The Origins of Freemasonry and the Invention of Tradition
In his introduction , Hobsbawm points out that this process of inventing tradition gained considerable momentum during the period between 1850 and the First World War , and suggests that it is linked to the growth of modern ideas of the nation . As Hobsbawm puts it , invented traditions ‘ are highly relevant to that comparatively recent historical innovation , the nation , with its associated phenomena : nationalism , the nation-state , national symbols , histories and the rest . All these depend on exercises in social engineering which are often deliberate and always innovative ’. 19 The invention of tradition is a vital political weapon , and myths of national origin continue to be invented today by populist politicians across the world from Erdogan in Turkey and Victor Orban in Hungary to Narendra Modi in India . In a 1992 article for the New York Review of Books , Hobsbawm trenchantly described the political importance of the creation and manipulation of traditions :
History is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies , as poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction . The past is an essential element , perhaps the essential element in these ideologies . If there is no suitable past , it can always be invented . Indeed , in the nature of things there is usually no entirely suitable past , because the phenomenon these ideologies claim to justify is not ancient or eternal but historically novel . 20
In his introduction to The Invention of Tradition , Hobsbawm cites freemasonry as an example of an invented tradition ' of great symbolic force ' and notes that it has been one of those ' well-supplied warehouses of official ritual , symbolism and moral exhortation ' providing the raw materials for the construction of new traditions . 21 As elsewhere , the creation and manipulation of traditions in freemasonry reflects wider social , cultural and political movements . Despite its cosmopolitan veneer , freemasonry is particularly prone to the crack cocaine of nationalism , whether it is promoting the myth of George Washington in the United States , seeking to preserve the spirit of the French Revolution in Paris , or toasting the Queen in London , and freemasonry has both generated and been shaped by national cultures .
Hobsbawm and Ranger , The Invention of Tradition , pp . 62-6 ; A Rattleskull Genius : The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg , ed . Geraint H . Jenkins ( Cardiff : University of Wales Press , 2009 ); Ronald Hutton , Blood and Mistletoe : the History of the Druids in Britain ( New Haven : Yale University Press , 2009 ), pp . 146-347 ; Barry Cunliffe , Druids : a Very Short Introduction ( Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2010 ), pp . 116-8 .
19 Eric Hobsbawm , ' Introduction : Inventing Traditions ' in Invention of Tradition , ed . Hobsbawm and Ranger , p . 13 .
20 Eric Hobsbawm , ' The New Threat to History ', New York Review of Books , 16 December 1993 , pp . 62-5 , afterwards reprinted as Chapter 1 of Eric Hobsbawm , On History ( London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson , 1997 ).
21 Hobsbawm , ' Introduction : Inventing Traditions ', p . 6 .
7