television killed the secret handshake

Music: Marconi Union: Under Wires and Searchlights

It's always nice to report I'm done with an essay, so I'm feeling nice today. I will run over the whole thing once more, do final edits, and send it off. This marks the third essay of the summer, and so, I should be able to relax a bit more. Not having things in pipes makes me nervous, you know, since I spend so much time on these tubes.

No, I'm not gloating people: most of you are married, some of you have kids, and therefore you "have a life." I have gardening and social engagements, no church or charities, no pressing social issues to fight for (my activist colleagues make me feel guilty sometimes), and a lot of sublimation to go around. Oh, were it not so!

Anyhoo, Jodi Dean's book still hasn't arrived (grrr), so I decided just to cut her out of the conclusion and maybe work with her theories on another project I am planning to work on with Dale (stuff on publics, secrecy, and maybe Coleridge and the early German Romantics). I found an article in Political Theory that she wrote that works just fine for this piece. Gosh I really like her work; she's doing very neat stuff smartly (and does not hop on that Zizek-bashing bandwagon so popular these days--I mean, Zizek has his bad moments, but he had a lot of good nuggets of helpfulness). Here we go:

Concluding Remarks: Is There No Help for the Widow's Son?

The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry is a school of instruction [and] its subjects are morality and philosophy. The moral domain is composed of both precept and example . . . knowledge and action. . . . The accomplishment of the second half of the educational mission of the Rite, however, has received little emphasis . . . . like a river seeking the smoothest route, the Rite has steadily moved away from instruction on philosophy and continued to place a greater emphasis on its charitable endeavors.
--Rex R. Hutchens, 33°[1]

Hutchens' observation that Scottish Rite Masonry has gradually moved away from its rhetorical theory or "philosophy" is frequently the beginning premise of most occult scholarship in the past two centuries.[2] Many of Albert Pike's scholarly works, for example, begin in an elitist tone: "The highest claim of Freemasonry to consideration is that it is a philosophical truth, concealed from the masses and taught to adepts by symbols," argues Pike. And yet, "every intelligent Mason knows that of every hundred of the Brethren . . . not more than two or three regard the symbolism of Freemasonry as of any real value, or care to study it."[3] Pike hoped that his efforts to enhance and amplify the mystery of Masonry by re-writing and rendering more dramatic the Scottish Rite degrees would inspire the intellectual and spiritual curiosity that he saw lacking among the Masons of his time. His worry was that the philosophical mission of Freemasonry was increasingly eclipsed by Masonic sociability and charity. In this essay, I have argued that Pike's fears have been realized: if the recent rhetorical efforts of Masons to publicize the fraternity are any measure, then Masonry is giving up on its theory of rhetoric and the centrality of mystery to that theory. To this end I first described what the fraternity is and does in very general terms, and then moved on to specify a Masonic rhetoric: like most modern occult rhetoric, Masonic discourse (1) is socially discriminatory; (2) historically helped to create a safe space for free discussion; (3) functions enthymematically and phatically; and (4) is deliberately mysterious in order to inspire curiosity, respect, and so on. After revisiting Griffin's description of the failed rhetorical responses of the fraternity to negative publicity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I then showed how the most recent Masonic strategy has been to divest Masonry of its symbolic philosophy in favor of stressing the civic, social, and charitable mission of the Order. In short, at least in the popular press, Masons are deliberately dismantling the mystery or fetish character of their Order.

Owing to the introductory and descriptive mission of the present essay, space prevents any thorough discussion of the wider, cultural meaning of the Masons' rhetorical response to recent publicity. Nevertheless, I want to close by arguing that continued study of the Fraternity can fruitfully contribute to discussions about issues that are important to rhetorical scholars, most especially those concerning the transformation of publics in our time and the relationship of this transformation to a decline in civic engagement. For example, during their interview on Good Morning America at the Scottish Rite Temple in Washington, D.C., Charles Gibson and S. Brent Morris linked civic engagement directly with the clandestine character of Masonry:

Gibson: . . . one of the things that struck me, you've all talked about the fact you do good works, very supportive of one another, but membership is diminishing in the Freemasons.
Morris: Indeed it is. Membership has diminished in the Freemasons since 1960. But it's also diminished in virtually every voluntary organization in the United States. It's a mystery for sociologists.
Gibson: Why? Private societies, secret societies, whichever word you want to use, raise suspicions. Are some of those suspicions the reason you think that membership declines?[4]

Morris responds that "you can't point to just the Masons' traditions," implying that the mystery of the fraternity is not the issue. I think Morris is wrong.

As the widely read scholarship of Robert D. Putnam has shown, Morris is correct to diagnose a general decline in the participation in civic groups. The reasons behind this decline, however, are not a mystery: Putnam locates the decline in the complexities of major social changes including urbanization, the erosion of the nuclear family (e.g., divorce rates), the move of women into the workplace, and most especially the arrival of mass media entertainment technologies:

First, news and entertainment have become increasingly individualized. No longer must we coordinate our tastes and timing with others in order to enjoy the rarest culture or most esoteric information . . . . with my hi-fi Walkman CD [player] . . . I can listen to precisely what I want to when I want and where I want. . . . Second, electronic technology allows us to consume this hand-tailored entertainment in private, even utterly alone.[5]

To put it in the language of Dummies and Idiots, television killed the secret handshake.

What both Morris and Putnam fail to discuss, however, is the centrality of secrecy to notions of the public and civic engagement and where the site of secrecy has shifted. Following the work of Reinhart Koselleck, Jürgen Habermas traces the emergence of the ideal of the public sphere to the interplay of publicity and secrecy; coffee house meetings, reading groups, and Masonic lodges are described as nascent publics. For Habermas,

The decisive element [of lodges] was not so much the political equality of the members but their exclusiveness in relation to the political realm of absolutism as such: social equality was possible at first only as an equality outside the state. The coming together of people into a public was therefore anticipated in secret, as a public sphere existing largely behind closed doors.[6]

And it was behind the lodge doors, guarded with passwords and handshakes, that the "rational faculty" was protected from the counter-secret machinations and "chanceries of the prince."[7] For both the state and the lodge, Habermas argues, publicity had to "rely on secrecy" until methods of rational deliberation and judgment in private helped to topple the secrecy of the state in demands for transparency. Nevertheless, the unforeseen consequence of "social equality," suggests Habermas, is that "secret societies fell pray to its own ideology" as other publics began to demand transparency for counterpublics of all sorts, which is precisely what the U. S. Anti-Masonic movement illustrates.[8] The decline of Freemasonry is paradoxically symptomatic of the realization of republican ideals.

Coupled with Putnam's technological explanation for the decline in civic enjoyment in the United States, Habermas' analysis would support the argument I have advanced in this essay: Freemasonry is on the decline because it has no secrets and because its leaders do not seem to morn the loss of the drama and inspiration of mystery so central to its tradition. Furthermore, if the formation of a given public is discerned rhetorically at the sites of discrimination, if, as Jodi Dean argues, the constitutive limit of publicity is the site of secrecy, then the true public of Masonry has shifted to publics of entertainment.[9] This would imply, of course, that the drama of secrecy on the page and screen has analogously become the scene of spiritual insight as much as it has become the locus of public debate (or rather, the place where talking heads debate for us so that we are relieved of the burden).[10] Insofar as Masonic leaders are "giving it up" in the hip-hop argot of contemporary accessibility,[11] Masonry will never exist as an important, civic public again. Increasingly, Masonry's public will only exist in the imaginary networks created by the readerly circulation of Dan Brown's forthcoming novel, The Solomon Key. However ironically, an analysis of Masonic rhetoric tells us that the contemporary techno-logics of publics and democracy have put Freemasonry to death.

Notes

1 Hutchens, Pillars of Wisdom, 1.
2 I would argue, in fact, that such an assumption helped to generate the explosion of speculative work and analysis on Freemasonry that occurred in the mid- and late nineteenth centuries in the first place!
3 Pike, Symbolism, 75.
4 Morris, "Good Morning," paras. 36-39.
v 5 Putnam, Bowling Alone, 216-217.
6 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 35.
7 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 35.
8 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 35.
9 Jodi Dean, "Publicity's Secret." Political Theory 29 (2001): 624-650. Her book of the same title expands this argument in relationship to mass media technology.
10 Dean, "Publicity's Secret," 628.
11 Despite what I think is an anti-intellectual tone, Hodapp's humorous language in Freemasonry for Dummies is enjoyable. His description of "all those aprons, pins, and medals" is titled "Masonic bling-bling." See Hodapp, Dummies, 109.