Freemasonry: A Very Short Introduction - Andreas Önnerfors 2017
The attractiveness of the myth
Perceptions, prejudices, and persecutions
From the outset, public perception of freemasonry was determined by a tension between secrecy and transparency, and the same tension remains today. In freemasonry, secrecy is a constitutive organizational feature and a key element of internal knowledge formation; thus, it is opposed to revelation, and revealing secrets/hidden material is and always has been one of the main purposes of all forms of news media outlets, from 18th-century journals to the Internet. It is therefore no wonder that freemasonry has always featured extensively in the press. In addition, secrecy prompts speculation and prejudice, no matter how transparent freemasonry has generally been historically or today. The circularity of negative press treatment of freemasonry leading to apologetic writings by masonic representatives has created a dynamic that has prevailed throughout the centuries.
The standard objection voiced against masonic secrets is: how can the public trust what freemasonry says of itself, if secrecy is part of the masonic practice for initiates? How can initiates of lower degrees trust the aims and motives of their (potentially unknown) superiors? In the end, these questions cannot be answered in an entirely rational fashion. They are intimately connected to perceptions, anxieties, and the amount of mutual trust people are prepared to allow in interpersonal relations and society; in particular, they relate to how much trust governments are prepared to have in their citizens.
The popular association of freemasonry with conspiracy is partly due to the extraordinary claims the fraternity has made regarding its ancestry and importance, which have been a continual part of masonic lore. After all, The Constitutions associate freemasonry with almost all important building projects since the Ark. Ramsay’s ’Discours’ linked the fraternity to the medieval orders of the Crusades and (along with many later authors) to a host of ancient cults. Thus, the supposed connection between freemasonry and grandiose events and players in world history could easily be perceived as demonstrating the group’s motivation to play a leading role in high-level, political events; and, as such, it is unsurprising if this has led to a recycling of these links in literature and pop culture references.
For more than three centuries, a link between freemasonry and political order has been part of many countries’ public perception. People have imagined the secrecy of freemasonry as running contrary to the foundations of society under a variety of political systems, ranging from oppressive anciens régimes to totalitarian states and open democracies.
Through its organizational practices, freemasonry itself has indeed contributed to the development of political culture in civic society. The ’Great Schism’ of 1877 introduced a division between masonic bodies with regards to societal and political activism. Masonic modes of organization could potentially be misused for the promotion of agendas of radical political change, as demonstrated by the Illuminati, some nationalistic, quasi-masonic associations such as the Italian ’Carbonari’, and radical Irish loyalist orders. In other cases freemasonry has been closely aligned with the governing elites and an integral part of political culture. Adjustment of the politics of the time to the existence of freemasonry has either been smooth, as in the Scandinavian countries, or it has led to tensions with other groups in society, as in France.
The anti-masonic discourse of the 18th century, which has remained in latent existence since the beginnings of modern organized freemasonry in London, peaked around the time of the French Revolution. Freemasonry was seen not only as a danger to existing social order but also as potentially orchestrating radical political change. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, this perception opened the way for a mixing of anti-masonic sentiment with that of anti-Semitism and anti-socialism/communism. Equally, totalitarian communist regimes such as that of the Soviet Union also used anti-masonic thinking—only there freemasonry embodied the preservation of bourgeois political values (threatening those of a socialist/communist system) and had to be combated at any price. Prohibition of freemasonry and active persecution of masons then prevailed until the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Home Affairs Committee investigations into the role of freemasonry in the judiciary and public life carried out in Britain around 2000 demonstrate that even in one of the oldest democracies of the world, perceptions of freemasonry continue to be uneasy. From the margins of public debate, the issue of freemasonry has moved into mainstream media and governmental decision-making processes, where stereotyped images have been recycled, images that are likely to remain for the foreseeable future. What is most remarkable is that the governmental inquiry and other groups have frequently stated that fears, negative publicity, public concerns, suspicions, allegations, perceptions, images and—perhaps most intriguing—’beliefs’ are factors that must all be seriously taken into account in the political climate of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This statement might be interpreted as indicating that the rules of public debate have been derailed, that arguments of passion are now placed above those of rational deliberation—and this has chilling parallels to the debates during 2016 surrounding Brexit and the US presidential election and the contemporary rise of populism in world politics.
It is not difficult to identify similarities between the current (post-)political climate and the weak democracies of the 1920s, when the proponents of totalitarian ideologies cunningly exploited purely emotional perceptions of political realities for their own purposes. Another interesting aspect of the British case from the late 1990s is that religious arguments against freemasonry were voiced (although not included in the governmental investigations). This seems to indicate that religion once again plays an increasingly important role in societal debates, even in open societies such as Britain. In the Catholic and Orthodox countries of Eastern Europe, freemasonry’s alleged incompatibility with Christianity has re-emerged as one of its most noted features.
In the 21st century, religion has indeed returned as a strong factor in politics. In the contemporary climate of growing political polarization charged with religious undertones, it is not unlikely that a negative perception of freemasonry could soon be amalgamated with a politicized Islamophobia, both because of masonic religious tolerance and because of a naïve and inaccurate view that anything that might be branded anti-Christian or heterodox runs contrary to allegedly ’true’ Western values. At the same time, freemasonry is an easy target for fundamentalist Islamism, which has incorporated and never revised anti-masonic conspiracy theories from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion discussed earlier. Such developments would follow the logics of both post-Revolutionary France and late-19th-century argumentation, but—more frighteningly—would be reminiscent of the situation in the 1920s, when freemasonry and its perceived role in world politics were demonized by both the far left and the far right.