Where did the late Amnon Navot err in his fight against corruption? How can culture be restored to culture? And is it possible that Maayan Eitan is a student of Yitzhak Laor? The cat as the future of humanity - doesn't leave the house, doesn't connect, doesn't bark, doesn't push its nose but raises it, yet on the other hand is wonderfully curious, has many souls, independent and mischievous - from head to tail
Why are all cultural institutions deteriorating, while natural sciences are not? Because of the loss of the evaluation function. What can be easily corrupted - is corrupted (plastic arts are the most extreme example), and what less - less. For what is corruption? Sabotage of the evaluation function. For example, when a judge or decision-maker receives an envelope, or when an editor makes a decision for non-professional reasons (therefore Tzipper is corrupt just like Bibi - this is the secret of their soul connection). Corruption can also be in society as a whole, for example if the evaluation function for politicians' performances becomes unprofessional, or for cultural works. A person becomes corrupt in their private life when their evaluation function is destroyed, and hence there can also be sexual, hedonistic or financial corruption - and addiction is the peak of a person's corruption. And today we live in a corrupt culture.
But no one can bribe the future. Corruption is only in the present, when the evaluator himself is evaluated by the evaluated, meaning it stems from circularity: I like the decision-maker and he likes me. Every such social circle is a small corruption, and therefore Facebook corrupts its participants (I have never liked anyone. Even when I greatly appreciated their writing - I restrained myself). Corruption is favoritism - and what is Facebook if not a platform of faces. Levinas's ideal has turned into a dystopia. When I see posts mutually praising between two cultural figures (for example: a curator and an artist. Or: a critic and a writer), it always causes me revulsion, just like the social corruption party called a wedding, where the check you deposited is supposed to return to you in the future: write for me and I'll write for you. On Facebook, unlike in the past, these things are done in broad daylight, and since it does not disinfect anything, they become the way things are supposed to be done legitimately under the sun, and not just in the dark.
Populist corruption is actually when there is a feedback loop that is too short and too tight between the leader and the people (the secret of Bibi's power is the secret of his weakness), and cultural corruption often stems precisely from genuine mutual appreciation, which quickly deteriorates into cutting corners. Let's recall here the first lesson in graph theory: a network is a structure of connections that has circles, while a hierarchical tree is a network that has no circles, and therefore a clear tree structure can be created from it - from top to bottom. If so, how can we break the circle of corruption, which stems from the very structure of the network?
When the utopia of creation in anonymity and hiding faces and from social distance is still far from us, there is only one way to create a hierarchy that is completely unidirectional, that is - with direction and incorruptible. For this purpose we must rely on actual physical unidirectionality, which no social structure can overcome, and this is the unidirectionality of the time axis. As long as it is not possible to jump forward in time, and bribe the critic from the future, the future is the only objective evaluator, who will not recognize anyone - and therefore will not accept bribes. Many indeed try to bribe the future in the politics of authority relations, raising heirs, nurturing a group, and so on - but all this holds up maybe one generation. And time is the number one enemy of corruption, and its disinfecting light is seven times stronger than the light of the sun, because it is not light, but darkness: the good darkness of forgetting everything that is not worthy of remembrance.
Therefore, people who are desperate from the corruption of the present (for example from Bibi) turn to the judgment of history. Because justice is indeed slow, but today even this is less and less - because history itself is accelerating. The extensive cultural forgetting of our days is the best sign of the efficiency of justice and its necessity, and frightens only those who have something to fear (about themselves). And there is a lot to forget. All of Facebook, for example, will be forgotten by the future. All non-scientific academic research, written in jargon, will be forgotten. Even higher percentages of destruction, approaching 100%, will be undergone by contemporary art. Phenomena that we stand helpless against - will be eliminated as if by the way, unknowingly. How much wrath did Amnon Navot of blessed memory invest, and how many pens were broken... Does anyone still remember that there was once a thing called Ars-Poetics? Was there any value to all the commotion, on both sides? This will also happen to Bibi and Tzipper themselves, and also to political correctness and Me_Too, and also to the extreme right and the radical left, and to any corruption. Why open your mouth about what will be swallowed by a yawn? Not in wind or in earthquake is the Lord, and not in fire - but in a still small voice.
The future is not forgiving of politicization. Because politicization brings out the worst side of all sides. The left is based on preaching, and the right is based on incitement. And therefore the left is full of purism (hence: the purges) directed inward to the group. Leftists eat each other alive (or exile to the gulag). And in the right, incitement is directed outside the group (hence its fondness for marking the enemy as external). Who does it like to eat alive? "Them". Therefore the war in the 20th century against the extreme left became cold (with Hitler, the extreme right, there could not have been a cold war - and a nuclear war would have broken out). Both sides are worthless to the future, because the future is not built on the struggle between thesis and antithesis (right-left axis), but precisely on the breakthroughs perpendicular to the axis (which is usually a wall) - towards a new direction of synthesis. The future, how typical of it, cares only about innovation. And politics is by nature a dirty battle within the paradigm (because the clean is the new!). Therefore, anyone who says a variation on what has already been said - as if he said nothing. The question is not whether he said truth or falsehood, and who is right within the discourse, but whether anything interesting was said at all, something that opens thinking, and not something that closes it in some "correct" direction. The idea of persuasion in discourse, therefore, is the father of corruption, as if if I convince enough people - it will secure my place. Who is interested in convincing? Only to offer. Who cares if you are convinced? Persuasion is the idea that language has power - an idea that somehow convinced all the convincers.
After all, what is the motivation of people to publish on Facebook? What pitiful belief in discourse, or that the method to move things in the world is to talk about them, or the pathetic thought that there is importance in communicating "important" things to people. All of these are so disconnected from reality, yet so rooted in discourse, that they bring an entire culture to a state of reality denial. The belief in burning discourse and not consuming is much more absurd than the belief in the burning bush and not consuming, but the cult around it is very developed, because it is related to the human bias towards oral culture around the campfire (for example: gossip, or cheap wit). Only learning affects the world, but the chatter, in a kind of arspoetic justice, destroys itself - and will help the future separate the chaff from the wheat. Anyone whose value is measured by the fact that "there is talk about him" among those in the know and "they talk about him in the media" (and will forget him tomorrow) - will be talked out of the consciousness of the future. And only those who were a significant link in future learning will continue to exist in it.
For those who do not believe in the vitality of cultural learning in the face of cultural forgetting - we will bring a contemporary example. Recently I started reading Maayan Eitan's new and interesting book, "Love", and a thought crossed my mind that made me laugh a lot: Are people aware that the unique poetics of the book is taken almost one-to-one from the most famous poem of one - Yitzhak Laor? (You are invited to compare the two! Rock Girl). Including the dissociative context... How cunning is the way of the spirit in the world, and on this Ecclesiastes said: "The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits". The poetic solution survived all the politicization and personalization and gender reversal and changing times, and the chain continues - sometimes even without the awareness of both sides, Rabbi Laor and the student Eitan, because this is how the learning chain works. Learning is always interested only in the body of the matter - and not in the body of a person. And all this completely disconnected from discourse, from the audience, or from any other type of nuisance.
Why publish a book today at all? What is the motivation to present a work of art for judgment by artistic institutions? Is there a desire to reach an audience? But the audience itself is worthless, and also uninteresting. An artistic and literary community desiring life would have to completely disconnect itself from any price tag, because money is a corrupting measure, which in practice subordinates art to public opinion (and also the wealthy or the establishment are an inferior audience in their artistic taste). Today, when there is no audience and no money in art and literature and even in the world of spirit - there is actually a golden opportunity to disconnect these fields from capitalism, which caused them enormous cultural damage, and from the opinion of the general public - whose contribution to them is negative and destructive. The masses will always prefer mass "culture" over culture, and capitalism prefers popularity over reputation. Capitalist democracy will always give everyone equal status as ideology and practice, because the ballots and shekels are all equal, no matter who they come from, and in this it will always eliminate the reputation function in the name of the popularity function. After all, Facebook gives all likes equal status, and the number of users who viewed or liked something is the measure - not their quality. Such a disconnection between culture and audience will be positive (we didn't come to educate anyone!) - and will allow culture not to sell anything to anyone, in any sense. Not to be a commodity (not even a valuable or political or other type of nuisance commodity), and not to prostitute itself. A Haredi separation must be made between the livelihood of creators and the creation itself, and publish everything on the web, for the public domain, for free.
And how can a quality measure be maintained? In a simple and very familiar way - ask for approvals from authorities. Re-establish the custom of opening a work with approvals from known taste-makers and critics - who recommend it. Such a group, with great cultural capital, will be stronger than all the market outside and all the capital in the world. If, for example, a wide enough group of writers from among the most important and agreed-upon creators were to join a kind of network where everything is published on the web - but also receives approvals from within the group, which allow hierarchy and acceptance of new creators (what the world of language liked to call "new voices", and should really be called "new forms of learning" or in short: "innovations") - in the end it would even be economically worthwhile for them. Because everyone would then know very well who has more reputation. Then the influence of the literary republic on reality would be much stronger, because reality would chase after it, instead of the opposite (which determines the humiliating power relations between culture and its outside today). The moment you establish a strong and effective learning system - the whole world wants to join it, even if there is no profit of a penny. Because people by nature aspire to learning, and where there is real respect - there is real motivation. Even the power of money itself stems only from the instinct of respect, as can be seen in Haredi society, where the wealthy man is in an inferior social status compared to the leading cultural figures - and courts them. The one to whom desire is directed - is the ruler. Therefore, if culture wants power it needs to overcome its desire for the love of the audience and its wallet, or for its corrupt appreciation. The popular imagination appreciates only one thing - elitism that looks down on it. And today, when condescension has become a sin, a reversal of values must be performed - and not be ashamed of cultural superiority.
But there is no evil without good. We should rejoice in an era of positive network feedback in the field of economics, as opposed to the same positive feedback that destroys culture. Such an era actually has the potential to be an era of cultural flourishing par excellence - not in real time, but certainly from the perspective of future time. The very rise of material conditions themselves greatly affects the ease of creation and removes heavy barriers that hindered the progress of culture throughout history, and precisely because of the economic tide we can create a cultural tide. Only in this way can we take advantage of the drastic decrease in the production costs of culture in all fields, and also of its consumption, instead of being harmed by it. It costs nothing to write and not to publish, nor to read, and therefore it is necessary and possible to disconnect value from money (the general public is worthless). Why should a book cost money in our time? A book that costs money means a book that is not Torah for its own sake, and that is not disconnected from extra-cultural considerations. Does anyone at all, in the entire cultural field, earn anything significant from selling a book of cultural value? Why give publishers the cultural legitimacy they do not deserve, for shoes? Why give prestige to musty museums or collapsing galleries? It is much more economically and culturally efficient to establish a sharp Haredi division between economy and culture, because the moment you do not mix them it will be much easier for you to make a living - not from culture. The cultural-economic situation is such that there is no longer any point in this unnatural hybrid connection, of a species not of its kind (commercial publishing?), which is a musty relic of the printing revolution, and which has lost its relevance in the Internet age.
The new cultural learning system should be built according to the four basic principles of learning (the four postulates of the Netanya school): First of all, understanding that it is a learning system and not a discourse. Secondly, learning takes place within the system, disconnected from extra-cultural factors such as audience, money, politics, personas, clickbait journalism, or government approval. Third, unidirectionality - we are looking for innovations, but do not come to convince anyone that this and not otherwise. What matters is the learning interest, not any other argument, and arrows cannot be returned backwards (for example from creation to creator). And fourth, division between two types within the system: evaluated (creators) and evaluators (critics and researchers. Because who else needs active editors and mediating curators when publishing on the Internet? In the overall cultural summary, they caused more harm than good in their arrogant and domineering forcefulness). Finally, we must despise the severe form of corruption called the literary group. Creators are individuals, who participate in a learning system, and compete for the appreciation of authorities and creators in future generations. The groups are harmful both to the good creators in them - and to the bad ones.
In conclusion, Navot of blessed memory erred when he desperately wanted to keep the walls of past institutions at all costs - this is a lost battle. A new type of cultural learning system must be built, which is structurally less built for corruption. For this purpose, we do not have to establish a "new Facebook", but we can even take advantage of the existing structure of a Facebook group, if only a group of leading evaluators and authorities stands at its head as administrators, which is wide and strong enough in terms of its literary (or artistic, or research) taste and acceptable in terms of its cultural prestige. Such a group, where the content is filtered and presented by the administrators with a high hand, can be the gatekeeper that Navot yearned for, without the need to fix the irreparable publishers and other decaying institutions of the land. Are there still people who are capable of combining worship of the past with openness in bringing innovative voices of value (Navot himself did not excel in this)? It all depends on taste. It seems that in the current literary, artistic, or research field there is not even one person capable of this (everyone has their shortcomings), but precisely a group of leading taste-makers could create a whole greater than the sum of its parts, or at least revive on Facebook a forgotten institution - the literary salon. And if there are several such salons? Presumably they will be infected with the shortcomings of the literary group, but these are already rich people's troubles compared to the poor in spirit that we are today.
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