AN OBJECTIVE VIEW OF FREEMASONY (XII) – UNITY IN DIVERSITY IS THE REAL GOAL

By a blog reader.

Masonic ideology encouraged members to think beyond the local and the national to the global, beyond religious and political differences, and to embrace “others” as their brothers.

It was celebrated for its ability to transcend the boundaries that divided men, and for providing a globalized frame of reference. It helped members understand and negotiate the world they were living in. It facilitated men’s ability to negotiate strange and difficult worlds. In the process, Freemasonry helped lubricate several other agents of globalization, including trading networks, migration flows, and empires, and also set many modern notions such things as a liberal democracy and pluralism and so many things we now take for granted and it started doing all this well before the days of telegraphs or steamships, let alone the advent of jet planes and the Internet. 

Ultimately, the tension between the fraternity’s ideology of egalitarian brotherhood and the empires’ hierarchical, and often times racialized ethos, which sought to differentiate between the rulers and the subjugated, the tension that existed between what Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs (undoubtedly the greatest historian to read on the subject the spread of freemasonry and from whom I have borrowed so liberally) terms “brothering” and “othering,” would likewise inevitably come to a head for those masonic ideals were ultimately at odds with empire and domination and would lead to some of the most consequential events in geopolitics and the formation of the modern world. Not because Freemasonry as an organized entity actively sought let alone plan them, but because its members applied its ideals to the world they lived in.

In this extract, I have consciously and repeatedly called Freemasonry as ‘cosmopolitan’ and I did so to contrast it to another world view which is called ‘universalist’. Whereas universalism, as clearly espoused by the transnational corporate and technocratic oligarchies of today disregards and steamrolls over peculiarities, cosmopolitanism actively “encourages engagement with and appreciation of difference”.

Freemasonry was the laboratory where the local and the global could be both understood and appreciated and above all finely balanced in a way that one reality does not eradicate the other. For Freemasonry ‘unity in diversity’ was a real goal and not a political buzzword that it eventually became.

In the next article I will delve into how Freemasonry affected the world that we live in and also explain the emergent growing rift between British and Continental Freemasonry. In doing so I will have to take many shortcuts otherwise I’ll be writing here forever.

Subsequently, we will turn our attention to the ‘hot topics’ – Freemasonry and Secrecy and Freemasonry and Religion and its relationship in particular with regards to Catholicism before providing a brief overview of Freemasonry in Malta and finally, whether Freemasonry is still relevant today.