The Degeneration of the Nation (Part 1): Why is Culture Deteriorating?

What's Behind the Degeneration of the Nation - and What's in Front of It

Is Bibi to blame for the degeneration of the nation? Is the degeneration of the nation to blame for Bibi? (Source)

Why, in fact, are the gatekeepers deteriorating? If more people are writing, or want to be academics, or artists, etc. - shouldn't competition have led to rising standards and overall quality? If there are more candidates for every cultural position or role, isn't it natural that a more talented person would reach them? How can we explain the opposite phenomenon?

Many are those who lament the degeneration of our nation in the Bibi era, analyzing the powerful historical processes that are leading us from the Western world towards turning Israel into a second-world country (the shrinking of educated elites versus a populist mass with significantly lower human capital. Latin America is the future!). But the degeneration is not at all a local problem - limited to the country. The decline in quality is not happening only in Israel, or in the degenerating Jewish people, or in aging Europe, or in the satiated West, but in the entire world. The Chinese may be a rising economic and even global power, but can anyone claim they are a rising cultural force? The degeneration is a phenomenon that crosses countries and cultures: a global decline in quality. Can we attribute the "decline of generations" to the rise of populism and mass culture, or perhaps the opposite direction is correct, and the decline is an independent force that itself causes populism and the flourishing of low culture?

But is it even true that the masses are to blame for the global decline in quality? In other words: does the elite really function as a restraining factor and a counterforce contributing to raising standards? After all, the place where we see the decline in quality most of all is precisely in the elites. We are witnessing the collapse in its most blatant form in high culture institutions: humanities departments in universities, museums, newspapers for thinking people (the degeneration of "Haaretz"), journals, publishing houses, the dying of high classical music as a creative field, the deteriorating philosophy on both sides of the Channel and the Ocean - all are deteriorating (perhaps only in mathematics and exact sciences does the flourishing continue, and indeed these fields are becoming more and more isolated from the rest of the world - true ivory towers of intelligence). It's not just the bad readers - but the bad editors and curators (who write as poorly as the worst writers). And it's not just the dilettante students - but the mountains of worthless and unoriginal publications by academic staff, and the embarrassing intellectual stars that academia has to offer the world.

Is democracy to blame? After all, the decline in cultural quality is not limited to democracies, and is not limited to the decline of the USA, which still has no cultural force threatening it (unlike non-cultural forces). The Chinese elites and masses alike are real zeros in terms of culture, and lack any spiritual message for the world, and are even more materialistic than Americans. If there is another issue in which China has remained completely Marxist, and in which Marx's legacy has truly been internalized deeply into the culture - it is materialism as a supreme value. For the Westerner who "happens to work with Chinese people", and expects to encounter a deep culture with different values (as opposed to different customs), the amazing and bitter realization is repeatedly in store that the people in front of him do not understand that there is anything in the world besides money and material success. And so too the Russian kleptocracy, of course. It's embarrassing how bad taste the elite of the superpower of one of the most cultured peoples in the world has (if we only compare to equally corrupt elites in the past - whose good taste funded masterpieces).

Even Russian culture itself is not what it once was, even under the communist regime (!). In some ways, the Putin regime, which does enjoy considerable popular support, exposes the wretchedness of the "Russian soul" even more than communist tyranny. This is no longer a terrible tragic historical mishap - it's nature. And certainly it's still easier to create culturally under Putin (so why isn't this reflected in the output?). Where will the next cultural force that can even challenge the USA emerge from? This is not a badge of honor for the USA but a certificate of poverty for the world - and we're talking about cultural poverty, not economic of course (where the situation is actually progressing okay). Material poverty is being eradicated in the world, but the spiritual poverty report shows a deep spiritual crisis (which is the real reason for the "crisis of the humanities": a crisis in the spirit itself).

When everything is deteriorating regardless - but with vigor - and when there is no force or counterforce that manages to stem the tide, and all the dams are breached one after another, including the most loyal gatekeepers, we must suspect that this broad dynamic has sources of a different kind, which are not just more specific and somewhat random historical "factors". If the fierce competition between artists is not leading to a rise in quality but to its lowering (and so too with writers and intellectuals), then there is no lack of free competition, market, or even talent here, but a loss of relevance of a paradigm. And this is the reason why the decline in quality is general - and therefore no one is to blame for it, and not any one factor.

As is known, fewer higher quality people create higher culture than many lower quality people. So if the level of the gatekeepers themselves maintains itself, they simply reduce the number of people and maintain the quality. But when the general level drops - it doesn't take long before the gatekeepers themselves become lower quality people. There is a decline in the quality of the quality producers themselves: the editors, curators, researchers. And therefore competition is created for a less quality evaluation function. For example: popularity, or conformity to trends, or political excellence and social skills, or just diligence. Therefore we do not see here some titanic struggle between a quality hierarchy and a lowly mass network, but a feedback process of declining quality: degeneration. The entire system as a whole is shaped in the direction of the transition from hierarchy to network. Therefore the quality - which is inherently related to hierarchy - decreases and flattens.



In such an analysis, we can identify a structural paradigm shift between two cultural formations - hierarchy and network - as the basic tectonic movement that produces all the changes in the layers of meaning above it (if we can still talk about layers at all, and not networks of meaning). Thus we can explain a long series of trends in our world - in the decline of hierarchy and the rise of the network. For example, the fall of patriarchy will be understood not as the fall of man: not because of the patri - but because of the archy. A fall that stems from a transition from a hierarchical world to a different kind of world, and hence also the sexual revolution, in which sexual connections become a network - and much less policed in hierarchical construction (whose peak: the patriarchal family, in a tree structure).

Therefore the network formation is not only related to the network (meaning the internet), but the intensification of networking preceded the network, and in fact - even created it in the first place. The intensification of horizontal connections in the world, connecting it in a network, began long before the internet, which is only the most complete and ultimate expression of this trend. Whether it's the transportation links that gradually networked the world, or the intensification of migration networks, or communication networks, and even literacy and the decline in book prices that created a much more networked transfer of ideas. The highest spiritual expression of the idea of the network preceded the network itself by half a century, and was based on the perception of communication as the center of being: the philosophy of language. "Family resemblance" means a network of connections, and when Wittgenstein likens his method of investigation to walking in a network of paths, which have no built-in hierarchy - he is actually describing a network. This is the horizontal culture, in which lateral connections in the system come at the expense of vertical connections and a built-in hierarchical perception of the basic structure (which the later Wittgenstein opposed). That is, there is a culture war here: horizontal culture versus vertical culture. Or: network culture versus hierarchical culture.

Therefore all hierarchies in the world are in a process of decline, in favor of network structures, such as the market. Thus we can understand the defeat of communism and socialism and regulation versus capitalism and the free market simply as the defeat of hierarchy versus network decentralization in the economic sphere. In fact, the basic structural differences are more fundamental than any ideology: network economy versus hierarchical economy are more basic ideas than capitalism versus communism (in this sense, Russia has basically adhered to the same economic system for hundreds of years: hierarchical kleptocracy that has characterized it since the days of the Tsar, through communism, and up to Putin. Only the thieves change - while the system remains). Even the wealth distribution gap of our days (or the number of sexual partners, or Facebook friends, or any other parameter that obeys the exponential law) simply stems from the 80-20 network structure (20% of the vertices have 80% of the connections, and vice versa, in an exponential ratio function). And the more we aspire to a completely pure network structure, without hierarchical regulation - this will be the natural distribution function of the world.

In the same way, only in the political sphere, we can understand the fall of hierarchical dictatorships and authoritarian regimes in favor of democracies of the network-communicative type, or decentralized civil wars, in which there is a network of power factors. And so we will also be able to understand the Chinese success - the first network dictatorship. Because contrary to popular belief, Rome - or in its less random name: the Mediterranean Empire (Rome is simply close to the center of the Mediterranean) - is not a parable for the USA, but more for today's China. This is a hierarchical and brutal rule that contains within it a network economy, with emphasis on construction and infrastructure projects (the Roman road and building the empire around the sea) and relative autonomy for provincial rulers (the empire is too large for effective centralized rule). In other words, the Chinese success is the success of network communism, just as the success of Rome compared to other empires in the ancient world was its being a network empire built around the great network of the ancient world - "our sea" - and containing it within it. And if we continue to classify learning and developing systems according to their basic organizing structure, we will discover that globalization itself is an anti-power and anti-hierarchical idea, which means: a whole networked world. There is no superpower or empire that rules the world, not even the USA, and therefore there is no need to fear that China will replace the USA. The world is becoming more and more of a network, in which there is no alpha state at the top of the hierarchy, but only changing networks of interests.

Another product of networking is the destruction of education systems, which are pillars of hierarchy, and the success of more decentralized systems (in Canada there is no Ministry of Education, in Korea education is actually private in private lessons, while in China and Finland enormous autonomy is given to districts and schools). The independence of principals and teachers is more educationally effective than supervision and control from above. In fact, it is possible that the form of educational structure is a more important parameter for future economic growth than the form of economic structure itself. This is in contrast to economic thought concentrated mostly on networking the "economy" and reforms in the economy, instead of the most critical factor for the prosperity of nations: human capital (only Russian human capital explains why it is still a superpower at all). Decentralized (or planned) education is essential for the future even more than the decentralized (or planned) economy. But almost all the intellectual firepower of the economics profession is directed at the economy, that is, at material capital, instead of increasing the combination of society's human capital and cultural capital, which deserves to be called its spiritual capital (by cultural capital we mean here the quality of culture that has economic significance, exactly as in the expression human capital - and not in Bourdieu's sense). Is the missing component that causes us to deteriorate a new model of truly networked education that will fit the structure of the current era?



Vertical economy versus horizontal economy, vertical totalitarian regime versus horizontal regime, vertical education versus horizontal education, networking is inherently liberal (this is, in fact, the liberal tendency) - and hierarchy is inherently conservative (and this is, in fact, the conservative tendency)... Is networking simply better? Is it the future? Should we view history as a long movement towards the horizontal, with vertical bumps - mountains that need to be overcome along the way? Is it like the famous Chabad sign - "Prepare for the coming of the Messiah" means prepare for the coming of the horizon? After all, one can look at history as a long series of networked liberation movements from hierarchical control structures. If we zoom out a bit from the networked gallop of our times, we'll discover that this basic structural gap has been present throughout history: The Greeks - a networked, commercial culture (hence the Macedonian Empire disintegrates into a cultural network within five minutes), while the Romans - a hierarchical empire. The entire Renaissance was an overcoming of networking: shipping, the republic of letters, discoveries and voyages, printing, trade-based culture - and this after the very vertical hierarchies of the Middle Ages. The Jewish exile itself is the transition from a hierarchical, state existence, with a temple at the top, to a networked, decentralized existence. That's why the Torah transformed from a hierarchical system descending from above (Written Torah) to a network of sages and connections between them (Oral Torah). Instead of a dictatorship of the proletariat, should we aspire to a network of the proletariat? Was this the whole mistake? Is the network the form of the desired equality - the horizontal paradise on earth (as opposed to the hierarchical one that is above, in heaven)?

Well, the existence of hunter-gatherers is inherently networked, but the agricultural revolution was the hierarchical revolution in human history (hence it was also the source of patriarchy). In fact, the hierarchical structure - which was certainly then an enormous cognitive innovation and a new method for perceiving and organizing the world - is the one structure that created all the components of the agricultural revolution, including hierarchical control of production sources, animals and plants, in contrast to hunting and gathering which are networked. Movement in space is horizontal, while settling in one place allows for vertical and hierarchical construction - religious, social and physical. Hence the prevalence of monumental construction in the ancient world, and thus the hierarchical idea then reached its most extreme form, just as today networking has reached its most extreme, and almost pure form (perhaps only the future vision of a network of minds where all minds become one network and one mind is more networked than it).

The physical place where the hierarchical revolution probably reached its global historical peak was then in Pharaonic Egypt, in the most hierarchical culture in the ancient world, which not surprisingly brought us the most stable hierarchical building form - the pyramid. Monotheism itself, which seems to us today as a particularly vertical hierarchy, was then actually a movement of descending hierarchy and horizontal flattening: a transition from an elaborate hierarchy between gods and in the cult itself to one god, who makes a direct covenant at Mount Sinai with the entire people, in the format of the covenant in the ancient world between a ruler and his vassals, and whose Torah is full of his direct speech to man. This, as opposition to the ruler's status as a god and as the center of worship, as in Egypt. The Bible itself was not shaped by a ruler as his ideology (and does not display such loyalty), but as a social text, which is the story of the people. Therefore, the Torah of Moses was actually a horizontal rebellion against the uncompromising and unbridled Egyptian hierarchy - and this is the depth of the exodus from slavery in construction to horizontal wanderings in the desert.

On the horizontal-vertical axis, Mesopotamian cultures were then more like Europe in modern times, with much political fragmentation and wars and influences and progress, that is, a more horizontal structure of power distribution between system components (the peak of this situation - for geographical reasons - was then in ancient Greece). And this is in contrast to the high hierarchy of strong American cultures or China. Hierarchy indeed created monumental achievements and exceptional construction projects, but ultimately paid in stagnation. In other words, we see an overwhelming advantage for networked flexibility over hierarchical efficiency only in the long term (and not the short term), or in a rapidly changing world - in the medium term. This is exactly the trade-off between two types of search: network search versus tree search. Or, if you will: exploration versus optimization. That is, there is a dialectic between the two forms, and when one of them is taken to extremes (in Egypt - hierarchy, and in our time - networking) we get a departure from the optimum. And where is the middle? On the border between a hierarchical world and a networked world and in the transition between them (in the ancient Near East: in the Land of Israel and Sinai - where the alphabet was invented and the Torah was created).



The most appropriate term to describe the most learning-conducive state is unification or coupling. This is an abstract Kabbalistic term describing a relationship between two, like dialectics or synthesis, but in which the two do not maintain their separateness (dialectics) and also do not unite (synthesis) but are in constant movement between these two possibilities themselves (and not just in movement between the two). The Kabbalistic coupling or unification is not a linguistic discourse (heaven forbid) or conflict, but a shared learning system (hence its ability to procreate). Hence it is a second-order relationship between connection and confrontation: coupling is a dialectic between dialectic and synthesis. And also: a synthesis between synthesis and dialectic. And why is the sexual metaphor the most appropriate to describe this relationship? Because sexuality itself was created precisely for this purpose.

The human revolution was a networked revolution: the human brain was a transition to a more networked brain than the hierarchical animal brain based on instincts. Language further increased networking, including social networking. And so we arrived at the networked society spreading and wandering in space of hunter-gatherers, which networked almost the entire globe with human societies (there was certainly a tremendous networked expansion drive here). But human sexuality is unique: it is neither networked nor hierarchical, but resides on the border between them. We are not penguins and not bonobos. The networked and hierarchical logic of sexuality always challenge each other in humans - not due to a malfunction, but intentionally, because it enhances learning. Because what is sexuality? The first great inventions of life creation were hierarchical inventions of control and stability (and therefore evolution was very slow at its beginning): DNA, the cell, the internal division of the cell into organelles (the appearance of eukaryotes), the building of the hierarchy that allowed animals (multicellular organisms) and the various body structures from the Cambrian explosion, predation, the gradual growth of organisms while increasing their complexity, and so on. All these increased the strength of the vertical axis - between generations and in control relationships. And the peak of this vertical peak, which parallels the phenomenon of the pyramids, where complexity is size - was the phenomenon of dinosaurs.

Within all this hierarchical flourishing, sexuality was the more networked and horizontal component of the ecological system, in that it allowed not only a generational genetic hierarchy, in the form of a tree from organism to its offspring, but networked gene transfer within the population (and sometimes - even gene transfer between species! a less known but critical phenomenon for evolution). Thus, for example, the appearance of flowers - which creates from the hierarchical plant growing upwards a horizontal and non-local network of pollination - is a classic example of sexuality. That is, sexuality is from the outset on the border between the hierarchical and the networked, and therefore its most famous place in Kabbalah is the meeting between the hierarchical vertical divine tree and the networked and horizontal Shekhinah of the congregation of Israel and the Torah. That is: between heaven and earth. For the *unification* of the Holy One, blessed be He, and His Shekhinah. Hence the importance of sexuality for learning, and the decline existing in the current, over-networked world, in sexuality itself.

The learning existing in the universe indicates that there is some aspiration in it for a chaos boundary: convergence not to absolute chaos and not to an orderly structure - but to the border between them. After all, what does it take for complexity to be created in a physical system, and not just mess or infinite stagnation? If we infer from mathematics - very little is needed. In almost any structure we create, based on some mathematical structure, there will be tremendous learning complexity. Mathematics formulates what is possible, and it turns out that complexity in what is possible is not exceptional, but rather the lack of complexity. Complexity is common. We have a bias in favor of simplicity because we are stupid (limitations of the human brain, especially in working memory) and therefore we repeatedly search for simplicity in the universe, but there is some attractor we don't understand that draws the universe to the border between order and disorder - and to learning.

Therefore, extreme networking is destined to fail and stabilize again in a structure with more hierarchical characteristics. Our era allows us to learn the opposite failure to fixed hierarchy - decentralization without grip - and to observe the destructive results of the Tower of Babel: flattening and dispersal over all the earth. As is known, discourse cannot be criticized from within the discourse itself: criticism of the Facebook network will never be viral on Facebook, and even the linguistic ideology associated with the decline in level is difficult to eliminate through its own means - communication is opaque to its deterioration (one can think here of Israeli media, and also of "Haaretz" in particular). There is a failing method here, which perceives the essence of the network as communication and discourse (and not, for example, as a brain learning network), and therefore thinks that if it spreads an idea on the network and makes it popular - it will succeed and be successful (give me a click, give me a byte, what do you get? Clickbait!). Just like a teenager who wants to be famous (it doesn't matter in what, for what and why), because fame itself is important - and not the content. This method does not understand that there is something outside the network - and therefore it sets out to conquer it, and often claims in the name of networking and popularity against hierarchy and reputation (who are you to determine what culture is?).



Indeed, the attempt to describe and understand history as a struggle between structures (hierarchy versus network) is a step back from language, to the philosophical paradigm before the philosophy of language, in order to criticize the current paradigm with known and agreed tools. While the more correct description (that is, more future-oriented) - which the current consciousness only approaches - is a struggle between methods, not between structures. In the structural view, philosophy is the highest form of organization - because it is (simply) the form of organization in its purest form: its abstract form. Philosophy formulates a paradigm of organization - of its time. Therefore, for it, understanding is the construction in structure, just like perception in Kant. Because the depth of the Kantian paradigm was structure and organization (for example: categories). The Kantian method was a form of perception, and therefore it enabled the structures of bureaucracy and mechanisms of human control over the world - which became worldviews, and struggles between worldviews, or between forms of building the world. Exactly as we presented history as a struggle between structures.

These struggles are foreign to linguistic struggles, which are not struggles of perception and ideologies and construction, but struggles of power and popularity and control of discourse: communicative struggles. This linguistic paradigm naturally understands philosophy itself as the highest form of language - as discourse in its purest form. As language about language (or one that examines its boundaries). But in a learning view, philosophy is actually the method in its purest form: the method of methods. And history is perceived in it as struggles between methods. In this last view, the networked and decentralized linguistic method defeated the more structural and hierarchical Kantian method. Hence the decline in level - because level requires height and depth, while language is the horizontal surface: a shell. In the Kantian method, content from the world is perceived within the human structure, with deep legitimacy for the human structure as inevitable and positive, and therefore there was legitimacy in it for human hierarchy as valid. You could learn a certain field of perception - and become an expert and authority in it. You could combine subjective and objective components in your taste. You could learn and teach to appreciate works or texts - learn perception. Learning was construction - and the result could be built to perfection.

Language attacked this method as arbitrary, unjustified - and even illegitimate. Why is your perception better than mine? Every hierarchy is institutional and powerful and oppressive. Every structure - fossilized. The linguistic method saw in language itself the exclusive plane in which there is development and learning, that is - learning itself was flattened to learning how to talk about something. Precisely because mastery of language is not fortified in any structure and learning is open to all, the result became powerful many times over, only that power passed to the masses - the struggles became who shouts louder, who manages to shape the language, and who manages to organize the network and control it and incite it (right) or purify it (left). The structural struggle is an orderly war - and the networked struggle is terrorism. Or alternatively, civil war. Or alternatively, a kindergarten quarrel. Instead of struggles between perceptions - we have wars over discourse, over attention, and over narrative, and over what he said that she said to him that you said to me. Did you hear about the new statement of...? What a terrible thing to say. Go to the bathroom and wash your mouth with soap. *Learn* how to speak! The general method for the intellectual of language is simply to learn how to speak in a certain discourse - academic jargon, poetic style, an article in Haaretz, the genre of Israeli prose and its accessories - and then maintain conformity to the discourse, because it gives value to your words, and you reaffirm it back, and thus babble yourself to knowledge (because content is secondary to language, not to mention learning innovation).

But learning within language defeats itself, because there is no internal basis in language - which is conventional and arbitrary many times more than perception - for why one speaks this way and not another, or worse: why to say this and not that. Therefore, the learning method will replace the linguistic method, and will reconstitute the ability to learn something, that is, to learn why this and not otherwise, from the power of a learning system (as opposed to a language system). Learning systems are actually good at creating flexible hierarchies, and therefore there is meaning in them to the idea of level, and there is room in them for the dimensions of depth and height, far from the linguistic surface. For this purpose, we really need to build new learning systems, because cultural institutions are really dinosaurs (that is, fossils of dinosaurs). In contrast to the Roman/Chinese method of containing a network within a rigid external hierarchy, we need to create hierarchy within the network, just like in the brain (or in Google's algorithm). For this purpose, it is necessary to add to the various networks an internal *hierarchical* ranking of the vertices, in order to create vertical structures within the network itself. Because there are different levels of people. Not everyone is equal. Plato already knew that there are people made of iron - and there are those made of gold. Not all language users are entitled to the same listening: a post by a person ranked as gold is worth more than a post by a person of copper. And the critical difference from the Platonic state system is that we now have a variety of flexible learning and ranking algorithms to determine what material you are made of - within the network (PageRank, Hebb's rule, h-index, and more). That is: we have mechanisms to incentivize you to become precious metal. This way we can turn the babbling network - into a learning brain, and the straw and chaff it produces - into gold.

To Part B