Curitiba/2002
The construction of a current Masonic Ethics
Ivan Herrera Michel, 33º
Past Grand Master
Gran Logia Del Norte De Colombia
For our grandparents things were simple: they lived in a world of certainties. The world had begun 4.000 years before Christ; according to the Bible, the first human beings were Adam and Eve. A system existed with prizes and punishments. There were clear rules necessary to complete, and it was easy. If they didn’t oppose the majority opinion, they lived a life without anxieties. They were honorable if they professed with enthusiasm homeland, religion and family feelings, respecting the social structure. In that society all fulfill their role without questioning it because a project of similar life guaranteed the tranquility of conscience.
The Freemasons, meanwhile, fought to strengthen the individual's paper in front of the abuses of the throne and the altar and to achieve that their political parties, more or less Jacobins, more or less anticlerical, reached the control of the State. And the biggest difference was that the Conservatives went to mass at 5 and the Liberal to mass at 7.
On the contrary, is our story. Today's Freemasons, the destination of facing the question and the negation of the big stories of our cultures, and consequently to the exam of the foundations of the Order, and their current justification, always looking for new answers to the questions: What is the Masonry? For what reason does it serve? What does it contribute today to the tomorrow's world?
As the above-mentioned foundation there are three ethical ones Masons have to cultivate: That of the individual, that of the citizen, and that of the human species.
Then, let us begin with an elementary question: What quality is recognized by the adjective “Masonic”? What makes an ethics to be “Masonic”? What is it that in fact distinguishes an object when it possesses the epithet “Masonic” that is not pointed out when another shows?
It is explained to ourselves: our parents, our schools, our neighbors, our friends and a long line of relatives taught us that we should be good children, good husbands, good parents, good citizens and useful men to our society. Our university instructed us, through two or three subjects, about the obstacles that impede the free development of the thought. The Constitutional literature of our country imposes the respect to our individual, social, economic and cultural fundamental rights, as well as our guarantees and duties. If the Masonry repeats this, then we have more than enough. But if the Order contributes to us something different and valuable then we should wonder: What is that "something different" that contributes to us?
A first approach to the answer could be related with the paper that for the citizen and the society has had the Speculative Masonry in the last 4 centuries. And here we find a trip: Which of the Masonry?: the Deistic? or the one that doesn't accept women neither lame? or the one that does accept them? or the non-dogmatic one? or the liberal one? or the one that thought shop is? or the Anglo-Saxon from United States that boasts of Regulating and does practice for more than two centuries racial segregation with the Afro-Americans Freemasons of that country? or the aristocratic English? or the progressive one French? or the mystic? or the metaphysic? or the Latin American Patriot?
Logically our appreciations are certain, in their biggest part, for the Masonry that is practiced in the “Great Lodge of the North of Colombia”, to be the one that we have practiced for a long time.
Anyway, all the Freemasons that we know, without distinction, share a common denominator: We have made the decision of coming closer to a Lodge in order to acquire new knowledge that improved our social, professional, intellectual and personal aspects of life. And to faith that today has improved our potential of being better citizens and our capacity to act autonomously in the civil society.
In the first instance we were in contact with lessons that spoke to each other of polishing the gross stone of our own nature and, in the case of the Liturgies that we practice in Colombia, of developing the sense of the honor, of the knowledge and of the virtue. Until this the new thing consisted on the invitation to comment this surrounded morality of the formality that make implicit the Masonic ceremonies, and the comments coming from men that were boasted being defined like liberal thinkers. Then we were invited to cultivate the science and lastly, to close the symbolic cycle, to intellectually produce meditation about the teachings of the phenomena of life and death. The books taught us what we should understand for freedom, equality and fraternity by the light of multiple events in America and Europe.
It arises after this stage, for those that persist in the Order, as first necessity the incorporation of the new ideological dexterities to the society, if it wants to conform to a new pact and one renovated society, and to opt for an authentic State of pluralistic right in which the citizens have not only equality of opportunities before the law, but, what is more important, in the face of the life.
Us, today's Freemasons, are conscious that the understanding of the behaviors in the current world, where multiple postures exist, demands, besides the scientific investigation, the acceptance of the imperative of the human dignity based in a free, autonomous and educated human being. One cannot make today a Masonic ethics turned to the amplification of our understandings, and, through it, the one of those that surround us. A key element could be the flexibility for adapting to the changes of contexts that the new knowledge are creating permanently. And a basic central principle is the mutualism, that is to say, the born ethics of to the relationship with the “other”.
In this order of ideas, we consider that the Masonry only makes a social ethical sense if it is conceived as a meeting point dedicated to non academic developments, but yes formative, where it offers integral education to each one of its members, adopting with methodology the direct contact with men coming from different social classes, economic possibilities, races, cultures, national or family origin, religion, political or philosophical opinion, beliefs or non beliefs, personal formation, professional, etc. Of this environment emerge the Mason endowed with more qualified and ideologically more competitive civic dexterities that those that could possess somebody that has not had contact with a similar group. Here it is where the fundamental difference resides in front of other groups and to the justification of the Masonry in a democratic society, since this experience is not given, for example, in the universities where all the participants obtain a similar education and formation. The diversity of the social origin, the maturity of the thought, and the different focuses in the analysis of a topic in consideration, makes the difference when enriching the Freemasons and, through them, to the society, for natural extrapolation of the new ethical attitudes.
Now then: Which are the indispensable conditions to reach the social objectives of the mentioned group without containing the variables that waste it?
The answer is: the Freedom of conscience, the mutual tolerance, the guarantee for the diversity and the sanction for the intransigence, practiced inside a dialectical mark.
It is for this that our enlarged capacity of civic participation, now from the biggest qualification in the foundations of their philosophical principles, should contribute to the pluralism, to the acceptance of the difference, and to the tolerance to the diverse opinion tendencies, in the societies in that we are immersed. Without forgetting that parallelly, while Freemasons work in our Lodge, it has taken the form of the scientific perception that some way the whole universe belongs to a single plot, as well as the reflection on the characteristics of our relationships with the nature. This brings us to a topic on which we should stop to open the way to their ethical implications.
It is clear that this current thought, in vogue among intellectuals, and its necessary sensibility, strengthens with knowledge that don't have a lot of antiquity. For example: To know, from certain science, of the existence of about 5.000 galaxies, with hundred of millions of stars that possess millions of planets rotating around them. The scientific calculations speak of one followed by 15 zeros of planets with possibilities of some type of life. Until the director of the Astronomical Observatory of the Vatican (headquarters of the international institution that with more success has opposed the development of the knowledge during the last 1.500 years) declared some months ago “it is a madness to think that we are alone”.
Today the men know ourselves fruit of 3.800 million years of evolution (2.000 million of them without oxygen in the atmosphere, that which enlarges the possibilities of life in the universe when not being necessary this element), of which we have been human hardly the last 300.000 years, and it has been demonstrated that only about 25.000 years ago our current memory capacities were shot, of data evaluation and making of decisions, what allowed the creation of what we call with pride “Human Civilization”, producer in multiple ways of sublime art, of supreme barbarisms, blinding technologies, etc.
The discoveries about the human genome, of the cells mothers and the embryonic clonation of cells with therapeutic ends that promise to eliminate nearly 6.000 illnesses of genetic cause, and to cure a great quantity of them taken place by virus, as well as to the every time bigger potential of genetic engineering; the studies of the Paleontology and the Anthropology that suggest to us that we have been the third species of human primates endowed with intelligence, language, etc, (extinct are two of them. The last one about 15.000 years ago, because they didn't develop adaptable changes like those made by our grandparents) they recommend to us that the answers to the old questions about who we are, from where we came and it stops where we go it is necessary to look for them, no longer in the philosophical ponderings, neither in the religious dogmas or in those metaphysician enunciates, but, through the responsible scientific activity setting to the humanity's service.
The animal life in Earth has suffered 5 massive extinctions in its 550 million years of existence and in them 99% of the species that have thrown the course of the evolution have disappeared. It has been calculated in 40.000 million species have lived in front of the 40 millions of them that exist. Nowadays a lifetime consists on a thin superficial movie of the planet that represents a ten millionth part of its weight. And it surprises for the vulnerable thing. The lightest cosmic change would make it disappear. At least in their current forms.
The certain thing is, to let us be what we are, where we are, and we should be conscious of our real possibilities of survival like society, as species, as well as that of the necessary habitat.
The search of the scientific knowledge that develops a more efficient medicine, and a bigger domain of the laws of the physics with the purpose of that we are less vulnerable to the threats of the non alone exterior is a duty but also a necessity for the survival. An extraordinary feat for a species that has just arrived in the last second of the history of the universe.
By way of illustrative example of the necessity of continuing deepening our scientific knowledge, we can remember that about three months ago it was informed to the public opinion that a meteorite the size of France, that had only been discovered, a few days prior, passed very close to Earth. The horrifying news is that it came towards us and we had nothing to make it deviate its course or to reduce the impact. Two are the well-known antecedents that we have, of a collision of this nature: the first one was a similar impact that produced the separation of a part of the planet (the Moon) that was gravitating around him; and the second, about 65 million years ago, when a much smaller asteroid that fell in the gulf of Mexico and it resulted in the disappearance of 95% of the life in the planet including that of the dinosaurs.
But not all the threats are exogenous. Thanks to the extraordinary success of the human species in their adaptable radiation, to the tremendous impact on the Earth of the 6.000 million men, to the development in the last two hundred years of technical destructive, and to the pillagings for the sake of the economic productivity, it is getting lost in the earth the environmental balance: we have produced the contamination of the seas, the rivers and the underground waters, the heating of the planet, the decrease of the layer of ozone, the acid rains, etc. Six million hectares of earth disappear annually causing millions of human beings to die for problems related with to hunger. According to the United Nations, the forest cover of the planet will have diminished in 40% for the year 2010 with regard to 1990, and nearly 15 million hectares of forests disappear every year. Four times Switzerland. A single square kilometer of humid forest in the occident of Colombia possesses bigger biodiversity that the whole United Kingdom, and near here, in the virgin forests of the Amazons, live today nearly 50% of the species of the Earth, and at this time 60% of the oxygen of the globe is taking place.
On the other hand, the chemical waste of the precursors substances that contribute the developed countries, of North America and Europe, so that drugs take place or be produced, with final destination to their own internal markets, in laboratories located here in South America, in full Amazon forest, far from their civic consciences, they are contaminating important sources of water, and making millions of square kilometers of the first lung of the planet disappear, as much for the erosion as for the overflowed cut of trees with ends of cultivation of plants of coca and poppy. The Colombians know for own experience the disastrous consequences that in the social and economic structures of the underdeveloped towns, they throw the economic pressures of the great global illicit market and the double moral of the financial centers of the countries of the first world.
Seen the aforesaid, it is fortunate that in big multilateral Masonic forums, be debated, with whole freedom, in the dawn of a new Renaissance, the topic of the Masonic ethics that constitutes for us, without place to doubts, the philosophical foundation of the Mason's ideological competitiveness in today's world; since before a new context of knowledge and threats, the Masonry should be applied, if it is defined as progressive (and it cannot be otherwise without betraying the intention of its founders), in developing a new order sense to each other in the relationship of the human beings, and with the universe. And to achieve it, cannot forget that the man should establish a direct bond among the participation of his civilization, more and more technological, and the stability of the natural phenomena that allow a half suitable one for the life in the Earth.