Four Industrial Revolutions: Four Stages of English Freemasonry

By: Gerald Reilly

Klaus Schwab, WEF – The Fourth Industrial Revolution

This series has offered an understanding of freemasonries as a cultural phenomenon. Industrial Revolutions are considered as key, even determining, drivers of cultural change transforming government, business and, civil society.

The identification and significance of a Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4) was the overarching theme at the January 2016 assembly of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Must an industrial revolution be in progress before being identifiable: could a subsequent industrial revolution be anticipated and prescribed? Did Schwab, Chief Executive of the WEF, generate the meme of a fourth industrial revolution as a power and/or marketing initiative?

Whilst already used in the laboratories of industrial and academic research, the public introduction in November 2022 of ChatGPT generated an awareness of AI and an exponential acceleration of its use. For some, ubiquity generated a bandwagon upon which to jump; for others, a life raft on which to cling.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is not only about smart and connected machines and systems. Its scope is much wider. It is the fusion of technologies and their interaction across the physical, digital, and biological domains that make it fundamentally different from previous revolutions.

Klaus Schwab, WEF – The Fourth Industrial Revolution

In The Great Algorithm of the Universe readers attention was drawn to 3.6 billion years of biology. An iteration natural which includes reproduction as well as survival. Based on the biology of enhanced cognitive capability – as suggested by the name – ‘sapiens’ have experienced 70,000 years of enhanced cognitive skill in an iteration cultural; an agency which modulates too rapidly to be termed ‘evolutionary’. It was a sole agency but during say the last ten years, by accident or design, agency became shared with an iteration digital.

Thus, ‘…the fusion of technologies and their interaction across the physical, digital, and biological domains’, can be understood as a fusion of:

3.6 billion years – biology: iteration natural with
70,000 years – sapienship: iteration cultural with
10 years – AI: iteration digital

Identity and experience (‘The Self’) may be understood as an iterative continuity theorised as a triple helix: natural, cultural and, digital; a process by which, speculative builders modulate the grammar of meaning, understanding and participation.

The changes are so profound that, from the perspective of human history, there has never been a time of greater promise or potential peril.

Klaus Schwab, WEF – The Fourth Industrial Revolution

‘Greater promise’? For whom; at what price and, paid for by whom? The ‘potential perils, include:

1. Loss of Human Agency.
2. Acceleration of economically surplus people.
3. Acceleration of inequitable wealth distribution.
4. Legislatures less able to effectively regulate.
5. Exclusion of civil society’s role.
6. Environmental strain or neglect.

Is it reasonable to believe that the ‘big tech’ of the present and future will be either willing or able to modulate these ‘potential perils’?

We must develop a comprehensive and globally shared view of how technology is affecting our lives and reshaping our economic, social, cultural, and human environments.

Klaus Schwab, Mastering The Fourth Industrial Revolution

But of course, who are the ‘we’? The WEF? Legislators? ‘Big tech’ self-regulation?

The Busan Agreement is a set of common principles for all development agents/agencies’.

In 2011 it was adopted by representatives of government, multilateral organisations, civil society, private sector, foundations, et alia. It centres on an ownership within research and development, prioritising transparency, and shared responsibility.

As IR4 is, ‘….reshaping our economic, social, cultural, and human environments’ all nations can be regarded as developing nations Ostensibly, civil society was represented at the Busan High-Level Forum through a coordinated global platform known as the Open Forum for Civil Society Organisations Development Effectiveness, which later became the CSO Partnership for Development Effectiveness (CPDE).

This coalition brought together hundreds of civil society organizations from around the world, spanning regional networks, thematic groups, and national platforms. Hopefully, freemasonries were, and are, participants and will feedback content to The Square for it to share with readers.

The good intentions of Schwab, Busan and, the CPDE, can be understood as a call for a global stewardship to mitigate the perils of IR4 and to shape IR5.

This, a process modulated by continuous feedback, generating a revising of ritual: an ‘iteration humanistical’. Of the ‘potential perils’ perhaps the first, ‘Loss of Human Agency’, is the most challenging.

Human agency is the capacity to knowingly and corrigibly (being subject to checks and balances) participate in a grammar of shared existence.

It is not a possessive but rather, a performative role enacted through language activity embedded in a form of life (Wittgenstein).

Language is not external to us—it’s woven into our biological and social being (iteration natural and cultural). Language is rule-following activity generated by use within subtle ‘forms of life’. The complexity of language mirrors the complexity of human life; it evolves, adapts and thereby, resists being reduced to simple, fixed rules.

Large Language Models (LLMs), by which AIs interact with sapiens, are not embedded in any form of life; they generate utterances in semantic detachment, ‘language’ without the essential of lived experience, apparent meaning as without life-giving practice.

It is not so much about the consciousness or otherwise of machines but rather, what understanding, or otherwise, a machine may have. ‘Alien Intelligence’ (Hariri) captures this disruption, a simulation of participation without the accountability, corrigibility, or the co-presence which constitutes genuine agency. (Although, if an organism can be understood as an algorithm, whither ‘artificial’ or ‘alien’ intelligence’?)

Perhaps intelligence can be understood as a phenomenon arising in different physical substrates.) The peril is not semantical incommensurability but rather, an erosion of the very lived conditions by which human agency is enacted.

For Wittgensteinian, iteration is a process and procedure of instruction-following agency embedded in a form of life, shared practice. It is the repeated enactment of civic procedures the meaning of which arises from their use within a grammar of participation.

The rituals of freemasonries are microcosmic enactments of human agency; a procedural grammar of participation performed through corrigible, embodied acts. These rituals are rigorous, trained, modulated, performances.

Within a lodge, checks and balances are not abstractions but rather, encoded within layered offices, procedural votes, and symbolic roles of distributed agency across the experience.

This architecture of ritual indicates a form of world citizenship, perhaps providing a hint of an iteration humanistical enabling a participation effective and sustainable.

IR4 is generating semantic disenfranchisement, lodges must be an active counter-model.

Part 1 of this series celebrated English freemasonries and Enlightenment. Margaret Jacob’s suggestion that freemasons were ‘practitioners of Enlightenment’ was the greatest compliment ever paid to the movement.

Parts 2 and 3 of this series sought to connect freemasonries with Modernism and Post Modernism; this may well have been less familiar territory.

Encouragingly, freemasonries could be understood as having made some connection with Post Truth.

Post Truth? We should neither believe nor disbelieve anything we are told. (Hariri)

In 2023, English Freemasonry replaced its founding grand principles of, Brotherly Love, Relief and Truth with Integrity, Friendship, Respect, and Service.

These seem eminently fit for the purposes of the Post Truth milieu for freemasons, as citizens of the world, exercising agency within a coalition of civil society. Hopefully, freemasonries will seek such agency.

Could civil society participate in prescribing the grand principles of a fifth industrial revolution?

The concept of ‘truth’ is no longer about mirroring a putative metaphysical reality which provide feelings of ‘certainty’; it is being replaced with a performative, corrigible, construct within shared language use.

Meaning and understanding are no longer fixed by reference but by shared embedded practice. Beliefs, assertions, and actions are no longer evaluated by an abstract concept of ‘truth’ but by performance within a form of life.

Not being ‘fixed’, performance is on-goingly modulated with checks and balances which provides a basis for advancement.

The shift from Brotherly Love, Relief, and Truth to Integrity, Friendship, Respect, and Service could be understood as a modulation in response to the epistemic drift – the post-truth challenge to former models of institutional intellectual hegemony.

Might this be arising from a post-truth environment where the concept of “truth” is identified as an emotive adjunct. Perhaps there is a realisation that, ‘truth’ as institutional imprimatur is no longer legible. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” (Hamlet).

Integrity is practical coherence between speech, and action.

Friendship is more inclusive; it provides an emotional resilience and relationship to counter-balance the uncertainties generated by Post Truth. Friendship when supplemented with Respect encodes a civic grammar of restraint, a listening, a civility which ameliorates emotional volatility. .

‘Relief’ describes charity from a position of institutional strength; ‘service’ implies mutuality and civic engagement. The Post Truth milieu erodes institutional patronising service and repositions freemasonries as participatory citizenship.

Overall, this change is a modulation of Enlightenment symbolic virtue into a procedure and practice of adapting to environments where the concept of ‘truth’ is no longer a shared premise. Freemasonry now positions itself as a “beacon of civility” in an age of emotional narratives and digital disinformation. See Square Magazine Article – Freemasonry in the post truth era 

Hopefully, this series has been of interest for readers of The Square. In the next edition, a small team of writers will consider this modest start; will look at how freemasonries within civil society might exercise positive influence in addressing the perils of IR4 and design an IR5 as an ‘Iteration Humanistical’.

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