ways.

The first revolution began with a simple but radical idea: that computers should be tools for individuals. In the late 1960s, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated the mouse, hypertext, and windowed interfaces — a vision of interactive computing that would profoundly influence the next generation of researchers. In 1970, Xerox founded the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a place designed to explore “new information technologies” far beyond the company’s copier business. PARC’s researchers created the Alto, the first computer with a graphical user interface, a bitmapped screen, and WYSIWYG text editing. These innovations transformed computing from a command‑line activity into a visual, intuitive experience. The Alto was never sold commercially, but its ideas would later shape the Macintosh, Windows, and every modern interface.

At the same moment, a second revolution was taking shape — one that focused not on how humans interacted with computers, but on how computers interacted with each other. In 1969, the U.S. Department of Defence established the ARPANET, the first wide‑area packet‑switched network and the first to implement what would become the TCP/IP protocol suite. ARPANET’s design was shaped by Cold War concerns: military planners wanted a communication system without a central point of failure, one that could survive attacks or outages. Packet switching — breaking messages into small pieces that could travel independently across the network — was the key innovation. The first nodes came online in 1969, linking UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. The network was declared operational in 1971, and soon supported remote login, file transfer, and early email.

By the mid‑1970s, ARPANET had expanded rapidly, and in 1975 operational control passed to the Defence Communications Agency. Researchers like Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn developed the Transmission Control Program, which evolved into TCP/IP — the protocol that allowed multiple networks to interconnect. On January 1, 1983, ARPANET officially adopted TCP/IP, a moment widely considered the birth of the modern Internet. That same year, ARPANET split into two networks: ARPANET for academic research and MILNET for military communications. The foundations of today’s global network were in place.

While these two revolutions — interfaces and networks — were unfolding, a third revolution was quietly emerging: computer games. The earliest games were experiments in interactive computing. Spacewar! (1962) was created by MIT students exploring the capabilities of a new PDP‑1 computer. In the 1970s, arcade games like Pong and home consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey introduced gaming to the public. Text adventures such as Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork explored narrative and imagination through pure text. By the 1980s, games had become a major cultural force, with titles like Pac‑Man, Super Mario Bros., and SimCity shaping the imaginations of millions.

These three revolutions influenced one another in subtle but profound ways. PARC’s work on graphical interfaces made games more expressive and accessible. ARPANET’s packet‑switching concepts laid the groundwork for online multiplayer gaming. The rise of home computers in the 1980s created a generation of programmers who learned to code by making games. And the emergence of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s — built on top of the Internet’s TCP/IP foundation — created new spaces for game distribution, community building, and online play.

By the mid‑1990s, the convergence was unmistakable. The Mosaic browser made the Web accessible to ordinary users. Doom popularized online multiplayer gaming. The WELL and early Internet forums created communities that blended gaming culture, hacker culture, and the countercultural ethos of the Whole Earth Catalog. .

First published in 1968, the Whole Earth Catalog was the brainchild of Stewart Brand, a countercultural thinker who believed that access to tools — intellectual, mechanical, and technological — could empower individuals to build better lives and communities. The Catalog’s pages were filled with everything from woodworking kits to ecological theory, from Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes to early computing devices. Its ethos was simple: tools give people agency.

Though PARC and the Whole Earth Catalog emerged from different worlds, they shared a common belief: that technology could be personal, empowering, and transformative. This shared vision helped create a bridge between the counterculture and the nascent computer industry. Many early computer hobbyists — including members of the Homebrew Computer Club — were steeped in the Catalog’s ethos of experimentation and self‑reliance. They saw computers not as corporate machines but as instruments for creativity and liberation.

And so, building on this ethos, the Macintosh and Windows 95 brought graphical interfaces to hundreds of millions of people. And massively multiplayer online games like Ultima Online and EverQuest created persistent virtual worlds that depended on both sophisticated interfaces and robust networks

By the 2000s, the three revolutions had merged into a single digital ecosystem. Broadband Internet enabled online worlds like World of Warcraft. Consoles like the Xbox integrated networking directly into their design. Smartphones introduced touch interfaces that reshaped both computing and gaming. And the Web became the platform through which culture, communication, and play flowed.

Looking back, it is striking how these revolutions — interface, network, and game — emerged independently yet converged so completely. PARC’s vision of personal computing, ARPANET’s vision of distributed networking, and the game industry’s vision of interactive play all contributed to the digital world we now take for granted. Each revolution solved a different problem, but together they created a new kind of environment: one where humans interact with computers, computers interact with each other, and people interact with one another through computers.

The modern digital world is not the product of a single invention or a single institution. It is the result of decades of parallel experimentation, cross‑pollination, and cultural imagination. The interface revolution made computing personal. The network revolution made it global. The game revolution made it playful, social, and immersive. Together, they transformed not just technology, but the way we think, communicate, and live.

References:

• Move Fast and Break Things - Jonathan Taplin (2017)
• Research at Hatfield Polytechnic (Now University of Hertfordshire) (1989-1990)
• Produced with assistance of Co-Pilot AI

Envy Redeemed

 

An Allegorical Poem in Three Movements

THE ARGUMENT

The Poet, musing on the torment of envy, conceives it as a fallen spirit, self-consumed and wandering through the wastes of the soul. Envy laments its curse before the bright Spirit of Charity, who rebukes and then redeems it. In the end, the fires of malice are turned to light, and the two ascend together toward the dawn of Grace.

i. THE VOICE OF ENVY

Lo, I arise from caverns of the mind,
Where never dawn hath shone, nor quiet dwelt.
I am the worm that feedeth on the root,
When yet the fruit is green upon the bough;
The canker hid, that drinketh of the sap,
And turneth sweetness into dust and gall.

ii. THE DIALOGUE OF ENVY AND CHARITY

ENVY
I wander as a shadow ’mid the blest,
A spirit self-consuming, bound in spite.

CHARITY
O child unblest, thou hast not known thy thirst.
It is not others’ plenty that condemns,
But thine own emptiness that maketh pain.

ENVY
I walk among them, yet I cannot rest,
Each joy I see doth wound my heart with fire.

CHARITY
Then yield thy stings; lay down thy fires to rest.
Their heat shall serve the altar, not the pit.

ENVY
Can such as I be turned to light and peace?

CHARITY
Yea, by contrition, by love’s gentle might.
Thy thousand serpents change to threads of light,
And every coil is loosed into a star.

ENVY
What grace is this? I feel the chains unbind,
The weight of many ages melt away.

iii. THE REDEMPTION OF ENVY

So shall it be for all who envy’s snare
Have felt, and by contrition are made clean.
For love is stronger than the serpent’s guile,
And mercy keepeth watch where pride is tamed.

A Miltonic riff, produced with assistance of Co-Pilot AI

Oct 2025

Dragonfly Sonnet

It is the cave of me, its emptiness,
Which hollows your own imperfections free.
The echo shapes a shadowed tenderness,
Where absence learns the art of memory.

Yet in the damp, where silence clings like stone,
A fragile nymph stirs restlessly unseen;
It dreams of wings it cannot call its own,
A shimmer waiting where the dark has been.

And so it breaks — the thin skin of the past,
Shedding the weight of oldness in the night;
The cave dissolves, its hold undone at last,
A body glimmers, born of hidden flight.

Innocent now, it hovers, fierce and small,
A dragonfly that knows no cave at all.

• Produced with assistance of Co-Pilot AI

A Kelling Memory

 

Autumn and winter days at our cottage in Kelling were marked occasionally by the arrival of guests of the Kelling estate. These guests - paying guests - came for the entertainment offered by the regular pheasant shoots. Here is a reflection, written as the spent pellets rained upon our cottage conservatory. It was completed in Oxfordshire sunshine a few days ago.

The Reluctant Sportsman

The guns speak a fate. Keep 
Brave as the birds break cover.
Squeeze the trigger. The flock in disarray
Hovers then darts loose over the fields.
Shame hinges on a miss. This
Is what we expected. The land over stiles
Marks an escape. I am reptile.

The guns settle. Held, not fired.
Brave as the birds break cover.
Finger stays curled. The flock in disarray
Hovers then darts loose over the fields.
No one sees the stillness. This
Is not what was expected. The land over stiles
Marks a passage. I stay human.

The grass parts. A rustle speaks.
Brave as the sky calls danger.
Muscle recalls the flint of air
As bodies scatter, low and rising.
A crack behind. Not struck. This
Time, still breathing. The land over stiles
Means a distance. I am creature.

Kelling October 2015/Oxon July 2025

• Stanzas 2 and 3 developed with assistance of Co-Pilot AI

Treescape in Watercolour 2022

Tracks: A Revision after a Decade

 

The tracks hold signs of wisdom planted
Full deep in the way. Here a flame
Burns and flickers, flickers, burns
And lights rocks against rock,
Another shadow, a different shade,
A shiver of memory thrust to mind.

At the broken stile, a figure stood.
Not stranger, not guide.
He said:
What you carry was not gathered,
But given—before the path began.

To survive in this wild place
In this wilderness scaffold, simply face
The shades as they speak of times made strange
By current tread.

The dead speak in fire,
Not in voice or name.
Hold fast to that light. It shines
Miraculous, though too often maligned.

 

-          -    Kelling July 2015/Oxon July 2025

• Stanza 2 developed with  assistance of Co-Pilot AI, with reference to Eliot's "Compound ghost" in "Little Gidding"

G

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Inclusion as Evolution and Strength: An Alternative View

A critical enquiry into the moral and philosophical basis against boundary-making in post-liberal societies

Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed / For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse.  - Bob Dylan "Chimes of Freedom"

And rest yourself ’neath the strength of strings / No voice can hope to hum. - Bob Dylan "Lay Down Your Weary Tune"

In contemporary political discourse, the concept of inclusion often finds itself under scrutiny. Critics argue that inclusion without boundaries leads to moral entropy and societal fragmentation. However, here, I offer some arguments that inclusion, far from being a surrender of values, represents an evolution of moral and civic strength.

Liberalism’s Moral Depth

Liberalism is frequently criticized for its emphasis on individual rights, which some interpret as a neglect of communal duties. Yet this dichotomy is misleading. Liberalism fosters civic duties such as participation, responsibility, and mutual respect. Philosophers like John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum have articulated a vision of liberal inclusion that demands engagement and justice, not passive permissiveness. Moreover, liberal universalism is grounded in human dignity, providing a moral foundation that has empowered civil rights movements to challenge unjust traditions.

The Misuse of Schmitt

Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction offers a compelling but dangerous framework for political identity. Historically, this binary logic has justified authoritarianism and exclusionary nationalism. Liberalism resists such framing not out of naïveté but from a recognition of the moral hazards inherent in defining identity through opposition. Pluralism, contrary to claims of fragility, thrives when institutions are robust and inclusion is paired with deliberation. Democracies such as the United States, Canada, and many European nations demonstrate that diversity can coexist with strong civic identity.

Tradition vs. Transformation

While thinkers like Roger Scruton and Alasdair MacIntyre rightly emphasize the value of tradition, it is essential to acknowledge that traditions can perpetuate injustice. Inclusion challenges traditions not to erase them but to refine them. Historical milestones such as the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and LGBTQ+ rights emerged from this tension between tradition and transformation. Furthermore, models of hospitality need not be conditional. Radical hospitality, practiced in various faith and secular communities, welcomes without demanding assimilation, trusting in shared humanity over shared doctrine.

Inclusion as a Practice of Virtue

MacIntyre’s concept of "practices" underscores the importance of narrative unity within communities. However, this unity need not be exclusionary. Communities can embrace diverse voices while maintaining coherence—much like jazz, which is improvisational and plural yet deeply structured. Inclusion does not imply the abandonment of standards; rather, it calls for the co-creation of expectations rooted in democratic norms, human rights, and civic responsibility.

Boundary-Making Reimagined

Liberalism does not reject boundary-making; it redefines it. Boundaries should be negotiated through dialogue, not imposed through coercion. Inclusion fosters resilience through diversity, and tradition must be continually tested by justice. Persuasion and participation are more effective tools than coercion in maintaining social cohesion.

Conservative View	Liberal Counterpoint
Boundaries protect identity	Boundaries must be negotiated through dialogue
Inclusion erodes cohesion	Inclusion fosters resilience through diversity
Tradition is moral anchor	Tradition must be tested by justice
Coercion may be necessary	Persuasion and participation are stronger tools

Conclusion: Inclusion as Moral Maturity

Inclusion is often dismissed as sentiment unchecked by reason. Yet, when rightly understood, it embodies reasoned compassion. It is not the refusal to draw lines but the refusal to draw them in fear. A community that includes does not lose its soul; it discovers its depth. To include rightly, we must sometimes expand. Inclusion, therefore, is not erosion—it is evolution.

To include rightly, we must sometimes expand.

• A thought experiment produced with assistance of Co-Pilot AI

 

 

When Inclusion Becomes Erosion: A Philosophical Case for Boundary-Making: One View

A critical inquiry into the moral and philosophical basis for boundary-making in post-liberal societies

"There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it."                                                                                   -   attr: Friedrich Nietzsche

 In the modern liberal imagination, inclusion has become synonymous with moral progress. From civil rights legislation to multicultural pluralism, the moral arc appears to bend always toward broader accommodation, deeper toleration, and the softening of boundaries. Yet the foundational question remains: Can a community endure if it refuses to draw lines around its values, identity, and cohesion?

While inclusion can be a moral good, it is not an absolute one. There comes a point at which the expansion of inclusion without corresponding commitment to shared values becomes not a sign of vitality but of erosion. Drawing from thinkers as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre, Roger Scruton, and Carl Schmitt, these words which follow make the case for philosophical and practical boundary-making.

I. The Liberal Commitment and Its Limits

The liberal tradition, rooted in Enlightenment rationalism and Christian moral universalism, treats the individual as the fundamental unit of moral concern. Rights precede duties; inclusion is a default posture. Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, critiques this view as a fragment of older moral frameworks stripped of their ultimate grounding, the purpose they serve.  While he calls for the renewal of communities rooted in virtue traditions, he avoids advocating coercive measures against dissenters.

Roger Scruton, similarly, emphasises tradition, continuity, and the shared cultural inheritance of a people. In works like How to Be a Conservative, he warns against liberal overreach that tears down institutions in the name of abstract justice. Yet Scruton, too, remains committed to the language of law, civility, and constitutional restraint.

In both cases, the response to internal erosion is cautious and pastoral: re-educate, re-embed, rebuild. Coercion is viewed as a symptom of failure, not a strategy of survival.

II. The Post-Liberal Challenge

This reluctance to act decisively in defence of a community's identity reflects, arguably, a continued subscription to liberal moral instincts. Post-liberal and realist thinkers argue that this very posture allows for the slow undermining of social cohesion.

Carl Schmitt, in The Concept of the Political, asserts that the defining act of politics is the drawing of the friend-enemy distinction. For Schmitt, communities cannot survive without the capacity to name their enemies, including internal ones. Liberalism, by avoiding such distinctions, becomes unable to defend itself against existential threats.

From this perspective, a society that welcomes all without conditions eventually loses the ability to sustain the very virtues it wishes to preserve. Tolerance becomes self-liquidating. Inclusion, when unbound from reciprocal commitment, functions as erosion.

III. Virtue, Tradition, and the Limits of Hospitality

MacIntyre's emphasis on "practices" and "narrative unity" offers an important clue: a community is not a collection of strangers but a shared moral project. Outsiders who reject or remain indifferent to the purpose of the community do not simply extend diversity—they fracture intelligibility.

Hospitality, in traditional societies, is always bounded. The Benedictine model, for example, welcomes the stranger as Christ—but also expects the stranger to join the rhythm of the monastery. Inclusion is contingent on participation. A practice that accepts all but forms no expectations ceases to be a practice at all.

IV. Toward a Philosophy of Boundary-Making

What then constitutes a legitimate act of boundary-making?

Moral Deliberation: The community must define its values clearly, not abstractly. Without a defined ultimate goal or purpose, no inclusion or exclusion has meaning.

Reciprocity: Inclusion must involve commitment from both sides. A unilateral tolerance is not a moral victory; it is political suicide.

Proportionate Action: Coercive or exclusionary measures may be justified, but only when persuasion has failed and the integrity of the community is under sustained threat.

Cultural Self-Awareness: The community must discern whether its openness stems from virtue or from a lack of conviction.

V. Conclusion: From Sentiment to Survival

The liberal impulse to include springs from noble sentiments—compassion, openness, remorse for historical exclusions. But sentiment must be ordered by reason. Communities that refuse to name limits, set expectations, or defend their moral and cultural inheritance will not be more just; they will simply be more fragile.

Inclusion is not an absolute good. A political and moral order survives only by boundary-making: not the rejection of others per se, but the insistence that membership implies meaning. Without borders—moral, cultural, spiritual—a society becomes an open circuit, unable to hold energy, unable to pass on purpose.

To include rightly, we must sometimes refuse.

July 2025

• A thought experiment produced with assistance of Co-Pilot AI

Writing in the manner of TSE's Ariel Poems

Sometimes, at the edge of feeling, there is fear -
Sometimes a turbulence appears
And there is madness,
Madness manifested in monstrous and fearful ways
 - Swansea Dec 1973

At the Verge

Sometimes, at the edge of feeling, there is fear—
Not the child's fright at darkened halls,
Nor the candle's twitch at unseen breath—
But the quiet fear that wakes at four,
Where silence hangs like wet linen in alleys of the soul.

The hour is neither dream nor waking,
But the bell between two bells—
A waiting, a weight, a windless turning
Where no angel guards the lintel.

Sometimes a turbulence appears—
Not of the sky, nor sea, nor the city’s restless thrum,
But beneath the ribcage:
A ripple, a grinding, a storm that will not pass—
Madness.

Madness not in flame or thunder,
But in the order of things unhinged—
The tea poured into a shoe,
The child answering the empty chair,
The mother forgetting her child’s name
As if it were never spoken.

And so madness manifested in monstrous and fearful ways:
The eyes that gleam too bright in crowds,
The voice too calm in confession,
The laugh that echoes where laughter does not belong.

Sometimes the world turns inside out—
And we, gentle bearers of reason,
Are no more than cracked vases on the altar,
Spilling the dust of meaning into the wind.

Yet still, the bird sings at the chimney pot,
The clock ticks its futile benediction,
And the bread rises.

So we go, between verse and void,
With pocket-watches and whispered prayers,
Hoping the threshold holds.

DB June 2025

This poem was produced using AI, feeding Co-Pilot with the seed lines from an old poem of mine, and a request to deliver something in the style of TSE.

A Poem in the Manner of EP

 

The ages fade daily from memory,
but an instant calls to mind,

times thought lost through dull decay.

-- Tours: Nov 1971

Palimpsest

An ink-smudge on papyrus—
ghost-hand of Charax in the margin,
"νοῦς ἀνθρώπου—" and the reed bends.

Clamour of looms in Nineveh,
threads humming patterns
no eye remains to read.

Rust eats the bronze mirror
at the base of the Acropolis;
I see my face in it,
fractured—
half Helen, half the boy from Tyre
whose sandals wore a path to the salt market.

A gull cries.
Concrete breaks its own silence.

Words come in fragments:
"– et in Arcadia…"
"—ye towers of Ilium…"
They lie like bone shards
in the posthole of a vanished hut.

No elegy is whole.

Yet, in a metro tunnel,
fluorescent and wet with transit hum,
I glimpse her—
an eyelash curve,
a gesture from an older grammar.

Time uncoils.
Memory is not kind,
but sudden.

- Oxon: May 2025

Footnotes

1. νοῦς ἀνθρώπου (nous anthrōpou) — Greek for "the mind of man." This phrase reflects classical philosophical thought, especially in Plato and Aristotle, where nous denotes the highest faculty of intellect or reason. The attribution to “Charax” may allude to Charax of Pergamon, a semi-legendary chronicler, here imagined as a marginal commentator in an ancient manuscript. The smudged ink emphasizes textual decay and the ghostliness of ancient knowledge.

2. Nineveh — The capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, famed for its architecture, gardens, and textile production. The "clamour of looms" references the lost industry and domestic life of ancient cities, preserved now only through archaeology and legend.

3. Bronze mirror / Acropolis — Mirrors in classical antiquity were often made from polished bronze. The Acropolis, Athens’s ancient citadel, becomes a stage for cultural erosion, the bronze mirror symbolizing faded self-knowledge and the inevitable corrosion of civilization's reflective capacities.

4. Helen / boy from Tyre — Helen of Troy embodies mythic beauty and destructive desire. The "boy from Tyre" may allude to mythological figures such as Cadmus or Europa's brother, or symbolically to young Phoenician traders, invoking early Mediterranean commerce and cultural diaspora. The juxtaposition suggests fragmented identity across time and myth.

5. Concrete breaks its own silence — A motif where inanimate materials gain agency. Concrete, emblem of modern civilization, is personified as it fractures—both literally and metaphorically—under the weight of history and memory.

6. "Et in Arcadia…" — Latin: "Even in Arcadia, there am I," traditionally interpreted as death’s reminder of its presence even in idealized realms. Associated with Poussin’s paintings and Baroque vanitas themes.

7. "Ye towers of Ilium…" — A line echoing Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, referencing the mythical city of Troy (Ilium). Symbolizes fallen civilizations, often used in literature as shorthand for the tragic arc of empire.

8. Bone shards / posthole of a vanished hut — An archaeological metaphor: postholes are traces left by decayed wooden structures; bone shards suggest fragmentary remains of life and culture. This image mirrors a preoccupation with cultural excavation and lost origins.

9. Metro tunnel / gesture from an older grammar — An allusion to Ezra Pound’s "In a Station of the Metro" ("The apparition of these faces in the crowd..."). The “older grammar” evokes pre-verbal or ancient systems of expression—bodily, symbolic, or mythic—still surfacing in the modern world.

10. Time uncoils / Memory is not kind, but sudden — A nod to involuntary memory (e.g., Proustian recall), where memory erupts unexpectedly. “Time uncoils” may also suggest a serpent or scroll—symbols of both danger and revelation.

This poem and the notes were produced using AI, feeding Co-Pilot with the seed lines from an old poem of mine, and a request to deliver something in the style of Ezra Pound

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The Village of Pusey

 

From the "Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey"

"Pusey and its estate had considerable effect upon the young Edward Bouverie-Pusey. Geoffrey Faber in his Oxford Apostles wrote of the Georgian house ''. . . standing where manor house had followed manor-house for a thousand years, looking over water and trees and the miles of Pusey land to the unchanging outline of the downs, house and church and tiny village keeping company together as they had done for centuries - all this spoke to the boy of a permanent, immutable yet gracious and living order, the soul of which was the living mystery of a religion once and for ever revealed. Pusey today, perhaps even more, exudes this feeling''. 

See also in the : Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey by Henry Parry Liddon, http://anglicanhistory.org/pusey/liddon/1.1.html

"There was not much society at Pusey...... Of this limited society, however, the children naturally saw little in their early years: they made their first acquaintance with the world when they went to school".

All Saints Church, Pusey

Pusey Gardens 

Pusey Estate: View Towards the Downs

Home Farm House, Pusey. Betterton Family Lived Here 1956-1970

"We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time."

                     T.S.Eliot - Little Gidding

What is this Covid, Actually?

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
Step out of line, the man come and take you away -

                        Stephen Stills: For What It’s Worth Dec 1966

Here are a few thoughts around where we might be in the current debate about what Covid is, and the place of vaccines as a benign countermeasure to any effects it engenders. We might start with the idea that a serious disease has for some reason spread across the world and is causing a significant number of deaths as well as serious illness. A small but significant minority of people refute this, but if we wish to pursue a realistic debate, we must start with the assumption that a disease named Covid-19 exists and warrants investigation (qua Stephen Stills "There's something happening here/What it is ain't exactly clear).  

So, is it clear? Is there any mileage in the view that this Covid 'pandemic' created from nothing but the authoritative voice of government and media? Could this be another plank in the ongoing construction of one of the greatest acts of sleight of hand, 'bait-and-switch' or whatever you like to call it in the history of the world?  

My instincts in March 2020 at the beginning, when looking at the UK figures for Hong Kong flu in 1968, were that the 1968 (and 1957) events were deadly indeed but had by no means been the subject of co-ordinated and prolonged lockdowns and general governmental push towards mask-wearing and social distancing. Why then were the prospects in this latest event any different?  

By May 2020 it was way too soon to compare the numbers, but H3N2 had at that time seemed to have proved deadlier than COVID-19. Between 1968 and 1970, the Hong Kong flu killed between an estimated 1 and 4 million, according to the CDC and Encyclopaedia Britannica, with US deaths exceeding 100,000, and the UK 30.000. In May 2020 Covid 19 had reportedly killed around 295,000 globally and around 83,000 in the United States.   

Do we trust these figures? Between 1 and 4 million seems to be a meaningless statement, for example, but in a half hour of research trawling many websites, I could find no consistently authoritative numbers.   

Here for example is what GAVI says "In terms of the number of deaths COVID-19 has caused (349,095 as of 27 May 2020), it is actually more comparable with previous flu pandemics. The Asian flu in 1957-1958 killed an estimated 1.1 million people, close to the 1 million people thought to have been killed by the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968-1970". Not 4 million, then?  

We can read in Wikipedia that “worldwide deaths from the so called Hong Kong virus peaked in December 1968 and January 1969”. At the time, public health warnings and virus descriptions had been widely issued in the scientific and medical journals. In Berlin, the excessive number of deaths led to corpses being stored in subway tunnels, and in West Germany, garbage collectors had to bury the dead because of a lack of undertakers. In total, East and West Germany registered 60,000 estimated deaths. In some areas of France, half of the workforce was bedridden, and manufacturing suffered large disruptions because of absenteeism. The UK postal and rail services were also severely disrupted.   

But do we look back on the years 1968-1970 and see panic, lockdowns and endless debates about vaccinations and controls? In the West, certainly we do not. These years were populated by seismic events, such as the Apollo moonwalk, Prague Spring, the escalating war and TET offensive in Vietnam, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, Woodstock, student demonstrations especially in Paris but elsewhere, the Ohio University campus shootings…  

The World Health Organization estimated the case fatality rate of Hong Kong flu to be lower than 0.2%. The disease was allowed to spread through the population without overarching restrictions on economic activity, and a vaccine created by American microbiologist Maurice Hilleman and his team became available four months after it had started. (More about Hilleman follows below).  

Meantime, in current Covid-19 global up to date figures using Worldometer, the reported deaths worldwide currently is 4.5 million. (Sept 2021). This is 0.058% of the global population. 0.2% UK.0.198 % USA 0.16% Sweden (Using Worldometer figs for deaths and population).    

However, we know that the UK presents its figures as deaths with Covid within 28 days of a positive test.  Are we clear what India does? Or China? Or Brazil? Do the Worldometer figures address these different approaches to data collection and interpretation? And indeed, finally, and crucially, how many deaths have actually been prevented by the waves of draconian measures put in place by governments worldwide? It ain't exactly clear.  

What is clear is that distance lends a kind of perspective. The last truly devastating global pandemic was incontrovertibly the so-called Spanish Flu post 1918. The world was at that time already in tremulous shock. That pandemic simply ripped through populations already traumatised. It created a new fractured politics, a new fractured art. However which way we look at the current sets of data, the effects of current pandemic - in terms of illness and death - bears no relation at all to the 1918 devastations. That is exactly clear.  

And so to vaccines.   

Maurice Hilleman was a difficult beast, but massively influential as a vaccinologist at a time when the zeitgeist did not challenge the concept in the way in which we are led to believe today. He is now more or less faded into obscurity. But in his story in the late 1960s, we have many of the elements repeated in today's melange of activity: angst, virtue-driven certitude, mutations, quickly developed vaccines, maverick scientists, conflicting political and medical opinion.  

Interestingly we read this about Hilleman in a 2005 Obituary: [ BMJ Obituary republished in the National Library of Medicine https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC557162/   

"Hilleman characterised several viruses and identified changes that could result when a virus mutated. This concept, which he worked out while at the Walter Reed Institute of Army Research, helped prevent a huge pandemic of Hong Kong flu in 1957. Learning that the flu was a new strain, 40 million doses of vaccine were rapidly made available in the United States."  

"Hilleman's style of working was iconoclastic. Dr Offit said, “To give you an example of how he worked, in 1963, [when his daughter had the classic symptoms of the mumps,] he swabbed the back of his daughter's throat, brought it to the lab to culture, and by 1967, there was a vaccine.” He added, “Today's regulation would preclude that from happening... If Maurice was alive today, I doubt he would be able to be Maurice. He was a very strong-willed person and a person like him could face a high level of inertia.”  

"During his more than 60 years in basic and applied research, he earned a reputation as an often harsh , impatient fellow who tangled with industry and government bureaucracies. Hilleman defended his pushy and prickly behaviour (today also we might say deeply sexist), which offended some colleagues and co-workers, as crucial for science to advance. He argued that politics, not science, determined which breakthroughs were brought to the marketplace".  

And so in the space of 60-odd years, it seems we have a complete volte-face of the public perception about the deployment, and the constitution of vaccines. The mavericks today are named Montagnier, Yeadon, McCullough, Raoult, Fuellmich, Zelenko.....  

In the current marketplace of opinion (for many opinions are indeed monetised via (anti)-social media and burgeoning video platforms), debates are intense. We might look at the assertion that most of the vaccinated population have no idea of the substance they are allowing into their bodies. Or perhaps very little idea. This, of course is incontrovertible. But whether this is a reason alone to vilify the current crop of vaccines, produced in circumstances which are familiar to mainstream virologists, is absurd. The bigger picture is how medicine has become compromised since the development of a post-enlightenment science-based medical establishment, and petroleum-based solutions which have overtaken and more-or-less supplanted natural and holistic medical practice. How to understand and respond to this is a matter for individual conscience. In a free society, this remains a right and is the source of discussion, such as this one.   

Aside from people of faith, for most people living in the maelstrom of modern existence, when defining how we stabilise as best we can, the health of nations, there can be trust in the authority of the day which is paid for through the Social Contract (whether this be via taxation, or democratic affirmation of the majority, or tribal acquiescence). Or we can develop and act upon our  individual knowledge of the workings of viral vectors, mRNA and their relationship to spike proteins et. al. and so act independently according to individual conscience. The perspective of history tells us that this pragmatic approach to medicine - with all the checks and balances of scientific understanding - saves lives and improves the prospects of millions. 

That is the balance which we inhabit in the modern era. But what is new, of course, is the prospect of the weaponizing by governments of the binary between vaccinated and unvaccinated, and between the tested and untested. This set of notes ends where that discussion starts. But the mood music in the airwaves is not promising.   

September 9th 2021

Update: December 27th 2021 : Here we are in the UK.

Recent UK Government announcements on  Covid Passport interventions in the everyday, neatly summed up in terms of Identification Document Validation Technology (IDVT).

For What It's Worth 

Buffalo Springfield. Released December 1966 

There's something happening here

But what it is ain't exactly clear

There's a man with a gun over there

Telling me I got to beware 

I think it's time we stop

Children, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down? 

There's battle lines being drawn

Nobody's right if everybody's wrong

Young people speaking their minds

Getting so much resistance from behind 

It's time we stop

Hey, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down? 

What a field day for the heat  

A thousand people in the street  

Singing songs and they carrying signs   

Mostly say, "Hooray for our side"   

It's time we stop

Hey, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down? 

Paranoia strikes deep

Into your life it will creep

It starts when you're always afraid

Step out of line, the man come and take you away 

We better stop

Hey, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down? 

You better stop

Hey, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down? 

You better stop

Now, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down? 

You better stop

Children, what's that sound?

Everybody look, what's going down?   

Songwriter: Stephen Stills For What It's Worth lyrics © Cotillion Music Inc., Ten-east Music, Springalo Toones, Ten East Music, Richie Furay Music, Cotillion Music, Inc.