Four Industrial Revolutions: Four Stages of English Freemasonry
‘My world is my language and the limits of my world are the limits of my language.’
(Ludwig Wittgenstein)
Novus Ordo Seclorum: of which, ‘He approves’ (sic). The term, ‘new world order’ has been used for centuries to describe radical, change.
Novus Ordo Seclorum
IMAGE LINKED: wikimedia Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
This article is an introduction to a four-part series titled,
‘Four Industrial Revolutions: Four Stages of English Freemasonry’
Part 1, ‘Enlightenment Freemasonry: Introduction’.
Rapid radical change, often termed, ‘revolution’, generated new world orders; they rendered some human life forms unfit for future purpose and were superseded.
Old forms were held up to enlightenment and found wanting! Since the formalisation of English freemasonry in 1723, there have been radical changes impacting on all of life.
Readers of The Square will be familiar with the suggestion that the history of the last three hundred years can be seen through the lens of four industrial revolutions which had, and are having, the most significant and substantial impact how humankind ‘lives, moves, and has its being’.
‘Lives’ indicates a place in nature; ‘moves’ indicates activity in the humansphere; and, ‘being’ indicates identity and purpose. These change radically between 1723 and 2016 and can be described as four new world orders; obviously, this includes the development of freemasonries.
Industrial = the production and distribution of food, clothing, shelter, and communication.
Technology = applying the predictability and control emanating from scientific methodology to materials and production.
Revolution = rapid change: exceeding limits.
Humankind = (i) designers and users of tools (technology); and, (ii) capable of large-scale, language-based, cooperation – this is the real genius of species sapiens.
History = nature + culture.
Radical transformations require new descriptions and thereby, entail new language use – new life forms – new words and old words with new uses.
1st Industrial Revolution: ecclesiastical concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ needed enlightenment with a conjoining of scientific methodology and Renaissance humanism.
2nd Industrial Revolution: established an imperial ‘truth and ‘reality’.
3rd Industrial Revolution: questioned the concept of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’.
4th Industrial Revolution: the concepts ‘truth’ and reality’ surplus to human requirements.
Four Industrial Revolutions and Stages of English Freemasonry
|
Industrial Revolution |
Nature and Technology Man and Machine |
Cultural Milieu |
Masonic Phase |
Masonic Milieu |
|
1st 1723- 1873 |
Iron; coal; steam. Assisting physicality. |
Enlightenment |
Introduction |
Dissenter; Whig- Radical. |
|
2nd 1874- 1983 |
Steel; electricity; oil. Managed interface. |
Modernism |
Growth |
Church of England; Establishment. |
|
3rd 1984- 2015 |
Silicon; computing; blue-collar robotics. Cognitive partnership. |
Post Modernism |
Maturity |
Ecumenical Social Democratic Open. |
|
4th 2016- Present |
Nanotechnology; AI; white-collar robotics. Conjoining. |
Post Truth |
Decline |
Inclusive; Secularist; Digital. |
It is trusted to dilate on the second, third and fourth industrial revolutions in subsequent issues of The Square
Part 1 Enlightenment Freemasonry: Introduction Phase
|
Industrial Revolution |
Nature and Technology Man and Machine |
Cultural Milieu |
Masonic Phase |
Masonic Milieu |
|
1st 1723- 1873 |
Iron; coal; steam. Assisting physicality. |
Enlightenment |
Introduction |
Dissenter; Whig- Radical. |
Nature, Technology, Man and Machine: Scientific methodology, as demonstrated with the Copernican Revolution, located the sun at the centre of the known universe.
The Royal Society, chartered in 1662 brought together the knowledgeable elite. Nature, which included humankind, could be understood as a great machine/mechanism.
“Life is but a motion of limbs. For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body….” (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 1651)
Herein was inspiration for an industrial vision.
prototype steam engine – constructed by Thomas Newcomen for pumping subterranean water from the Griff Collery, Warwickshire
IMAGE LINKED: wikimedia Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
The earliest available engineering drawings of a steam-powered pump (likely of a later version) were produced by John Theophilus Desaguliers Fellow of the Royal Society and published shortly before his death in 1744. He was the Grand Master of English Freemasonry in 1719.
Hand tools and machine tools were designed by humans, for the assistance of humans, by doing the heavy-lifting and increasing output.
In 1714, a prototype steam engine was constructed by Thomas Newcomen for pumping subterranean water from the Griff Collery, Warwickshire.
Fortitude Lodge No. 131 was established in 1772 in the mining area of Truro, Cornwall.
IMAGE credit: the square magazine Digital Collection (CC BY 4.0)
Textile production, the spinning of yarn and the weaving of cloth, was domestic industry; for some, their ‘moving’ revolved around the wheel and the loom.
However, by the mid eighteenth-century, ancillary processes such as washing and bleaching were mechanised and accommodated in purpose-specific buildings, adjacent to clean, fast-running, water. Principally, these were in Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Ulster.
Spinning and weaving became mechanised and powered by water wheels in buildings known as water mills, abbreviated to ‘ the mill’. From the nineteenth century, steam engines replaced waterwheels; however, the buildings continued to be called mills and some remain so-called to this day. The term ‘factory’, an abbreviation for manufactory, was slow to gain traction.
Other than in mining and textiles, most factory production was in smaller units including the ceramics industry led by Stoke on Trent freemason, Josiah Wedgewood.
In 1766 he wrote of, “…. the extensive capability of our manufacture for further improvement… a revolution at hand.” With human design and control, machines were used to make better performing machine components and hence, better performing machines; this required a standardisation of measurement.
Manual operations became industrial processes necessitating technical writing and manuals.
Industry’s most spectacular achievement was the self-moving (locomotive) steam engine. The railways provided hitherto inconceivable accessibility and mobility.
With the introduction of railway timetables, ‘moving’ was now planned to, and by, the minute; this was adopted in factories where time became machine time, time-based work schedules were introduced and thereby, formalised the division of labour.
New industry needed new central infrastructure. It took the form of: joint-stock companies, banking, insurance commodity/stock markets and credit instruments.
By 1848, over 9,000 miles of railway track had been laid and began the age of capital. The introduction of the electric telegraph in the 1840s enabled the instantaneous transmission of information by wire.
The growth of industrial manufacturing accelerated the migration from the countryside to the urbansphere. In 1723 Britain’s urban population was estimated at 20%.
By 1801, the first census indicated 33%; and by 1851, 50%: Britain was the first major nation to become urbanised. (By 1950, the world had become urbanised.) The 1871 census indicated the urbansphere accommodating 65% of the population and represented the most radical change, ever, in how people lived, moved, and had their being; thereby, constituting a new world order.
However, the acceleration of scientific methodology and the pace of its technological application after 1874 was to burst through the limits into a new world order and for many, introduce a new form of life.
vitruvain man – leonardo da vinci
IMAGE LINKED: wikimedia Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Enlightenment Milieu:
With the c.1440 invention of the printing press came literacy and from 1517, Reformation. Scientific methodology removed the Earth from the centre of the celestial globe. Contemporarily, Renaissance placed man centrally in the world as ‘the measure of all things’.
Enlightenment followed as a conjoining of Renaissance humanism with scientific methodology perhaps dating from the new world order as described in the Principia (1687) of Sir Issac Newton Fellow of the Royal Society. Religion no longer had a divine right to define governance or to pronounce on natural philosophy.
Between the years 1689 – 1692 occurred one of the most significant feats in publishing history.
It was John Locke’s trilogy: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding – how we know; Two Treatises of Government – how we rule ourselves; and, A Letter Concerning Tolerance – how we live with one and other.
The Essay was a text book for scientific methodology describing the process of: observation; identifying patterns; identifying repetitions; algebraically formalising repetitions into regularity; experimentally testing theories; prediction and control.
bill of rights
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Leviathan was written during the human tragedy of the English Civil Wars (1642 – 1649) from which, neither Charles I nor the divine right of kings survived. Hobbes sought to design a governance to obviate wars and tyranny by proposing a social contract between nation state and citizen to replace, monarch and subject.
Sovereignty thus being transferred from monarch to ‘the people’ as represented in Parliament. This concept was explored by many writers but most elegantly, by John Locke in his, Two Treatises of Government.
Thus, when James II sought to emulate his father Charles I he was forced to flee in 1688 and, was deemed by Parliament to have abdicated.
Guided by the spirit of the Bill of Rights, William and Mary were invited by Parliament to occupy the English throne as constitutional monarchs. It introduced a governance replacing the divine right of kings with constitutional mechanisms to limit governmental power by dividing it into distinct branches.
Thereby, preventing a concentration of power in any single institution and promoting checks and balances. Whilst, toleration perfumed the air, it did not extend to a Roman Catholic becoming monarch.
A war of all against all in which all of life is solitary poor, nasty, brutish, and short is considered in Hobbes, Leviathan.
From meritocratic civic responsibility and education could flow sociability, courtesy, clubbability and charity, a societal rationality. Thus, governance could be focussed on improving the situation of humankind, Novus Ordo Seclorum.
Protestant William and Mary, Ann, and George I notwithstanding, there were conservative forces supporting the return of James I and in 1715, an unsuccessful attempt was made.
Perhaps some of the elite Hanoverians had discreet and discrete systems of support which were incorporated within the organisation of the Grand Lodge of England and formalised within its Book of Constitutions.
Masonic Introduction and Milieu: Freemasons were being drawn from the Whig-radicals, the Royal Society, and ‘disciples’ of John Locke.
Margaret Jacob in, The Radical Enlightenment, suggests that freemasons were ‘practitioners of enlightenment’. Perhaps this is the greatest compliment ever received by English freemasonries.
“There is a rich and multi-layered world concealed within the 1723 Book of Constitutions, one which reflects the complex and varied roots of modern freemasonry.” (Andrew Prescott Ars Quatuor Coronatorum Vol.121)
Perhaps to date – outside of church and state – The Constitutions based on enlightenment ideals – comprised the most significant formalisation of how people should live, move, and have their being.
The principles of which were to be taught through freemasonry’s most defining characteristic, the ritual. Within a decade, there were over 100 lodges chartered within Grand Lodge’s jurisdiction.
A lodge can be regarded as a team with each member having a position and role in practising and spreading enlightenment: The Constitutions provided the rules (Antient Charges) of the activity.
The first rule, concerned God and Religion; it obliged masons
“….to that Religion in which all Men agree, leaving their particular Opinions to themselves; that is, to be good Men and true, or Men of Honour and Honesty, by whatever Denominations or Persuasions they may be distinguish’d; whereby Masonry becomes the Center of Union, and the Means of conciliating true Friendship among Persons that must have remain’d at a perpetual Distance.”
The English civil war had divided the nation by religion; freemasonry, for men of honour and honesty, was a basis for true friendship.
The the UGLE video 1723 ‘Inventing the Future’ attributes the authors of The Constitutions with, “…. taking out forever undue deference to a divinely appointed monarch and a trinitarian religion.’
The second charge was ‘of the civil magistrate supreme and subordinate’. Masonic loyalty was primarily to constitutional government of which, magistrates were the custodians.
It was proposed that compliance and enforcement of this ‘rule of law’ would secure welfare and peace.
Thus, religion and politics (ideology) were not to be discussed in a lodge as they had been decided in, and by, Grand Lodge. “Look back to its origins 300 years ago, however, and we find Freemasonry working in a different way, representing and expressing the political and religious views of a core group at its centre.” (Prestonian Lecture, 2016)
1723 constitutions
Editorial
The Anderson’s 1723 Constitutions transformed Freemasonry. By establishing new principles that supported Enlightenment ideas, they marked a departure from the “Old Charges” that governed mediaeval stonemasons’ lodges. Tolerance of other faiths, individualism, respect in relationships, and learning and development were all mentioned.
read the full series …
In the form of a more inclusive freemasonry, in 1756 a challenge came to the hegemony of Grand Lodge. Artisans moving, from elsewhere in the British Isles, to work in London had difficulty accessing lodges.
Thus, the Grand Lodge of Antients was formed; it soon gained aristocratic leadership and critical mass. The crises over Masonic nomenclature was recognised with the 1798 revolt of the United Irishmen; doubts on grand lodge control of members, minded Prime Minister Pitt The Younger to proscribe freemasonries.
This was avoided and perhaps in part, led to the 1813 unification of the two English grand lodges.
The unification Grand Master, from 1813 to his death in 1843 was the Duke of Sussex, the sixth son of George III. Royal prince notwithstanding, he insisted on submitting to the election process before accepting presidency of the Royal Society.
He resisted English freemasonry’s drift to establishment and attempts for its Christianisation. He said;
“… attached as I am to science – attached as I am to religion, I am satisfied that the real philosopher is the most religious man; and it is in looking to the operations in nature that the finger of the Almighty leads us to the lesson.”
The United Grand Lodge of England was not above the tensions of the times, yet it retained its aspiration to lead on voluntary, self-organised sociability and share enlightenment Novus Ordo Seclorum.
‘Overall, masonic influence on British voluntary associations was in the late eighteenth-century, setting an organisational pattern from which many types of club and society borrowed. Increasingly, masonic links provided a spinal element in social networking, helping to underpin contacts and communications in business, politics and local administration.’
Peter Clark, British Clubs and Associations 1580-1800:
Article by: Gerald Reilly
Gerald Reilly was initiated in 1995 into St Osyth's Priory Lodge 2063. Essex. England (UGLE).
He is a member of two masonic research lodges; Ex Libris Lodge 3765 and Quatuor Coronati Lodge 2076.
He was a founder member of Josh Heller's Allthingsmasonic, and with Josh co-wrote 'The Temple that Never Sleeps' (Cornerstone Books, 2006) he is committed to the development of e-Freemasonry.
Awarded the Norman B Spencer Prize, 2016.
Book: by Gerald Reilly
The Temple That Never Sleeps
by Josh Heller and Gerald Reilly
Freemasons and E-Masonry Toward a New Paradigm
A revolutionary book for every Freemason.The two authors, American and UK Masons, present a radical view of Freemasonry for both today and tomorrow.
In addition to their ideas are those of numerous Internet Masons (E-Masons) from around the world who, by sharing the experience of their own Masonic journey, have provided stunning personal insight into the viability of the Craft in the Internet Age.
This book will challenge your understanding of Freemasonry today and how it might transform for future generations.
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