Theme: From theory to Practice

FROM THE TITANIC ORCHESTRA TO THE REVOLUTION OF TOLERANCE

IVÁN HERRERA MICHEL. 33°
Ex – Grand Master
Grand Lodge of the North of Colombia

Dear Brothers and Sisters:

For about 400 years and thanks to its experience in multiple nations, the Masonic Order has been accumulating a great cultural and philosophical experience difficult to find in another institution. Although to tell the truth, this accumulation is centered in a high percentage in the western culture since the African, Oriental, Arabian and Amerindian civilizations are really alien to our doctrinarian modernist heritage.  So much is this that in many of the countries from these regions, the Freemasonry is seen by extensive sectors of the national population as historic instruments of cultural penetration and colonial control. 

In a global context such as the postmodernism we live in by luck, this accumulation of cultural and philosophical experience combined in different doses all over the World constitutes an opportunity for the efficiency of the Order because we have among us open mentalities to new comprehensions of knowledge, as well as an inertial tendency to intellectual dynamic. 

Additionally, we cannot forget that likewise we find inside the Order paralyzed Obedience due to the impossibility to assimilate a civilizational change that each day is more vertiginous and uncontrollable. 

Just to mention a single example of this uncontrollable dynamic and the size of the new knowledge setting in which we have to act, we can point out the dominical edition of the New York Times, which contains more information than what our ancestors would have been able to accumulate during their lives, and the fact that there has been less technological advances between Christopher Columbus and us than those that will exist between us and our children. 

The traditions of spiritualist, esoteric and Metaphysical thoughts of diverse antiquities and origins, which in different measures have been incorporated to some of the present forms to conceive the Freemasonry, and which coexist with the rationalist vision, contribute to a view that is being increasingly surpassed by the evolution of the social forms of humanity and is attracting each time less freethinkers to our Lodges. 

Nevertheless a certain and incontrovertible fact is that since the XVIII century, when the speculative Freemasonry was born, the world continued rolling and humanity evolving. Darwin published “The Origin of the Species”; Einstein brought to light the “General Theory of the Relativity”; two world wars came; radio, television, movies, the computer, the Internet, the airplane, the rocket, the atomic and the badly called smart bombs were invented; women equaled themselves to men in their social performance; and the world became a “Global Village”. Man arrived at the moon, he deciphered the human genome and it was confirmed that we are very nearby cousins of the chimpanzee and the orangutan, and little more distant of trees, but either way and literally speaking we are made of the same matter and the same energy as the stars. The solar system is plagued of  exploration satellites; medicine discovered genetic therapies, the therapeutic possibilities of cloning, the mother cells and the transplants of organs; today’s children learn in schools more things, and with very different approaches, than those that we have learned.  Any high school graduate of today is multilingual and knows about spermatozoids, ovules, AIDS and condoms since elementary school; homosexuality is an option that belongs to the area of free development of the personality and not a moral aberration. And in addition they study, as if it was the most natural of the world, disciplines so new to us such as Telematics, robotics and computer science.  And all this in a world highly digitalized in which for first time in the history of humanity youths that integrate join the new generation, know much more since very early than the previous generation about the most advanced scientific and technological advancements. That is to say that the future arrived without we realizing it and it turned out to much more futuristic than what we had imagined. 

Really, we are immersed in which what experts consider the third great revolution of humanity considering the size of the impact in its occurrence. The first revolution occurred in the Neolithic when man became sedentary and discovered the agriculture and the domestication of animals; the second one came in the XVIII century when the vapor machine was invented, and there we were, the Masons adapting to the new changes and leading the progressive thoughts; and the third one is the one we are living in characterized by never imagined applications of the development of science and technology in all fields of knowledge and normal life. In order to mention a single example of the speed in advances in science and technology it is sufficient to recall that according to the results of an investigation carried out in 2003 by the University of California in Berkeley the amount of human knowledge was duplicated between the years 2000 and 2002. And the acceleration of this phenomenon will determine that in the 2020 human knowledge would be duplicated each 72 hours. 

We have then a vertiginous era called post-modernity in which we are irremediably immersed.  And very accurate is Jorge Valdivia, of the Great Mixed Lodge of Chile, in his article titled “Globalization and Freemasonry” when he says post-modernity is a reaction of disillusion towards the objectives and promises not fulfilled by modernity, which has been characterized as an extensive critical phenomenon and solvent of the strong values of modernism.” The important point is that the value systems of the Freemasonry, in most of their present forms, are united with the ones of that modernity that now disillusions. That is to say that it seems to simple view that Masons of today sail on a Titanic that hopelessly is sinking. 

In front of the shifts of paradigms that this dynamics implies, great part of the Freemasonry, especially the one that is defined as Regular, is found in crisis because it does not know that to do and because of the lack of ideological competitiveness of its speech, opts for being plunged, and to be withdrawn to the passive contemplation of the ideology that encouraged great men of the past, throwing the fault of its lack of flexibility and progress to the 25 Landmarks of McKey, or to any another listing of Landmarks, or traditional circumstance. Consequently, the number of its initiations diminishes and the members abandon the Lodges. Some leave because of saturation; others on the search of new intellectual challenges most harmonious with new sensibilities and comprehensions; some more because of health problems; and others, finally because of passing to the Eternal East.  And some more, why not to tell, because they do not know how to explain their close friends the exclusions and anachronisms of an institution they entered thinking it was progressive.

Some 15 days ago, right here in Santiago of Chile, the VII World Conference of Great Regular Lodges met under the express premise that no Mason should introduce a controversial subject in his work, and for that purpose a comitte was named to censor any presentation. It is the orchestra of the Titanic, playing with phlegmatic dignity in the middle of the shipwreck. 

Based on this order of ideas, the importance of the Order for society and the contribution of its Lodges should be located it in its capacity to act like a common receptacle to different forms of thoughts and ideologies, and in the discipline of Tolerance as requirement to encounter different things. 

And here comes to question the dichotomy presented among Masons who want to keep intact the old way to understand Tolerance, limited to the political and religious aspect, that is not longer sufficient to the new social leaders and the Masons that demand a new moral reading of the concept of Tolerance in order to extend it to the different postmodern sensibilities, or to what Javier Otaola accurately calls “the great moral, political and ideological questions of the XXI century that are going to affect our understanding of the human subject and, therefore, of society.” 

An extraordinary Chilean, Pablo Neruda, in 1971, when receiving the Nobel Prize of Literature, said in Stockholm something about poetry that perfectly can be affirmed of the Freemasonry and that can be rephrased as: ”... no Mason has more essential enemy than its own incapacity to understand the most ignored and exploited of its contemporaries; and this is true on all times and all lands.” 

Despite the previous thing, the Freemasonry also has strengths through the appropriate use of post-modernity tools.  Nowadays, the use of the Internet is allowing the Order to build a new imaginary collectivity, uniting many fragmented memories that before only constituted local or regional traditions of limited reaches. From this phenomenon, without doubt, a new conscience of the Masonic thinking and its challenges and opportunities, both in the liberal and progressive spaces as in the regular ones, is arising, which will serve as incubator to new actions. 

Dear Brothers and Sisters:

Whatever the directions that we are seeing disappear and arise to the interior of the Order are, it is clear that Masons do not have the absolute capacity to change the society in which we act to adapt it entirely to our dreams.  And this is not bad, since the Freemasonry, understood as an institution that turns around a central axis represented by tolerance, does not teach us to adopt a system of certain ideas, but invites us not to impose anybody our particular system of ideas. In fact, today the political parties, the NGOs, the public opinion and the factors economic are much more functional to social transformations. The important thing is that we must live within and in agreement with the diversity that exists, and with absolute individual and social responsibility. That is the main issue.

Today we observe new associative forms of the Liberal Freemasonry such as the CLIPSAS that congregates us, and the Forum R.E.F.O.R.M., based in Germany, are barely two examples very known. Their presence is strong in the Internet, and the easy access to their reflections is the main threat for the dogmatic and traditionalist Freemasonry, which sees how Masonic ideas known as progressive are mentioned and discussed in its Lodges with greater frequency. 

Now well, if we assume the proper historic perspective we observe how the speculative Freemasonry (very by the contrary to what happens in many of our present Freemasonries, which base their presentation in images of the past) in its first 300 years, that is, approximately from the 1600’s to the 1900’s, presented itself to the profane criticism though the contemporary executrices of some Masons particularly active in society, either in politics, science, art, or even in sports. The Freemasonry, in those times, was immersed in a cultural revolution of the Tolerance, that still is unfinished, and that it is far from being won. To tell the truth, we have not even earned it inside the Order. 

Dear Brothers and Sisters:

To tell the truth, it is very difficult to finish this revolution of the culture of Tolerance against the different, in which the Freemasonry focused on almost four centuries ago, but society and the Freemasonry will gain more if each Obedience and each Mason, even in this era of post-modernistic definitions, at least tries it. Or in Albert Camus words, if they dedicated themselves to “create in the planet a peace that is not the one of the servants.” This is a way to go from theory to practice.

Many Thanks, dear Brothers.

Asamblea General de CLIPSAS, Santiago de Chile, Chile

Mayo de 2004 – Ponencia de la Gran Logia del Norte de Colombia

Iván Herrera Michel. 33°  – Ex Gran Maestro