The Case Against Everything I Just Said

Steelmanning the opposition

In my last essay I argued that Freemasonry transformed from an Enlightenment laboratory into a post-war social club, and that specific institutional choices accelerated the decline. I also acknowledged that the picture is more complicated than any single essay can capture.

This is the follow-up I promised. The strongest counterarguments to my position, presented as fairly as I can manage, with my responses where I have them.

“You’re romanticizing the Enlightenment lodge.”

The critique: I drew on records from exceptional lodges in major cities because those are the lodges that left records. The Lodge of Nine Sisters in Paris, St. Andrew’s in Boston. These were elite gatherings of elite men. The average lodge in 1780 probably looked a lot like the average lodge in 1980: men showing up, doing the ritual, eating dinner, going home. Selection bias in the historical record flatters the past.

This is fair. I am comparing peaks to averages. The question is whether that invalidates the argument or just qualifies it.

My response: Even if most lodges have always been ordinary, the institutional capacity for something more existed. The structures were there. Extended formation periods. Proficiency requirements. Smaller membership creating denser relationships. The post-war changes didn’t just fail to produce more Nine Sisters lodges. They removed the mechanisms that made such lodges possible in the first place. You can’t grow an orchard if you pave over the soil.

“The post-war boom gave millions of men something real.”

The critique: I’m measuring the institution by intellectual output when most members wanted fellowship and belonging. A man who joined in 1955, served as an officer, attended lodge for forty years, buried his brothers, and was buried by them got something real out of the experience. Dismissing that as “degree mill” product is elitist and ungrateful.

This one lands. I’ve sat in lodge with men who joined in the 1960s and stayed. They didn’t stay because of philosophical depth. They stayed because the lodge was their community. Their friends were there. Their fathers had been there. That’s not nothing. That’s actually the thing itself, experienced differently than I might experience it.

My response: I’m not arguing those men got nothing. I’m arguing the institution stopped being able to reproduce what it gave them. The men who joined in 1955 were formed by a culture that still remembered what formation meant, even if it was already thinning. The men processed through one-day classes in 1995 didn’t have that residue to draw on. The fellowship my father’s generation experienced was built on social capital accumulated by earlier generations. We spent the inheritance without replenishing it.

“The TO movement is a niche solution for a niche problem.”

The critique: Traditional Observance lodges grew while the mainstream declined, but from a tiny base. There are maybe a hundred TO lodges in the country. The mainstream lost tens of thousands of members in the same period. Telling lodges to “try Freemasonry” is smug advice from a lifeboat to a sinking ship. Most lodges don’t have the human capital to implement rigorous vetting, extended formation, and educational programming. They’re trying to keep the lights on with twelve guys whose average age is seventy-two.

This is the hardest critique to answer because it’s largely true.

My response: I don’t have a program that will save lodges that can’t be saved. Some lodges are going to close, and pretending otherwise wastes energy that could go toward something else. The question is whether the lodges that remain, and the new lodges that form, will learn anything from the last seventy years. TO isn’t a mass solution. But the principles underneath it, genuine formation, careful selection, intellectual seriousness, don’t require a formal TO charter. They require brothers who decide to do the work. That can happen anywhere. It just has to happen somewhere.

“You’re blaming institutional choices for cultural shifts beyond anyone’s control.”

The critique: Putnam documented that civic disengagement happened everywhere. Bowling leagues. PTAs. Mainline churches. Service clubs. Fraternal organizations of every kind. The forces that hollowed out American associational life had nothing to do with one-day classes or reduced proficiency. Television. Suburbanization. Women entering the workforce and the end of the single-income household. Geographic mobility breaking up extended families and stable communities. Freemasonry got caught in the same undertow as everyone else. The institutional changes I criticize were survival adaptations, not causes of decline.

This is substantially correct. Masonry didn’t decline because Grand Lodges made bad choices. Masonry declined because the America that produced four million Masons no longer exists.

My response: Both things can be true. External forces created the pressure. Institutional choices determined how we responded to that pressure. Some responses preserved core identity at the cost of scale. Others preserved scale at the cost of core identity. We chose the latter, and it didn’t work anyway. The mainstream still collapsed. We probably couldn’t have prevented the decline. The question now is whether the institution that emerges from it will be worth belonging to.

“The gatekeeping you’re advocating for has an ugly history.”

The critique: Selective membership, rigorous vetting, blackballs. These mechanisms were also used to exclude men by race, class, and religion. Prince Hall Freemasonry exists because white American lodges wouldn’t admit Black men. The “careful selection” I praise was often careful exclusion. Advocating for higher barriers without acknowledging that history is incomplete at best, dishonest at worst.

This critique is important and I didn’t address it in my previous essay. I should have.

My response: The mechanisms of selection are morally neutral. What matters is what criteria you’re selecting for. Selecting for character, intellectual seriousness, and genuine interest in the work is different from selecting for race or social class. The fact that past generations misused these tools doesn’t mean the tools themselves are broken. It means we have to be honest about what we’re selecting for and vigilant about what we’re actually doing versus what we claim to be doing. A lodge that blackballs a man because he’s Black is failing at Masonry. A lodge that blackballs a man because he’s demonstrated he won’t do the work is practicing it.

“You’re just one guy with opinions.”

The critique: I have no special authority. I’m not a Grand Lodge officer. I’m not a Masonic scholar with academic credentials. I’m a retired military guy in the Upper Peninsula writing essays on Substack. Why should anyone care what I think?

This one requires honesty about what I am and what I’m not.

My response: I’m not a PhD. I don’t have academic credentials in Masonic history. But I’m not unqualified either.

I spent twenty-two years in the Coast Guard, the last several as a Command Master Chief. In that time I made twenty moves to twenty different addresses. Every two to four years I inherited teams I didn’t build, worked under leaders I didn’t choose, and was responsible for people I never would have hired. Every single year I lost 30% or more of my crew and had to rebuild. Forming, storming, norming, performing. Over and over.

Most organizations visit change management once a decade and treat it like a crisis. I lived in it. That was just Tuesday.

As a marine mechanic, I learned that every organization is a transmission. Each gear affects every other gear. You can’t touch one component without creating movement somewhere else. And if you have an ego, if you think you know the problem just from the symptoms, you find out fast whether you’re right. The machinery doesn’t care about your theory. It either runs or it doesn’t. That humbles you. Makes you go back and find the actual cause.

The thing is never the thing. The symptom you’re staring at is the third or fourth-order effect of whatever the prime mover actually is.

I apply that now to organizations that have drifted from who they meant to be. I help them find their way back. I assess where they actually are, identify what’s upstream of the symptoms they’re treating, and help them rebuild the transmission while the car is still running.

So no, I’m not a scholar. I’m a practitioner. I’ve spent decades diagnosing systems under pressure and working with whoever showed up. That’s the lens I bring to this.

I write because our ritual asks us to diffuse light and knowledge. It doesn’t specify credentials. It doesn’t promise the light we diffuse will be correct or sufficient. It just asks us to try.

So I try.

Where does this leave us?

Nowhere tidy. The forces that shaped Masonic decline are multiple, overlapping, and mostly beyond any individual’s control. The institutional responses to those forces made some things worse. The proposed solutions are partial at best. The future is uncertain.

I don’t have a program. I have a practice: show up, do the work, write about what I’m learning, stay open to being wrong.

That’s not a solution. But it might be a start.

-Brother Rob

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If you’re interested in the interior work of Masonry, my book The Unfinished Temple offers thirty-three meditations following the three degrees. Working tools for daily labor. Available in paperback and Kindle.