Like any child I grew up acquainted with the need to conform to behaviour. Parents and teachers primarily were to be reckoned with. My father was at heart a military man with the stiff, shoulders back approach (verbal reprimand); my mother was more refined as a diplomatic censure (polite ritual conduct). At school I remember once hearing of a child who had been administered the strap for misconduct. It was not a delivery which sat particularly well with me then (nor has it ever since). To my thinking it bordered upon brutality or bullying at a minimum. I certainly never considered it a clever routine for instilling cooperation or agreement; though I acknowledge that may also speak to my misunderstanding of the theoretical basics of discipline.
Boarding school at St. Andrew’s College very quickly taught me the dominance of a league of authoritarians commencing with the Headmaster, then the Housemaster, Masters, Prefects, House Captains, Team Captain, Cadet Major, Cadet Corporal and finally Clan Captain.
Boarding school history of discipline included administration of the cane, a so-called privilege reserved to the Prefects and normally conducted in the privacy of their Common Room. It was sometimes administered as a punishment alternative to having to run publicly about the quad at high port (that is, around the main circular courtyard with a rifle held over one’s head). The quad bordered the chapel, the Upper School and the Headmaster’s residence.
But the first I recall of having to maintain discipline was when I was acting as a House Captain of Macdonald House. Fred Duggan and I were the two senior boys from the Upper School charged to oversee the the younger boys in the Lower School. We inhabited a suite on the main floor. The younger boys resided in dormitories on the second floor. The House Master James Carmen Mainprize lived in a private apartment on the second floor.
I cannot now recall the event which triggered the need for discipline. I suspect it was something minor. Nonetheless Duggan and I held a conference in the House Captain’s Common Room to investigate the matter. Rather than broach the subject of either physical or verbal pillory, we challenged the youthful offender to carry an egg in a spoon while walking upon the sofa cushions we had laid upon the floor from one end of the room to the other with the threat of having to clean the cushions should he fail. Naturally it was the humiliation of the punishment which was the enactment of the discipline. Happily I can report that subsequent manifestations of discipline for boys who talked in the dormitories after lights out or who conflicted with fellow students or who did whatever were treated to more conversational reviews of the behaviour with a view to early retirement or settlement.
Many years afterwards I was introduced to the unanticipated subject of discipline when I joined the Masonic Lodge. As a sequel to acting as Secretary (during which I had access to the collection of Lodge records going back to its constitution in 1861) I wrote a review of historic secretarial records.
What interested me in particular about those accounts was the obvious sense of entitlement of the lodge hierarchy to administer its own form of discipline to its members. As you might expect the familiarity spoke to the accepted priority of the lodge. Within the length of my entire membership in the lodge since 1978 I have never once encountered a Masonic trial though it was not uncommon a century ago. The men with whom I formed a fraternity in the Masonic Lodge shall forever remain close to me. I find it impossible to characterize the strength of the fraternity but it most certainly prevails. It is the union of men from every walk of life and from every background. Lodge membership is an instant key to acknowledgement and connection. The fraternity exceeds anything heretofore or hereafter advanced. Oddly, as personal as the discipline may have been, it was curiously observed at the same time to distance oneself from the affairs of a brother’s private avocation.
Paradoxically it was the conjunction of the wholesome and abstract views of the brotherhood which sustained the relationships. I cannot resist thinking that the model is one which has value in other contexts. Though I likewise resist embracing a mode of conduct which survives upon conformity and superiority, neither of which is completely aligned with any one of us from time to time. As nebulous and imprecise as it may sound I much prefer instead to address matters of discipline with a view to harmony and concord. I never undertook an interest in criminal law nor practicing as defence counsel but on more than one occasion I was asked to act as mediator between conflicting parties. I can as well report that in every instance there were profitable results of those arrangements on all sides, which for me points to the theory that no one likes disruption in their passage through life. Nor does it matter in the broadest view how in particular you arrived at that juncture.