Confucius, China, and the Question of Influence: A Reflection Six Years On

 In the second half of one of my 2020 lockdown pieces, ( Churchill and the World as a Struggle against Totalitarianism (link opens in new tab)) I wrote about China’s influence in the UK — particularly through its education system and the pressures placed on Chinese students studying abroad. 

At the time, my concerns were framed in fairly robust terms: ideological conformity, academic freedom under threat, and the long reach of a totalitarian state. Looking back now, six years later, I can see that my instinct was not simply geopolitical – it was closer to Confucius than I realised. 

Churchill, Confucius, and the Question of How We Judge the Past

Today, on VE Day, I’ve been reflecting on how we might look at Churchill — and leadership more broadly — through a Confucian perspective that asks not for perfection, but for the fulfilment of one’s role with integrity, courage, and a sense of the moment.

That reflection is outlined here. It’s not about defending or condemning Churchill, but about asking a deeper question: How should we judge the past, and what do we owe to those who carried burdens we can barely imagine?

A review of Victor Sebestyen’s 'Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy'

 

(Source: The Spectator, Caroline Moorhead's review of Victor Sebestyen’s book )

In this week’s Spectator, a review of Victor Sebestyen’s Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy offers a sobering reminder of how swiftly a modern society can drift from openness to authoritarianism. What struck me most was not the familiar litany of crises — inflation, humiliation, political violence — but the way Sebestyen reconstructs the texture of the years themselves, the sense of people living through turbulence without quite recognising its direction. It is a story that feels uncomfortably close to our own times, precisely because it shows how the erosion of a society and its shared values rarely announces itself until the ground has already given way.

Cartier Bresson and Eliot on the Nature of the “Moment”

 

This piece develops some of the reflections I first explored in my 2019 essay, The Rhapsody of Time Passing. I have been thinking of the phrase "unattended moment" and-the "moment in and out of time" in T S Eliot's Four Quartets. And the "decisive moment" as described by the photographer Cartier-Bresson. There seems to me to be a profound connection between these two descriptions of a moment in time. Here,  I take a wander around that connection.

The Rhapsody of the Instant

There are moments when time behaves itself, and others when it seems to slip sideways. I have long been intrigued by that small perceptual glitch when one glances at a wristwatch and the second hand appears to hesitate, or even move backwards, before settling into its steady march. It is a trivial experience, yet it unsettles something fundamental. The mind expects continuity; the eye reports a stutter. And in that stutter lies a reminder that our access to reality is never as clean or as linear as we imagine.

If time is made of units — seconds, nanoseconds, whatever smallest bead the physicists may one day name — then what occupies the space between the beads? A friend once described this as a kind of cosmic abacus, the universe clicking its way forward. But if that is so, then the gap between the clicks becomes strangely charged: a place where the mind, reaching for the next number, finds instead a moment of suspension. A pause that is not quite time and not quite outside it.

This question — what happens between the units — has stayed with me. It is the same question that animates so much modern literature and art: how to reconcile the measurable with the lived, the clock with the consciousness that resists being parcelled into equal slices.

Bergson's "Pure Duration" and Eliot's Uneasy Struggle

Henri Bergson tried to dissolve the problem by insisting on pure duration, a flow of experience that cannot be chopped into units without doing violence to its nature. Eliot knew Bergson’s thought well; he attended the lectures in Paris in 1910–11, absorbing the promise that time might be experienced as a continuous unfolding rather than a sequence of fatalistic beats. 

But in Rhapsody on a Windy Night, written soon after, Eliot turns away from that optimism. The poem’s speaker walks through the night accompanied by the mechanical tolling of hours — “Twelve o’clock,” “Half-past one,” “Half-past two” — while his mind dissolves into involuntary memories. The clock drives him forward; his consciousness drags him back. No pure duration here. Only the uneasy duet of habit and dream.

Eliot's "Unattended Moment"

And yet, years later, in Four Quartets, Eliot discovers something else: not Bergson’s flowing durée, nor the clock’s rigid divisions, but a moment that arrives unbidden — “the unattended moment, the moment in and out of time.” This is not a moment seized by perception but one that interrupts it. A moment that does not belong to the cosmic abacus at all. It is as if the gap between the beads opens, and something from beyond the sequence looks back at us.

Cartier-Bresson and Eliot - The Contrast: Within and Without

Cartier‑Bresson, working with a camera rather than a pen, found his own version of the charged instant. His “decisive moment” is not outside time but perfectly within it — a fraction of a second in which the world briefly arranges itself into meaning. A boy leaps over a puddle; a cyclist flashes past a stairwell; a gesture, a shadow, a geometry align. The photographer does not create this alignment; he recognises it. His art depends on a taut, almost instinctive attentiveness. The decisive moment is the instant when time, usually so indifferent, suddenly reveals its coherence.

Eliot’s moment, by contrast, reveals its transcendence. Cartier‑Bresson’s is the triumph of perception; Eliot’s is the suspension of it. One redeems time aesthetically, the other metaphysically. And yet both arise from the same human bewilderment: the sense that time is not simply passing but happening — that within its flow there are instants which feel more real than the rest.

Between the Beats

Perhaps this is why the second hand sometimes seems to falter when we look at it. Not because time has stumbled, but because our consciousness has. For a fraction of a second, the mind is caught between the unit and the duration, between the beat and the flow, between the world as it is measured and the world as it is lived. In that hesitation lies the possibility of both the decisive moment and the unattended one — the photographer’s poised readiness and the poet’s receptive stillness.

The instant, it seems, is never merely an instant. It is a threshold. A rhapsody. A brief opening in which time reveals its double nature: the relentless march of the hours, and the mysterious shimmer that lies between them.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Postscript — Within You and Without You

It was only after settling on the heading The Contrast - Within and Without that I realised how close it sits to George Harrison’s song Within You Without You. The echo is accidental, but perhaps not entirely. Harrison had an instinctive feel for the doubleness of experience — the inner life unfolding at its own pace, and the outer world pressing forward with its demands. His song turns on that same tension: the self moving through time, and time moving through the self.

Harrison’s insight was not philosophical in the academic sense, yet it touched the same nerve that Bergson, Eliot, and even Cartier‑Bresson were probing in their different ways. He sensed that life is lived in two tempos at once: the measurable and the immeasurable, the outward rhythm and the inward drift. To live “within you and without you” is to stand, however briefly, at the threshold where those tempos meet.

Or perhaps he was just a very instinctive songwriter.

The Myth of Ēostre: From Bede’s Line to the Bird and the Hare

 

Here, for Easter 2026, I trace  the origins and evolution of the modern myth of Ēostre, the hare, and the egg‑laying bird. Beginning with the sole early reference to the goddess — a single line in Bede’s De temporum ratione — it examines the long historical silence that follows and the nineteenth‑century scholarly reconstruction of “Ostara” by Jacob Grimm. I then explore how independent traditions of the Easter Hare and decorated eggs converged in Victorian imagination, and how American newspaper folklore of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced the now‑familiar tale of a freezing bird transformed into a hare that lays eggs. Rather than an ancient pagan survival, the Ēostre myth emerges as a modern creation shaped by Romantic scholarship, children’s customs, seasonal storytelling, and cultural longing for symbolic meaning at the return of spring.

Part I — The Thin Thread: What Bede Actually Tells Us About Ēostre

If we strip away the pastel rabbits, the egg‑laying hares, and the internet’s fondness for “ancient pagan origins,” we are left with a single, slender thread: a brief remark by an eighth‑century Northumbrian monk. Everything we know — or think we know — about Ēostre begins with Bede, and Bede gives us almost nothing.

In De temporum ratione, his treatise on the reckoning of time, Bede pauses to explain the old English names of the months. When he reaches April, he writes that the Anglo‑Saxons once called it Eosturmonath, “the month of Ēostre,” named after a goddess in whose honour feasts were held. That is the entirety of the ancient record. No myths. No rituals. No sacred animals. No origin story. Just a name.

The silence is as important as the statement. Bede does not describe a cult, a temple, a priesthood, or a narrative cycle. He does not tell us what Ēostre looked like, what she governed, or how she was worshipped. He does not associate her with springtime fertility, with dawn light, with hares, with eggs, or with any of the symbols that modern retellings confidently place at her feet. He gives us a month‑name and a goddess‑name, and then moves on.

This is not unusual for Bede. His purpose was not to preserve pagan mythology but to explain the Christian calendar to an English audience. He mentions Ēostre only because her name lingered in the vernacular. The goddess herself may have been a fading memory even in his own time. Some scholars have gone further and suggested that she may never have existed at all — that Bede, fond of etymology, inferred a goddess behind the month‑name. Whether or not that is true, the fact remains: Bede is our only early witness, and he gives us no story to tell.

For nearly a thousand years after Bede, the name Ēostre disappears from the record. No medieval chronicler elaborates on her. No saga preserves her deeds. No church homily rails against her worship. No folk tradition mentions her. The goddess vanishes as abruptly as she appeared.

This long silence is the necessary starting point for any honest account of the “myth of Ēostre.” It is not a story of ancient continuity but of modern imagination — of how a single line in Bede became the seedbed for a reconstructed goddess, a Victorian springtime fantasy, and eventually the internet’s favourite explanation for the Easter Bunny.

The real story begins not in antiquity, but in the nineteenth century.

Part II — Grimm and the Nineteenth‑Century Rebirth of Ostara

After Bede, the name Ēostre falls silent for nearly a millennium. No medieval chronicler repeats it. No antiquarian glosses it. No folk tradition preserves even a shadow of her. For all practical purposes, the goddess vanishes. And then, in the early nineteenth century, she returns — not from the soil, but from scholarship.

In 1835, Jacob Grimm published Deutsche Mythologie, a vast attempt to reconstruct the pre‑Christian religion of the Germanic peoples. Grimm was a brilliant philologist, but also a Romantic nationalist, working in a cultural moment that longed for a unified German past. Where the record was thin, he was willing to infer, extrapolate, and imaginatively restore. It is in this spirit that he resurrected Bede’s Ēostre and gave her a new, German name: Ostara.

Grimm reasoned that if the Anglo‑Saxons had a spring goddess named Ēostre, then the continental Germans must have had one as well. He pointed to Old High German words such as Ôstarun (Easter) and Ostar‑tag (Easter day) as linguistic evidence of a lost deity. From these fragments, he reconstructed Ostara as a goddess of dawn and spring, a bringer of light and renewal. He imagined her as the personification of the rising sun, the brightening east, the quickening of the year.

But it is crucial to understand what Grimm was doing. He was not citing ancient sources. He was not reporting folklore. He was rebuilding a goddess from etymology and analogy, guided as much by poetic instinct as by evidence. Grimm himself admitted that the material was scant. Yet his reconstruction was compelling — so compelling that later writers treated Ostara as if she had always been there, waiting to be rediscovered.

From Grimm onward, Ostara begins to acquire attributes that Bede never mentioned. She becomes associated with spring flowers, with youthful renewal, with the first warmth after winter. Illustrators depict her as a radiant maiden stepping through thawing fields. Poets place her among blossoms and birdsong. The goddess who had been a single line in Bede becomes, in the nineteenth century, a figure of Romantic imagination.

Still, even here, one thing is missing: the hare. Grimm does not link Ostara to rabbits or hares. He does not mention eggs. He does not tell the story of a bird transformed. Those motifs will come later, from a different strand of nineteenth‑century creativity. But Grimm’s reconstruction provides the soil in which they will take root. By giving Ostara a name, a season, and a symbolic domain, he creates the conceptual space into which the hare and the egg will eventually be placed.

Thus the nineteenth century marks the goddess’s rebirth — not as an object of ancient devotion, but as a figure of scholarly imagination. From here, the modern myth begins to gather its familiar elements, one by one.

Part III — The Modern Myth: Hare, Bird, and Egg

By the time Jacob Grimm published Deutsche Mythologie in 1835, the goddess he called Ostara had been absent from the historical record for a thousand years. Grimm’s reconstruction gave her a season, a symbolic domain, and a poetic aura — but she still had no hare, no eggs, no miraculous transformations. Those motifs would come from elsewhere, through a convergence of folklore, migration, and Victorian imagination.

1. The Hare Before Ostara: A German Folk Tradition

Long before anyone linked a hare to a goddess, German-speaking Protestants had already developed a charming piece of children’s folklore: the Osterhase, the Easter Hare. The earliest written reference appears in 1678, in a medical dissertation by Georg Franck von Franckenau, who describes children eagerly awaiting the hare that brings coloured eggs at Easter.

This tradition was not mythic but domestic — a playful custom, much like the later Santa Claus. The hare was a judge of children’s behaviour, a bringer of treats, a creature of springtime abundance. It had nothing to do with Ēostre or Ostara. It was simply a hare that delivered eggs.

When German immigrants carried the Osterhase to Pennsylvania in the 18th century, the tradition took root in American soil. Children built nests for the hare; the nests became baskets; the eggs became chocolate. The hare was now firmly established in Easter folklore — but still unattached to any ancient goddess.

2. The Egg: Symbolism, Fasting, and Practicality

The egg’s association with Easter has deep roots, but not in Germanic mythology. Eggs were forbidden during the Lenten fast, yet hens continued to lay. By Easter, households had a surplus. Boiling and decorating them became a natural way to mark the end of abstinence.

In Christian symbolism, the egg represented the sealed tomb of Christ, cracked open at the Resurrection. In older Indo‑European traditions, eggs symbolised new life and the renewal of the year. These layers of meaning accumulated over centuries, but none of them involved a hare — and none involved Ēostre.

The modern myth arises when these two independent traditions — the hare and the egg — are brought together.

3. The Victorian Imagination: Ostara Gains Her Animals

The nineteenth century was fertile ground for myth-making. Romantic nationalism, antiquarian enthusiasm, and a hunger for picturesque pagan survivals created a cultural climate in which Grimm’s reconstructed Ostara could be elaborated almost without restraint.

Illustrators began to depict Ostara as a radiant maiden accompanied by hares. Poets placed her among blossoms and birds. The hare, already a symbol of spring and fertility, was a natural companion. Yet these images were artistic inventions, not survivals of ancient lore.

By the late nineteenth century, the association between Ostara and the hare had become so visually and poetically compelling that it began to be treated as traditional. The hare migrated from German children’s folklore into the imagined retinue of a reconstructed goddess.

Still missing, however, was the story that now circulates so widely: the freezing bird transformed into a hare that lays eggs.

4. The Birth of a Modern Legend: Newspapers and Children’s Stories

The fully formed tale — Ostara finding a bird with frozen wings, transforming it into a hare, and granting it the power to lay eggs — appears not in medieval manuscripts, but in late nineteenth‑ and early twentieth‑century American newspapers.

Folklore columns of the period were fond of charming seasonal stories, often presented as “old legends” without sources. These pieces blended Grimm’s reconstructed goddess with the already‑established German Easter Hare and added a narrative flourish that Victorian readers adored: a compassionate goddess, a rescued creature, a miraculous transformation. It was a perfect springtime parable — tender, moral, and picturesque.

By the early 1900s, the story appears in multiple newspapers across the United States. Some versions describe Ostara discovering a small bird shivering in the snow, its wings frozen and useless. Moved by pity, she transforms it into a hare so that it might survive the winter. Yet the creature retains one trace of its former nature: the ability to lay eggs. In gratitude, the hare decorates these eggs and presents them to the goddess at the return of spring.

Children’s books soon adopted the tale, polishing it into a gentle moral fable. Each retelling added new details — the colours of the eggs, the flowers blooming at the goddess’s feet, the hare’s devotion — until the story acquired the soft glow of tradition. By mid‑century, it was widely repeated as “ancient,” even though its earliest textual roots lay in the imaginative journalism of the late Victorian era.

What began as a literary embellishment became, through repetition, a “legend.” And through the cultural alchemy of the twentieth century, it became something even more potent: a myth believed to be old because it feels like it ought to be.

...and so: The Making of a Modern Myth

If we follow the trail with care, the story of Ēostre and her hare is not a tale of ancient pagan survivals but of how modern cultures weave meaning from fragments. It begins with a single line in Bede: a month‑name and a goddess‑name, offered without myth or detail. For a thousand years, nothing more is said. Then, in the nineteenth century, Jacob Grimm resurrects the name and imagines a dawn‑goddess he calls Ostara, shaped as much by Romantic longing as by evidence. Around the same time, the German Easter Hare — a creature of children’s folklore rather than theology — crosses the Atlantic and settles into American custom. Victorian artists and writers, eager for picturesque paganism, place hares at the goddess’s feet. And finally, in the early twentieth century, newspaper storytellers give the myth its narrative heart: the freezing bird, the compassionate goddess, the miraculous transformation, the first egg‑laying hare.

None of this is ancient. Yet none of it is trivial. The myth of Ēostre is not a relic of the distant past but a record of our own imaginative needs. It shows how readily we graft stories onto the turning of the year, how instinctively we people the spring with figures of renewal, how naturally we reach for symbols — the egg, the hare, the thawing bird — to express the fragile abundance of early light. The tale persists not because it is old, but because it feels true in a different register: a parable of mercy, transformation, and the small, bright miracles of survival after winter.

In the end, the myth of Ēostre is a modern creation with ancient resonances. It reminds us that tradition is not only what we inherit but what we make.

1. Stephen Winick — “Ostara and the Hare”

Library of Congress Folklife Center Blog >>> here A clear, engaging explanation of how the modern bird‑to‑hare story emerged.

2. Ronald Hutton — The Stations of the Sun

Oxford University Press >>> here A readable, authoritative history of British seasonal customs, including Easter.

3. Venetia Newall — An Egg at Easter

Indiana University Press >>> here A beautifully written exploration of egg symbolism and Easter traditions worldwide.

4. Jacob Grimm — Teutonic Mythology (English Translation)

Free digital edition (Archive.org) >>> here The 19th‑century reconstruction that reintroduced “Ostara” into modern thought.

5. Bede — The Reckoning of Time (Excerpt)

Fordham Medieval Sourcebook >>> here Contains the only early reference to Ēostre.

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. 

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. 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 some 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 very much in play. 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

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.

Further Reading:

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 (Internet Archive)

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)

  

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.