Height Magnifies Deviation: Responsibility Reveals What Already Exists

I was recently working on a Masonic meme built around the Plumb. The words were simple: “Outcome, Not Intention.” The image was equally simple—a plumb suspended beside a stone wall. Yet deciding exactly how that wall should appear raised a more interesting question than the one I had started with. Should the wall be obviously straight? Should it be visibly crooked? Or should it remain ambiguous enough that the viewer had to bring his own experience to the image and decide what the Plumb revealed?

That question stayed with me because of what happens when a wall is only slightly out of plumb. Near its foundation, the deviation may be almost impossible to see. Continue building upward along that same line, however, and the consequences of the original error become increasingly apparent. The deviation itself has not changed. If a wall rises at one degree from vertical, one degree remains one degree. At one foot of height, that error produces a horizontal displacement of only about one-fifth of an inch. At ten feet, it is a little more than two inches. At thirty feet, it exceeds six inches. Nothing happened to the original angle; the wall simply grew taller. Height magnifies deviation.

That is an operative lesson easily understood by a craftsman, but the speculative lesson interests me more. I began thinking about the progression of a Mason through the chairs of his Lodge and eventually toward the East. Each step brings additional responsibility, greater expectations, more complicated problems, and usually more people affected by his decisions. What if the increasing height of a wall provides a useful metaphor for that progression?

What if responsibility works upon character as height works upon a wall?

Greater responsibility does not necessarily create defects in character. It can reveal what was already there. A Mason may possess a measure of impatience when he begins his journey. He may be somewhat disorganized, dislike criticism, have difficulty delegating, desire recognition more than he realizes, or become stubborn when challenged. He may even have a tendency to confuse disagreement with disrespect. With little responsibility, those characteristics may have relatively little effect upon anyone beyond himself. They are small deviations close to the foundation, difficult to see and perhaps easily dismissed.

Then the wall begins to rise. A Mason accepts an assignment. Later he becomes responsible for a degree or committee. He occupies a chair. Other men begin depending upon him. Eventually he may become a Deacon, then a Warden, and perhaps one day Master of his Lodge. With each step, the work becomes more complicated. Decisions affect more people, communication becomes more important, and mistakes carry greater consequences. The character deviation did not necessarily become greater; the structure surrounding it did.

A man who is mildly disorganized may successfully manage a simple task involving two or three people. Give him responsibility for a complicated event involving twenty people, multiple deadlines, money, facilities, and outside organizations, and that same disorganization becomes far more visible. Impatience that once produced an unpleasant conversation may eventually affect an entire Lodge. An excessive need for control may remain largely invisible until a man finally possesses enough authority to exercise it. A sensitivity to criticism may seem inconsequential until leadership requires him to hear criticism regularly and respond to it constructively.

The same principle should also work in the other direction. Increasing responsibility can reveal patience, courage, humility, restraint, generosity, sound judgment, and an ability to bring men together that smaller tasks never demanded. Height magnifies alignment as surely as it magnifies deviation. The point is not that advancement makes men worse. The point is that increasing responsibility places more of the man where it can be seen.

This gives the progressive chairs of a Lodge a meaning beyond advancement toward the East. Each chair can be understood as another course of stone added to the wall and another opportunity for a Mason to discover whether his work remains upright. The Junior Deacon encounters responsibilities he did not have while sitting among the Brethren. The Senior Deacon encounters others. The Wardens confront questions of leadership, judgment, preparation, personalities, and responsibility that were not present earlier. Ideally, each position should reveal something about the man occupying it.

Advancement, then, should not merely prompt the question, “Am I ready for the next chair?” There is another question that may be more important: What has this chair revealed about me that I should correct before I build any higher? If the purpose of progression is partly personal development, advancement without reflection can become a missed opportunity. We can become very good at performing the duties of increasingly important positions without becoming equally skilled at examining what those positions are revealing about us.

This is where the Plumb becomes particularly important. The Plumb does not condemn the wall, nor does it know anything about the intentions of the craftsman who built it. It does not praise him when the work is upright or ridicule him when it is not. It simply establishes a reference independent of the craftsman’s opinion of his own work. He may sincerely believe the wall is straight. He may have worked extraordinarily hard upon it. He may have encountered difficult circumstances while building it. None of those things move the plumb line.

That may be one of the more difficult lessons contained within the symbol because we are remarkably capable of judging ourselves by our intentions. We know what we meant to accomplish. We know the pressures surrounding our decisions, the information available to us at the time, and the reasons we chose one course rather than another. Because we possess all that internal information, we can usually construct a convincing explanation for ourselves. The Plumb possesses none of it. It simply checks the work.

Yet speculative Masonry presents a difficulty that the operative craftsman does not face. We are simultaneously the craftsman and the material upon which we labor. We are attempting to examine character through the very character being examined. If my judgment is part of the problem, relying exclusively upon my judgment to identify the problem presents an obvious difficulty. An external reference therefore becomes essential.

Where do we find that Plumb? Certainly, Masonic teachings provide standards against which conduct can be considered. Experience provides another. Sometimes failure becomes the Plumb because the consequences of our conduct become impossible to ignore. Sometimes the reactions of those around us tell us that something is no longer aligned. Sometimes another Brother becomes the Plumb by telling us something we would rather not hear. The difficulty is not merely finding the instrument. It is developing the willingness to use it when the deviation is still small enough to correct easily.

There is another problem as a Mason progresses toward the East. Advancement itself can begin to look like evidence of alignment. A man is appointed to a chair. He performs adequately and advances. He becomes a Warden. Eventually his Brethren elect him Master. Each successive step can understandably feel like confirmation that the wall must be straight. After all, if something were seriously wrong, why would he continue to advance?

But advancement measures advancement. It does not necessarily measure character.

In fact, increasing authority may make honest measurement more difficult. People often become increasingly reluctant to criticize those who occupy positions of authority. A Brother may recognize a developing problem but decide that confronting it is not worth the resulting conflict. Another may worry that criticism will be interpreted as personal hostility or disloyalty. Others may simply decide to wait because a Master’s year eventually ends. The irony is difficult to miss: at precisely the point where a man’s deviations can have their greatest consequences, the people around him may become least willing to point them out.

Then comes the East. The Master’s chair represents the greatest formal height a Mason reaches within his Lodge, but it also places his character under extraordinary strain. Authority, tradition, personalities, expectations, finances, ritual, disagreements, schedules, candidates, officers, and the ordinary unpredictability of human beings converge upon one position. Decisions that were once theoretical become immediate. Leadership qualities that could once be discussed abstractly must now be practiced in front of everyone.

The chair does not necessarily create arrogance, insecurity, impatience, stubbornness, resentment, or an excessive need for control. It gives those characteristics room to become visible. At the same time, it can reveal strengths that were equally difficult to see before. Patience becomes meaningful when patience is difficult. Humility matters differently when a man possesses authority. Restraint means more when he has the power to impose his preference. Leadership becomes something other than an idea when other men actually depend upon his judgment.

That may be one of the greatest opportunities presented by the East. A year as Master can teach a Mason things about himself that he could have learned nowhere else. If he takes those lessons seriously, the experience becomes much more than successful administration of a Lodge. The East becomes another working place upon the unfinished stone. The danger comes when the authority of the chair is interpreted as proof that the work upon the man occupying it has somehow been completed.

I have come to wonder, however, whether the greater test may come after the East. Becoming a Past Master presents a peculiar challenge. For a year, a man has occupied the highest chair in his Lodge. Men have risen when he entered. He has presided over meetings, made appointments, controlled agendas, rendered decisions, and carried both the authority and responsibility of the office. Custom and protocol have reinforced his position throughout that year.

Then his year ends, and another man sits in the East. The former Master must now learn a different kind of discipline. He must advise without governing. He must disagree without undermining. He must watch another Mason make decisions differently than he would have made them. He may even have to watch a new Master make mistakes he believes he could prevent. Most importantly, he must surrender authority he has become accustomed to exercising and accept the same customs and protocols that now restrain him from continuing to govern.

Perhaps that is where some of the smallest deviations become most visible. The impatient man may discover that he cannot wait for the new Master to learn. The controlling man may struggle to relinquish control. The man who became accustomed to recognition may discover that he misses it. The man who interpreted his year in the East as confirmation of superior judgment may find it difficult to accept that another Brother now possesses the same authority he once held. A characteristic that was barely visible near the foundation may now stand several inches away from the line.

This may also be where a failure to apply the Plumb earlier becomes particularly costly. If nobody ever challenged the deviation—or if the craftsman refused to look when they did—the journey through the chairs may actually reinforce it. Every advancement can be interpreted as validation. Every conflict can be remembered as evidence that someone else was unreasonable. Every criticism can be dismissed as disloyalty. Instead of using increasing responsibility to discover where correction was necessary, the Mason can use his advancement as evidence that no correction was ever needed.

He reached the top of the wall without discovering that it was out of plumb.

There is something particularly unfortunate about that outcome because the journey through the chairs offers so many opportunities for exactly the opposite result. Every new responsibility can reveal something that simpler work could not. Every difficult personality can test patience. Every disagreement can test restraint. Every mistake can test humility. Every success can test ego. Every increase in authority can test whether a man understands the difference between leadership and control. Properly approached, the progression toward the East is not evidence that the work upon ourselves is finished. It provides progressively more demanding work through which we can discover where that work remains.

The Past Master may therefore face one of the most revealing stages of all. He has reached the height, exercised the authority, and completed the formal progression. Now much of the external structure that guided and restrained him has changed. What remains is the man and whatever lessons he chose to take from the journey. If he learned to keep the Plumb beside his work, his experience can become a tremendous resource to those who follow him. If he did not, the very experience intended to develop him may instead have strengthened his certainty that everyone else should continue building according to his line.

The lesson is not that men should fear advancement or that responsibility inevitably exposes some hidden moral failure. Quite the opposite. Greater responsibility offers a remarkable opportunity for self-knowledge. It places our judgment, temperament, discipline, humility, and relationships under conditions that smaller responsibilities simply cannot reproduce. It allows us to see ourselves at greater scale.

The operative craftsman does not wait until the wall is complete before applying the Plumb. He checks as he builds because correction becomes increasingly difficult as additional courses are laid upon an existing deviation. Perhaps the speculative craftsman should approach his own development in much the same way. We should not wait until the consequences of a defect become so large that everyone can see them. We should continually compare our conduct against something more reliable than our own intentions and remain willing to hear when another person sees a deviation that we do not.

There is no shame in discovering that the work requires correction. That is why the working tools remain beside us. The greater danger is continuing to build because the first few courses looked close enough.

We should not fear building higher.

We should fear building higher without keeping the Plumb beside the work.