The Rhetoric and Death of U.S. Freemasonry In this essay I argue ...

Death of Freemasonry 35
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. 79
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." 80
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 Masonry's promotion of democracy and social equality,
suggests Habermas, is that the fraternity "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. 81
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 the popular imaginary of enter/infotainment. 82
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). 83
Insofar as Masonic leaders are "giving it up" in the hip-hop argot of contemporary