There is much debate in the United Kingdom and elsewhere about how different people can live together in harmony. There are those who think that they should, there are those who think that they shouldn’t, and there are those who think that everyone should believe as they do whether this brings harmony or not.
    In this issue of Freemasonry Today we have an interview with former Police Superintendent, David Webb, who was in charge of the ethnically disparate and explosive Handsworth District of Birmingham during the worst of the troubles there in the 1980s. One very interesting act he performed, as a Freemason, was to help found a masonic lodge drawing from many of the groups in the community, the aptly named Lodge of Universal Brotherhood, No. 9329.
    One of the psychological inevitabilities of community tension and active ethnic or cultural fault-lines is that one group will define itself by what it is not. Let me explain: one group will find an enemy, a scapegoat, and all the ills of the group will be blamed on that other person or persons. ‘They’ are different; ‘they’ are not like us; ‘they’ are not as pure, holy, intelligent, sophisticated, educated, civilised - and so it continues. ‘Our’ group is what ‘their’ group is not; ‘our’ group is right, and ‘their’ group is wrong.
    The true horror is when otherwise intelligent people start buying in to this attitude forgetting that, in the end, it leads to the mechanised horror of the Nazi death camps. We may all be - or claim to be - intelligent, educated and cultured but the experience of the physical and moral selfdestruction in the Balkans during the 1990s should remind us all that the darkness lingers close to the surface.
    What is the solution? Well, a place to start is by celebrating what we hold in common rather than focussing upon how we differ. In that way our differences become a strength; our differences allow us to offer up other perspectives, other insights. But by focussing upon those differences alone they inevitably become a weakness, they create conflict and chaos where none need exist. I hardly need to spell it out: far from being in any way a fading residue of a long vanished past, Freemasonry has within it the keys to celebrating what we hold in common and yet allowing our differences to emerge so as to make the entire community stronger; the world community. We must never let the world beyond Freemasonry forget that one of our basic principles is expressed as: masonry is the centre of union between good men and true, and the happy means of conciliating friendship amongst those who must otherwise have remained at a perpetual distance.
   
    . . . . . . . .
   
    Many of you will now know that at Freemasonry Today we have a completely new website. Not only the entire current issue is available on the site but every back issue is there too. And to make it easier to find out if we have ever published an article in your area of interest, we have included a search facility. Type in the subject you want and all the references to it will be given to you. I think all will find this very useful. The search facility is part of the Free Limited Access. The current issue is available online for an annual subscription of £5.95. The current issue plus the complete contents of all thirtythree back issues, over one million words, is available for an annual subscription of £12 which, at £1 a month, is very reasonable indeed.
    There is another matter I would like to bring to the attention of readers: our regular writer on Masonic Museums, Yasha Beresiner, is leading a tour of the Holy Land from 7th - 14th November this year. He will take you to all the important sites as well as introducing you to Freemasonry there with a meeting with the Grand Master of Israel and visits to some local lodges; it should be very interesting. I would hope to go on a future trip with him because he is great company as I have found out during our regular trips to Museums. There are still some places available on the tour: telephone 0800 371972.
    Erratum: In our last issue, page 16, we carried a news report of the American Grand Masters Conference. The Masonic Service Association of America have asked us to point out that the Conference is self governing, having its own Executive Secretary and elected Representatives who arrange the schedule and programme. The Masonic Service Association is part of the Conference but does not govern it as we suggested in our report.
    Michael Baigent MA - Editor