The Art of Manliness - April 03, 2014


Episode #20： Freemasonry and Manhood In American History with Robert Davis

Topics
Freemasonry and manhood in American history freemasonry archetypes masculinity Freemasonry's influence on American masculinity Freemasonry relevance
Hosted by
Brett McKay
Mentioned
Robert Davis Freemason Guthrie George Washington Thomas Jefferson James Madison Scottish Rite Daniel Boone Paul Revere John Adams Freud Lewis Clark Jung
Episode #49： The Way Of Men With Jack Donovan

Episode Stats


Length

38 minutes

Words per minute

125.1

Word count

4,855

Sentence count

256

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Robert Davis is a Freemason and the Executive Secretary of the Scottish Rite in the United States. He is the author of the book Understanding Manhood in America: Freemasonry's Enduring Path to the Mature Masculine. In this episode, Robert talks about the history of American masculinity and the role of the fraternal movement in shaping the ideals of masculinity over the last 300 years.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello, Brett here. Before we get to today's show, got a quick favor to ask of you. If you've been
00:00:03.880 enjoying the Art of Manliness podcast, I'd really appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a
00:00:07.780 review on iTunes or Stitcher. It helps us out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you
00:00:11.720 so much. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get
00:00:15.240 something out of it. Word of mouth is the primary way the Art of Manliness grows and spreads. So
00:00:19.440 please share. Text a friend, send an email, do whatever, however you communicate. Tell them to
00:00:23.760 check out a particular episode if you think they'd get something out of it. Thank you for
00:00:26.200 your support and now on to the show. Brett McKay here and welcome to another episode of the Art of
00:00:47.980 Manliness podcast. Now masculinity in America has a complex history. Big historical events and social
00:00:54.060 movements like wars and the civil rights movement have all had an effect on shaping manliness in
00:00:58.480 the United States. But an often overlooked social movement that had a profound effect on masculinity
00:01:03.180 in America was the Freemason and social club movement. Are social groups like Freemasonry and
00:01:08.880 the Odd Fellows still relevant today in helping men become better men? Well, our guest today has
00:01:13.140 written a book on this subject. His name is Robert Davis and he's the author of the book Understanding
00:01:17.520 Manhood in America, Freemasonry's Enduring Path to the Mature Masculine. Robert is a Freemason
00:01:23.720 and also the Executive Secretary of the Guthrie, Oklahoma's Scottish Rite. In addition to
00:01:28.300 understanding and writing Understanding Manhood in America, Robert has authored two other books
00:01:32.140 on the subject of Freemasonry. Robert, welcome to the show. Hey, it's great to be here, Brett. Thank
00:01:37.800 you for inviting me. So Robert, tell us about this book. What inspired you to write Understanding
00:01:42.000 Manhood in America? Well, I think first of all, as a Freemason, the rituals and private ceremonies
00:01:50.300 of this old, old fraternal society reflect the journey of man's life from childhood to mature
00:01:58.680 masculinity. And I've been a Mason a long time and I became increasingly concerned that with
00:02:06.840 the growth of the fraternity, we have gotten so bogged down in the words of the rituals that
00:02:12.800 sometimes we don't integrate the meanings behind the words. This journey, of course, relates to
00:02:21.300 the psychology of being. And I wanted to investigate how men have looked at the ideals of masculinity
00:02:29.220 over the 300-year period of the American landscape, and then how the fraternal movements have sort of
00:02:38.380 moved in and out of the center of defining the ideals of masculinity for American males over this period
00:02:45.360 of time. And I think, just as importantly, I'm a man. And I am becoming increasingly concerned with how
00:02:54.880 our male gender is being sort of downplayed and overlooked as relevant in today's culture.
00:03:01.380 And I think there is, in fact, a growing crisis in mature masculinity in our own time because of
00:03:09.880 high mobility of men, high divorce rates, the lack of adequate models of mature men. There's really
00:03:17.380 no cohesive institutional structure for actualizing the process of becoming and being men. At least I know
00:03:26.940 of no other organization outside of Freemasonry itself that is focused on this very process.
00:03:35.240 And it's pretty much, we live in a culture that's pretty much every man for himself. Most men just 0.90
00:03:40.600 kind of fall by the wayside with no clear idea of the broad and important goals of manly development. So
00:03:46.740 I think that was my motivation for focusing on this journey of being a man.
00:03:51.880 Well, in your book, you kind of do a, I guess, a 300-year summary of American masculinity.
00:03:59.860 And one of the things you mentioned, you kind of mentioned throughout the book, are these three
00:04:03.220 archetypes of American masculinity. What are these archetypes and can you describe them to us?
00:04:09.120 Well, there's, of course, there are several types of archetypes which are related to the male
00:04:15.220 gender. And depth psychologists like Freud and Jung have made us aware that deep within
00:04:21.740 every man, of course, are genetic blueprints, which kind of represent the hard wiring of the
00:04:27.800 mature masculine soul. And these are sort of a map which identify the foundational characteristics of
00:04:35.240 our nature. And generally, when we read books about this kind of archetypes, we're talking about
00:04:44.340 hidden energies. And these are often categorized in a general way as the king, warrior, you know,
00:04:50.700 magician and lover kinds of archetypes. And I focus on those kinds of archetypes to a degree,
00:04:59.280 but I was more interested in looking at the possibility that there had been broader cultural
00:05:06.380 or societal archetypes where the social behavior of men can kind of be lumped into several broad
00:05:14.520 categories or groups. And I discovered that the foundational archetypes of the American colonial
00:05:20.820 era, these were the archetypes that we actually inherited from our European forefathers, were
00:05:27.700 usually listed as the genteel patriarch and the heroic artisan and the self-made man.
00:05:35.900 And so I made a decision in my book to try and discover if these cultural archetypes of our
00:05:44.780 founding fathers are still valid today and prevalent. The genteel patriarch is kind of comprised of the
00:05:54.440 classical European definition of man. He was the dignified aristocrat, I'm sorry, a man with an
00:06:02.860 upper-class code of honor and a character of exquisite taste and refined sensibilities. He understood the
00:06:09.720 nature of class. He was instructed as a young man into all of the protocols and the adequates of
00:06:16.940 becoming a gentleman. And so to the general patriarch, manhood to him meant property ownership,
00:06:25.940 the accumulation of wealth, the accumulation of wealth, and at the same time sort of a benevolent
00:06:31.340 patriarchal authority at home, he was responsible for providing for the moral obstruction of his
00:06:37.520 sons, whereas his wife was responsible for taking care of the moral instructions of the daughters.
00:06:44.780 He was very definitely the patriarch of his tribe. And at the same time, his world encompassed
00:06:52.740 compassion, kindness, duty. And this was represented in this type of man through public philanthropy and
00:07:01.400 usefulness. And probably in the American founding era, the genteel patriarchs are best represented by
00:07:10.280 George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, you know, many of the signers of the
00:07:19.740 Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Authors. And these were probably the best known
00:07:26.220 models for the genteel patriarch. And then the second archetype that we inherited from Europe was the
00:07:34.220 heroic artisan. Heroic artisan can trace his lineage to the craft guilds of the Middle Ages. I was
00:07:43.240 interested in the heroic artisan because most scholars believe that Freemasonry itself evolved from the
00:07:51.100 craft guilds of the Middle Ages. The idea about this individual and his character is that he was highly
00:07:58.540 independent. He was virtuous and honest, very formal in his relationships with women, extraordinarily loyal to
00:08:07.580 his male comrades. And whether he was the master of his family farm or the proprietor of his urban shop, he was always the
00:08:17.240 honest toiler, had a very strong work ethic, proud of his craftsmanship and self-reliance. And in our colonial period, I
00:08:29.180 think Paul Revere, the silversmith, probably represents, you know, the ideal of the heroic artisan.
00:08:36.740 And I think the third and the trio of these male archetypes, certainly at the end of the 18th century and
00:08:44.240 the first half of the 19th century, was a self-made man. And this fellow derived his identity from his
00:08:51.660 activities in the public sphere. It was measured by his own accumulation of wealth and status, but also by his
00:09:00.080 geographic and social mobility. As far as the great movement west from the eastern seaboard, you know, we
00:09:08.620 definitely became a land of immigrants with democratic ideals. And so the self-made man would be the kind of
00:09:17.680 guy that we would most affectionately believe seemed to be born with America. He was constantly on the go.
00:09:25.940 He was competitive. He was restless. He was aggressive. He was chronically insecure. He was a man desperate to
00:09:33.240 achieve some form of stability and masculine identity. And he very rarely stuck around long enough to set a
00:09:41.720 founding of cultural roots. And so I think the best ideals of the self-made man were the pioneers,
00:09:49.840 the soldiers, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, guys like the explorers like Lewis and Clark. And, you know, all of these men
00:10:01.220 moved west. And there were all kinds of them, the farmers, the trappers, the adventurers, the outlaws, the ministers and the
00:10:10.660 schoolteachers, the soldiers and the miners. And the man who kind of became the national hero, the cultural icon that would embed
00:10:22.900 himself in the masculine mind, I think, was the frontiersman. And so the self-made man probably is the most enduring of those three
00:10:35.220 archetypes. And I was just curious if if those archetypes are still around and what's going on with them.
00:10:42.720 So and are they still around? Yes, they are. But the very, very difficult, a lot more difficult to define today. And yet some of the
00:10:53.540 characteristics are are still there. The old icons of masculinity have become so clouted in our own culture that you have to really
00:11:05.140 dig through a lot of murky stuff to identify those archetypes.
00:11:10.460 So, Robert, in your book, you kind of talk about some of the cultural history of masculinity through in America and kind of
00:11:16.600 the conclusion that I got from in talking to you is kind of kind of reinforces that conclusion that you feel that men are
00:11:22.440 kind of lost in the wilderness when it comes to defining or achieving a mature mass masculinity. Why? How did that happen?
00:11:28.960 How did men become lost in this path to the mature masculine?
00:11:32.720 Well, it I think it largely is a 20th century phenomena. I could make an argument that
00:11:44.180 in the 19th century, the Civil War created some problems of loss of identity. But really,
00:11:53.080 the 20th century is where I think men became lost. And this this happened for because of several
00:12:02.700 societal societal things that really were under nobody's control. And probably the first and most
00:12:11.220 significant event that changed man's understanding of who he was, was the Great Depression of the 1930s.
00:12:20.440 Prior to the Depression of the 1930s, we still pretty much lived in a patriarchal society.
00:12:27.880 It was not unusual at all for there to be in each household three or four generations of males. And so
00:12:38.880 the connection that young men had with the with the elders within their own homes gave them a sense of
00:12:49.900 of connectedness to manhood, to maleness, and to the lessons that could be passed down from elder to son. And since there were multiple generations in these households, it pretty much was clear that we lived in a patriarchal society.
00:13:10.360 And the Depression, of course, moved everyone out of the family home. You know, something like, you know, one out of four men found themselves without job. A person could no longer, especially in the Midwest, make any money or sustain his family at farming.
00:13:34.560 And so we saw this huge out-migration that basically broke up the three or four generation male household.
00:13:44.560 And when the men left the traditions of their childhood, they never returned. They moved to the urban centers. They became, you know, they became a part of an entirely different culture, and they had to literally reinvent themselves.
00:14:02.920 And then a couple other things happened at the same time. The Depression had such an enormous social impact on families that we actually became, to some extent, a welfare state.
00:14:19.300 Men no longer felt like they could control their own livelihood or their own stability or preserve the, you know, the condition of their own family.
00:14:33.860 And they started feeling more and more helpless. And the more helpless they felt, the more connected to governmental relief agencies they became.
00:14:45.980 So it kind of took away, I think, the old model of strength and being able to work through all problems on your own as a man.
00:14:55.400 And it happened to the entire culture at the same time.
00:14:58.800 And then immediately following the Depression era, World War II came along.
00:15:04.680 And the result of that, of course, was that men joined the military by the tens of thousands, and they went overseas.
00:15:14.960 They were away from home for a long enough period of time that women started taking over traditional male jobs back on the domestic side of things. 1.00
00:15:30.320 And so when the men returned after the war, they found a new competition for jobs.
00:15:35.800 And the competition for jobs was with their wives and the women in their communities and in their cities. 0.95
00:15:44.840 And so they sort of started feeling this loss of patriarchy that began at the first of the Depression
00:15:56.000 and then just seemed to sort of vanish during the recovery period after World War II.
00:16:01.540 And then, of course, in order to employ America, after men came back from the war, 0.82
00:16:07.320 the government created all kinds of programs to keep people in working positions.
00:16:14.340 And that's where a lot of our government agencies were established in the large bureaucracies.
00:16:20.360 And so men found themselves just moving into salaried positions in large employee pools
00:16:29.920 where they had absolutely no control or authority over what happened with their lives.
00:16:38.740 It's kind of like it's the man in the gray flannel suit type of...
00:16:41.640 Exactly, yeah.
00:16:43.080 And so I think those two, or that particular era,
00:16:47.420 was an era that changed the landscape of American males forever.
00:16:54.340 And what about the Vietnam era, the baby boomers? 0.69
00:16:58.060 I mean, what happened with masculinity there?
00:16:59.840 It seems like a lot of change happened in that time period as well.
00:17:02.140 Yes, it was actually the first generation of men who did not follow their fathers
00:17:09.320 into the American institutions that their fathers believed in.
00:17:15.340 The Vietnam era created, of course, a very strong counterculture
00:17:20.560 just because the Vietnam War itself did not follow the traditional icons of warrior energy.
00:17:31.520 For the first time in the history of wars,
00:17:35.320 we were no longer engaged in the process of war like we had been in World War I and World War II.
00:17:43.800 It seemed to be more of a political war than a war of military strategy.
00:17:50.560 It was hard to know if it was, you know, truly a world conflict.
00:17:54.840 And it created a lot of conflicting thoughts as to, you know, what we were doing and why we were doing it.
00:18:03.440 And it damaged a lot of men.
00:18:05.760 Of course, you know, the war took place at the same time that the drug culture grew by leaps and bounds during that era.
00:18:14.680 Again, we sort of created a generation of men who chose to isolate themselves from the icons of masculinity of their fathers and their grandfathers.
00:18:29.880 And it especially affected Freemasonry.
00:18:32.680 It was the first generation where men did not follow their fathers into the fraternity.
00:18:38.460 It was the first time in the history of the fraternity that Freemasons had to look outside their own families for a sustaining membership.
00:18:52.740 And so, yeah, that was – and it's not that – and I'm not trying to bash the Vietnam-era males.
00:19:00.820 I'm just saying that the media became so prominent in reflecting the events of our lives day in and day out that we quit paying attention to ourselves
00:19:17.920 and what we should be doing as our own gender to sort of get back on the right track of manly development. 1.00
00:19:29.140 It just didn't happen.
00:19:30.000 Well, you talk a lot about – so far about some of the, I guess, negative aspects that, you know,
00:19:35.480 the kind of negative cultural changes that happened in regards to masculinity.
00:19:38.560 Were there any positive changes that happened in masculinity in America from, you know, the 19th century to today?
00:19:45.320 Well, yes.
00:19:46.400 As a matter of fact, there's a lot of positive things going on today, primarily with the millennial generation,
00:19:57.460 and these young men that are just coming out of college and getting into the workforce.
00:20:01.800 But there's also some good things that came out of the latter part of the 20th century.
00:20:12.300 You know, consciousness movements became real popular and a growing kind of thing.
00:20:20.720 Spirituality movements became very prominent.
00:20:25.320 And while this may have impacted somewhat negatively the church's role in providing spiritual instruction for the male psyche,
00:20:39.160 it has had the effect of men actually stepping back and trying to decide for themselves, you know, who they are.
00:20:52.060 They're trying to attach themselves more to meaningful adult male role models in their lives.
00:21:01.420 You know, they're now connected digitally, globally, and so information and knowledge is readily available to them.
00:21:10.980 And so for the first time, I think that men are starting to recognize that they have a lot of work to do
00:21:22.740 to bring their gender up to the feminist culture in America. 0.99
00:21:34.500 And we need to achieve that balance again.
00:21:38.260 And so I think that's a positive thing, and I think we're headed in that direction.
00:21:42.200 Well, in your book, Bob, you talk a lot about Freemasonry.
00:21:45.900 I mean, it's called the Freemasonry's Enduring Path to the Mature Masculine.
00:21:49.360 Can you describe, give some examples of how Freemasonry has influenced American masculinity throughout history?
00:21:56.680 The surprising thing about Freemasonry, and the thing that is the most misunderstood about the fraternity,
00:22:07.640 is it never claims to take on a particular cause and become the champion of that cause
00:22:19.340 so that we can say, you know, the Freemasons did this and the Freemasons did that,
00:22:24.800 and as a result of that, things changed for the better.
00:22:28.820 And the reason for that is, is that our goal in Freemasonry is the improvement of the individual himself.
00:22:38.100 The purpose of Freemasonry is to create a set of social, cultural, and moral icons
00:22:49.320 that literally can take a man on a journey into himself so that he can become aware of the things in his life
00:23:02.820 that have worked for him, that have proven useful to him,
00:23:08.460 along with the experiences of his life that have damaged him and that have created problems for him,
00:23:16.240 and to develop an understanding within himself that he, in fact, has to overcome himself
00:23:24.460 in order to make real improvement to those around him.
00:23:30.020 He has to come to grips with his own father, you know, all of his experiences.
00:23:34.540 And when he does this, then he discovers who he is.
00:23:40.400 He discovers that it's not always about striving to be the sports hero or building muscular bodies
00:23:47.420 or buying in to achieving status or fearing emotional conflict or overachieving in jobs.
00:23:56.140 All of these things that you would think are the icons of masculinity actually lead men to vulnerability
00:24:05.860 and feelings of powerlessness rather than fulfillment and contentment.
00:24:10.640 And so what he has to do, he has to balance himself around all of these things that are important
00:24:17.160 to his manly development.
00:24:20.040 And in the process of doing it, he overcomes a lot of the double standards which define men in our culture.
00:24:29.440 And in the process of doing that, he takes on reliable mentorship.
00:24:34.580 He decides that there are people out there that he can trust.
00:24:38.660 He can define role models in a more realistic and fulfilling way.
00:24:46.020 He can attach himself to meaningful leadership models without taking on the political or religious baggage
00:24:55.500 that so often accompany them.
00:24:58.560 So once he does that and makes that turnaround, it's at that point that I believe he takes on an understanding
00:25:05.960 of mature masculinity, and that's when he improves his role in his family.
00:25:12.160 He becomes a true mentor to younger men, and he gets involved in positive ways and in various community
00:25:21.540 outlets, and he improves society in the process.
00:25:26.500 And so what you have to do is you have to look at, well, okay, you know, what are some things
00:25:31.940 that Freemasons then have done to improve the world?
00:25:36.380 And in the 18th century, Freemasonry, more than any other social group that I have studied,
00:25:46.700 basically established the models for civil society.
00:25:53.020 They broke down the class system.
00:25:55.660 They created a new way of thinking where people could be equal and beloved.
00:26:03.400 And so Freemasonry, I think, probably more than any other institution, played out the experiments 0.86
00:26:13.580 of how one creates and lives in a democratic society, and he did it through the rubric of his lodges
00:26:23.420 because the lodges were governed as democratic societies.
00:26:28.400 And so the experiment took place in Lodge, and it was brought out of the Lodge into the society itself.
00:26:36.560 So that's probably the foundational greatness that Freemasonry had.
00:26:43.300 The organization itself, I have observed, has adapted itself around the popular needs of men
00:26:52.680 in every generation up until the Cold War era after World War II.
00:27:01.100 You can go back and you can just see how Freemasonry helped shape men's needs in almost all of these.
00:27:10.040 The 19th century was a great period of philosophical development.
00:27:15.200 That's what men enjoyed doing, and men enjoyed reading and thinking and having these philosophical dialogues.
00:27:24.240 And that's when a lot of the great philosophical lectures came into the fraternal movement,
00:27:31.760 again, within the private associations of the Lodges.
00:27:36.660 During the period when theater became a very, very important, popular thing,
00:27:46.280 the rituals of Freemasonry moved onto the stage, and actually the branch of the fraternity I work in,
00:27:53.560 the Scottish Rite.
00:27:54.660 We created the community theater approach to teaching morals and ethics
00:28:01.800 because theater was such a popular form of entertainment for men.
00:28:08.200 And then at the same time, fear of eroding masculinity hit the culture of men,
00:28:16.880 primarily as a result of women, suffrage movement, and these kinds of things. 1.00
00:28:23.760 And, you know, baseball and boxing and all of these kinds of very masculine, manly sports were established.
00:28:32.500 And what did the fraternity do?
00:28:35.620 The fraternity created boxing leagues and baseball leagues in order to accommodate the enjoyment of men.
00:28:43.100 And during the Depression years, the fraternity created these world relief societies to try to take care of the families of men who were within the fraternity.
00:28:55.960 So it's been always a fraternity first, but a fraternity that responded to the interests of men.
00:29:05.620 And that has been its fundamental strength in almost every generation.
00:29:11.900 And then overlying all of that, of course, is that all of these activities and these strategies occur in private conclaves of men
00:29:23.420 where three and four generations are participating in the dialogue in Lodge at the same time.
00:29:30.920 So we're one of the few organizations left in the world that focuses on this old icon of stability in the male gender
00:29:45.340 through connectedness and communications and conversations with multiple generations of men.
00:29:52.200 So, Robert, how do you respond to people who say that, well, okay, so Freemasonry had an important role in the lives of men for my grandfather,
00:30:02.900 for the founding fathers, but it's no longer relevant?
00:30:06.400 What they teach is no longer relevant to the ritual.
00:30:08.880 It's just old-fashioned.
00:30:10.240 They're not responding to men's needs today. 0.95
00:30:13.300 How do you respond to that?
00:30:14.040 Is Freemasonry still relevant to men today?
00:30:16.300 Oh, absolutely.
00:30:18.140 I think it's as relevant as ever.
00:30:21.720 You know, first of all, again, we live in a culture that so much clouds the icons of masculinity
00:30:33.220 that there's hardly any place where men can focus on those kinds of things in a private and safe environment.
00:30:46.460 We're never going to overcome the media bashing, you know, political correctness things,
00:30:53.720 the consumerism and all of that sort of stuff that's very much feminized in our culture
00:30:59.920 without, you know, staying together as men to try to grow ourselves to achieve balance
00:31:07.140 and become positive male role models for our families and for our communities.
00:31:14.840 Freemasonry is always about doing that, and so from that point of view, it's as important as it's ever been. 0.97
00:31:21.700 We also live in a culture that no longer trusts the old traditions of religion that are so attached to, you know,
00:31:33.900 dogma and the doctrines of faith.
00:31:37.180 And yet we so clearly understand how important it is for men to connect with their spiritual side
00:31:46.760 and embrace the aspects of their nature that make them good men.
00:31:52.520 So Freemasonry offers a way where all of these kinds of moral and virtuous characteristics
00:32:02.500 can be looked at in a non-doctrinal way.
00:32:08.880 So it gives a person a chance to develop an understanding of the nature of God
00:32:16.440 and man and man's relationship to God in an environment that is not tied to dogma or doctrine.
00:32:25.460 We have always felt like that we are kind of a partner with religion
00:32:31.020 in the sense that we deal almost totally with helping men understand the nature of the Spirit within him
00:32:42.580 and how that plays out in his life to take on characteristics of compassion and love and nurturing
00:32:50.620 and all of the feminine kinds of things that balance his more natural, aggressive nature.
00:32:58.840 All of that is necessary for him to feel balanced in his life and then live a balanced life.
00:33:05.740 So I can't think of anything more relevant to the human condition than an organization that focuses on these kinds of things
00:33:14.740 because I know that if a man can heal himself, he can heal the world.
00:33:20.760 And Robert, if a man wants to get involved with Freemasonry, how would he go about it?
00:33:24.820 Well, it's interesting that our fraternity has never been an organization that has been membership-driven
00:33:33.060 in the sense that we don't advertise broadly asking people to join.
00:33:40.300 And we always want that to happen sort of in a one-on-one way.
00:33:47.180 We want men to learn about the fraternity, become acquainted with men in the fraternity,
00:33:54.960 and sort of check us out through his own independent conversations with Masons he knows
00:34:02.360 before he decides to take on the duties and obligations of the fraternity.
00:34:11.080 So the best way to become a Freemason is to know a friend who is one.
00:34:17.180 And then express your interest and curiosity to him about the fraternity.
00:34:24.560 If you don't know any Freemasons, you know, every state organization of the fraternity now
00:34:33.380 essentially has a website.
00:34:35.400 There's contact information.
00:34:37.780 You can call the Grand Secretary of a state organization of Masons.
00:34:41.960 You can tell them where you live and that you're interested in learning about the fraternity
00:34:47.640 and talking with some Masons.
00:34:50.020 And they will refer your name to men in your community who will get in touch with you.
00:34:56.180 All right.
00:34:56.740 Well, Robert, before we leave, last question.
00:34:59.020 And we've talked about how men have kind of lost, have gotten lost off the path of the mature masculine.
00:35:06.700 What are, you know, three things that a man can do to reclaim that path to the mature masculine?
00:35:13.580 The first thing he has to do is learn.
00:35:15.740 There's nothing more important than the educated mind.
00:35:20.560 Because the thing that hurts anybody more than anything else in the world is ignorance.
00:35:27.220 To make a commitment to become a man of knowledge is, to me, fundamental to understanding the role of the mature masculine soul.
00:35:40.260 And secondly, at some point in time, every man has to go deep inside himself and figure out who he really is
00:35:56.040 and who he wants to become.
00:35:58.300 And if he does not make that journey, he will tend to live his entire life and being totally unaware of who he is
00:36:11.820 and what his real gifts can be.
00:36:16.060 And so I think the second most important thing is, is a man has to make the search inside himself.
00:36:23.180 It's so important that that be a facilitated process, that it's essential to taking on the mature masculine soul.
00:36:33.320 And then thirdly, he needs to live in a world that connects him on a regular basis with other men.
00:36:43.640 We cannot understand the mature masculine soul unless we experience a lot of men in our life.
00:36:52.100 We cannot do it by ourselves.
00:36:54.900 We cannot be isolated and alone and find out for ourselves what the value of men are in our culture.
00:37:04.360 So I think that's communication, conversation, association on a regular basis with men of different generations.
00:37:15.160 And even today in different cultures, I think it is essential to a man's self-development.
00:37:23.040 So I think those three things, self-knowledge, inner development, and communication with other men.
00:37:30.460 Well, Robert, thank you for your time.
00:37:32.640 It's been a pleasure.
00:37:33.480 Our guest today was Robert Davis.
00:37:36.660 Robert is the Executive Secretary of the Guthrie, Oklahoma, Scottish Rite, and the author of the book, Understanding Manhood in America, Freemasonry's Enduring Path to the Mature Masculine.
00:37:46.220 And you can pick up Robert's book on Amazon.com.
00:37:48.480 That wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:37:57.060 For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com.
00:38:03.040 And until next time, stay manly.
00:38:18.480 Art of Manliness