John W. Bizzack, Ph.D.

In 1709, a proverb written by English poet and satirist, Alexander Pope, summarizes what many earnest-minded Masons, leaders in the Fraternity, and those we consider the most illuminated Masonic scholars have cautioned the Fraternity about since at least the early 1800s. Once the academic world began to pay attention to the phenomenon of Freemasonry as a part of social history around the mid-20th century, they, too, joined the choir. Pope’s proverb has become the troubling truth in our Fraternity, which has been so steadily expressed that it is practically qualified as a Landmark. He wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”

By the time the first lodges in America had been warranted and formed, organized British Freemasonry had been in existence for no more than fifteen years. American Freemasonry did not merely take over from where the grand lodges of England, and later the grand lodges of Scotland, and Ireland left off. Freemasonry in the United States is a child of the Revolution—several generations removed from a more mature British society of the time that influenced the shape of and initial organization of Freemasonry in England. In the 1730s when Freemasonry began to appear in the colonies, it collided with local cultures and began transforming what was created in Britain into a different kind of system influenced by yet another set of cultural stimuli.

If you sense there is much less rigorous analysis about so many things today, trust your senses. We skim a lot. And details surrounding complicated problems get in the way of skimmers. We do not seem to have a society-wide interest in engaging in historical thinking these days, even though such thinking offers the opportunity to think and reason in more sophisticated ways. Few seem to devote much time or demonstrate personal inspiration to mine truth from the quicksand of inference and innuendo in which our technology engulfs us. Notwithstanding the positives from the fact that we have a repository of the world’s information at our fingertips more than at any time in history, the Internet gives millions of people the opportunity to pioneer, hone, and to largely advance their skimming skills.

When we hear someone referred to as a “maverick” we might first think of the American Western dramatic television series with comedic overtones that aired from 1957-1962, or the 1996 American Western comedy film based on the same story line. Some may know the word because it is the name of a professional basketball team based in Dallas, a hockey team in New York, the call sign of a fighter pilot in a popular 1986 film, or the name of the model of a 1970 Ford automobile. The meaning of many words in our language may change over time with popular usage and slang. The evolution of the meaning for words and even phrases is known as semantic change or drift. That semantic drift gives us several meanings for maverick.