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The Degeneration of the Nation

Retro-Perspective: A Decade of the Dachak Journal

On the Childish Grandfather and the Child Prodigy Who Never Grew Up: Why Did Yehuda Wizen Choose the Wrong Life's Work?

By: The One Returning to the Repressed

Back to the Future - and the Return of the Repressed (Source)

Recently, I asked my great-grandfather, a charming lad approaching a hundred, what he thought about Ukraine. He apologized for his "egoism" and said that at his age, these things no longer interest him, and that he had already seen many such events. Then, a characteristic witticism came out of him: "My future - lies behind me. But your past - lies ahead of you." This reminded me of the disappointment caused by the latest issue of Dachak recently released online, and of a contradiction I always feel in the editor's soul (whom I've never met, of course): on one hand, he's such a grandfather, and on the other hand, he's such a child. A bit like in the tale of the seven beggars: "And I am very old, and yet I am very young, and I haven't even begun to live at all. And even so, I am very old." Yes, a kind of contradiction, like "true radicalism is conservatism." And so, out of a certain irritation with those approximately 600 pages, which I used to look forward to, and which again mostly didn't justify themselves, I decided to decipher for myself what exactly weighs on Dachak. And on Wizen. And what weighs on me in the recent issues (books?).

First of all, let's clear the table. The political matter, or the conservative one, whatever you call it - it's not the reason people read Dachak, and although Wizen has recently made headlines with it, it mainly evokes a yawn in me, much like how my grandfather thinks about the current war, which was already the previous war, which even then was the war before. Here Wizen more or less aligns with opinion leaders like Assaf Sagiv and Yigal Librant, who feel like great radicals because they oppose radicalism, from a conservative stance, and rail against the culture of PC and cancel culture and the hollow television left. I must admit that Wizen's and the aforementioned's political stance is far from exciting me as much as it excites them, precisely because I'm not far from it. But the real problem isn't political but literary: its self-excited "boldness" - and somewhat childish - is far from innovating or interesting from a poetic perspective, and as much as it might sadden him, they haven't yet imprisoned Wizen in a zoo like Pound (by the way, I can't think of many real intellectuals, in the younger age group, who remain in the scarecrow liberal left against which Wizen fights. The conservative and traditional and "dark" sentiment is the bon ton, at least among those who don't see Haaretz as any measure of "culture and literature". After all, this newspaper is a spiritual corpse, albeit with a glorious past, and there's no point in kicking a body. Wizen is essentially fighting against an American phenomenon, not a Hebrew one, which everyone despises. So you've added a monarchist flavor or a fascist flirtation or an anti-Enlightenment illumination? Nu, tov. Armchair radicalism befits a poet and an adolescent, hopefully without mixing the two).

Seemingly, one cannot ignore the dream team Wizen has assembled in the journal, and each time anew I expect to discover what they've written. Jonathan Levy and Yehuda Wizen himself are our two greatest poets in the current generation (in the next generation, by the way, I have hopes for Foker, who was not coincidentally discovered in the competing journal. Neo-Buchbut, when he frees himself from the immaturity of big words and the kitsch of adolescence - the symptom of "blood" and "fire" - is another leading candidate). Amnon Navot - our greatest critic in the current generation (and the fact that he's deceased only reflects the state of criticism, RIP). Aharon Shabtai - the greatest living poet. Yochai Oppenheimer - a critic with great potential, perhaps only surpassed by Assaf Inbari and Orin Morris, and it seems not by chance that both write very little nowadays (interestingly, Dachak's only discovery was in the field of criticism). Tzur Ehrlich - a particularly delightful virtuoso translator. Michal Wizen (his wife) - she's a genius in the right sense of the word, in the field of philosophical research (which is, by the way, very different from philosophy). In fact, the engagement with Hegel is remembered as the intellectual peak of the journal (and the questionnaire on the subject for the great researchers in the field - as an impressive tour de force). As a continuation of this, the journal interviewed - in a kind of dazzling Israeli chutzpah - some of the world's leading intellectuals and philosophers.

But precisely because of all this (and more), I have an increasing sense of missed opportunity - and from the only Hebrew journal in which I placed my hopes for our literature. After all: what does all this greatness end up with in the end? Where, for example, is the new style that Wizen has been yearning for for years? What masterpiece has come out of Dachak, what genre innovation, or literary discovery? All the components and ingredients are here, and many of them, so where's the cake? The journal aspires to be "a center that is forming and will form by virtue of its textual weight alone. By virtue of the critical mass." If so, where's the nuclear explosion? Where is the fulfillment of the child prodigy's promise - where is the literary breakthrough?

Elisheva Samet-Shinberg is a literary researcher with merits - but her increasingly close connection to Wizen feels increasingly destructive to the latter, and it's also a sad symptom of his state as a creator. When I think about J. Levy and Y. Wizen, more than anything I want to lift my skirt a bit and give these two a good kick in the ass, so they'll each sit on their ass and try to write the great Israeli epic, or create the poetic style suitable for the information age, or compose the great Jewish poem dealing with the Holocaust (yes, "Joy of the Poor" is joy of the poor. And Uri Zvi Greenberg's exhibit...). Isn't it time for a real spiritual-poetic response to the second big bang of Judaism? (Here, take an example from the greatest Jewish theologian currently active, and one of the last intellectual giants operating in our culture - Yishai Mevorach - whose destructive and dazzling thought will yet bury Judaism, when its power is revealed to the masses in the generation after ours. Because he understands: the Holocaust is the central question. The Holocaust is the central question. The Holocaust is the central question. And nothing will help. You can't escape it, if you're operating in the realms of Hebrew culture, that is, in the realm of Jewish culture). Another witty poem about some socio-literary phenomenon of featherweight... Are we lacking "big" subjects crying out for poetic - and even mythical - treatment of value?

Wizen has been so busy lately with his necrophilic hammer (and not infrequently it's indeed literary corpses, deserving of the grave and not of rummaging in it), that he's fallen into an internal contradiction, which is ultimately characteristic of all narcissism that relies on the cult of fathers and great-grandfathers, in order to aggrandize the self and rise above the present (and repress the future: the real repression). If the ancient forms are so important and fruitful, why don't you do as the ancients did? Why do you write only parodic epics of a company vacation in Eilat, and consciously cowardly dodge (yes, he also has such a poem) with flimsy excuses and faintheartedness (he, the blunt and brave) from writing a real epic? Come on, deal with it. Come deal in the field of the big and strong, instead of crushing the small and kicking the weak and slapping the girls (Wizen's habit in scathing reviews is among his least charming traits... Who even bothers to write a review of a creator they don't appreciate? As anyone who has experienced any kind of relationship knows, criticism is worthy within a framework of love, and as an expression of hate it is tasteless and even baseless - and ignoring it is much more effective and ethical. Why would someone read someone they don't like? If I detest something - maybe it's not for me. And maybe I even have enough humility to think that maybe it's for someone else, and that there's a right to exist in the universe even for things that aren't for me. And yes, there's a difference between the spiritual - and even literary - world of women and men. That's why I love Wizen as a poet - and less as a critic. I love my critics - not to mention my men - gentlemen. Good criticism is always an act of love, and not because it's "good criticism". The condition for "he who spares his rod hates his son" - is love for the child...).

Contrary to the game of thrones taking place in Wizen and Frishman's imagination, the place from which criticism comes, in any field, shouldn't be the present of the field (and its masculine struggles for hegemony) - but its future. And the future simply won't read anything that doesn't innovate. It's that simple. So we'll ask: Does Wizen innovate enough? (Yes yes, nudnik, within the framework of sophisticated use of past forms and from deep familiarity with the history of culture and all its layers, including a marginal Haskalah poet even in his time, who of course by virtue of his antiquity and his archaic and non-colloquial, that is, rich language, causes you great inspiration from which comes out... great poetry?). You know what, okay fine, beat everyone up, but do you have one great work behind you that would justify this? What do you propose, practically (and not as a vague program on how literature should be, and what its sources of inspiration should be... aesthetics and ars poetica like sand and nothing to eat)?

Well, Dachak also takes the time to offer us a religious-national agenda. On the religious side, Wizen plays the educated Litvak, and therefore the religious libido there tends to zero, and so we'll never receive in the journal (the literary one!) the exemplary literary richness of the world of mysticism and Hasidism (which Wizen detests - and of course doesn't forget to get excited about) - which is the strongest literary creation the Jewish world has produced in the last millennium (much more than the poetry of Spain) - but ideological poverty and secondary/research literature, or secondary-research. And as with the religious nationalists, when you're essentially secular, your religion - or your Judaism section - is just a maid and slave to what really interests you: the Knesset channel, or the political-national level. This part, the political one, is usually more interesting, probably because it's more interesting to the editor. But in general, there's something a bit heartbreaking about the oxymoron in the prevalent conservative excitement about innovations and innovators in conservative thinking, or about the great conservative thinkers, who are the great revolutionaries in conservative thinking... (a true authentic conservative would say that conservatism is true conservatism and not that conservatism is true radicalism, like in Dachak's motto. Have we heard an ultra-Orthodox claiming that ultra-Orthodoxy is true secularism?). Not to mention the Dachakic adoration of radical conservatives specifically, which more than being dachka [a pun on "pressure"], it also demonstrates some fundamental aesthetic paradox.

Is there a chance that even the classicists weren't classicists, but the trailblazers of their time, and not its conservatives, who have long been forgotten? And is Dachak's struggle against forgetting, or is it a struggle against time itself, "in pursuit of the lost manuscript", and therefore so Don Quixotic? What really causes people not to be forgotten - as opposed to Dachak's Sisyphean choice to make us not forget? Could it be that forgetting is the long-term cure for our cultural condition, and not its disease? Could it be that the brain needs to forget, necessarily, in order to truly learn something new, and that this isn't a bug of culture but a feature? And finally, isn't forgetting crueler than any criticism, and therefore much more effective than it and all its struggles, which precisely no one will remember? Isn't the yawn a much stronger force than the sword, because it kills creators gently? Not with noise and not with fire is the future of literature - but with a still small voice. But then, why do we need to fight (or try to recreate - without an opponent! - some fight from the period when there was a hole in rhyme and we took out)? Is the fight, in the field of literature, the way leading to becoming an alpha male, or perhaps there's a need for something else? I have been very jealous for Hebrew culture, for the children of Israel have forsaken your literature, they have thrown down your publications, and slain your poets, and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away...

What else does Dachak offer us? If we've already yawned (and yawning is the most authentic conservative soul movement, hence the connection of conservatism to cats...), let's move to the main field of literature in our culture today: the field of contemporary prose has always been a weakness of Dachak - and of Wizen personally (open your eyes. It's okay), but still some of the more esteemed creators in our places wrote there (not by me. Sorry). Here too the fundamental problem is poetic: in the current culture, the field of prose suffers from an excess of conservatism and fixation and establishment on the classical form and its achievements and its pompous language (the novel), while poetry suffers from an excess of cheap liberation and radicalism and disintegration from any standard whatsoever. Therefore, poetry in our days has turned into (bad) prose - while prose has turned into (bad) poetry. And therefore Dachak's strategy for renewing poetry acts as a bad tactic in the field of prose (as a symptom: a review by Amnon Navot will always lead to licking fingers from the blood in the honey, but he's stuck on a very specific ideal of a realistic social novel whose language is as rich as a tycoon and fattened with oil. Therefore he's very good, like Wizen, at saying what not, and not - what yes. Which is after all a slightly greater wisdom... And I wish these two would write prose like they write criticism, like I wish Oded Carmeli would write poetry like he writes the satirical introduction in Hava LeHaba. Unfortunately, the symptom of our generation is that criticism is wittier and more interesting than literature, because literature must be high and serious, and only criticism can be playful - and serious).

Even the traditional critical slaughter, which seals Dachak like a sacrifice in Girard, originates from a lack of faith in the judgment of the future, and an attempt to replace its cruelty, which knows no faces - with your cruelty (which does know). But the future is both the judge and the executioner - not you. Are you a Foucauldian in disguise? Do you not really believe in the authenticity of aesthetic taste, but only in power relations, and therefore think that taste is determined by power, and therefore there's a point in fighting for it with all your might? Rest. Don't replace the aesthetic struggle with a political one. It's not wise to be a hero in war, that is, in criticism. Come be a great hero - in creation. And don't replace aesthetic boldness with political boldness for me - it's a pathetic mechanism and we can see through you. Is the very fact that criticism in Dachak is often the most daring, enjoyable and successful original literary creation in it, not indicative of creative libido and dark energies channeled into field intrigues instead of into the depths of literary work itself? Didn't you understand that Céline or Pound are remembered despite their political nonsense, and not because of it? They knew how to channel their psychosis into their work, and didn't feel bold just because they declare (bravely!) that they're psycho, and tilt their ear to hear echoes of outcries against them. Of course, criticism in Dachak always misses in every phenomenon, because it has no empathy (too feminine a trait?), which is the key to understanding. Therefore it's terribly fun, as a creation, but one should never refer to it as a guide, that is, as criticism. Therefore it's a show, even if not of the high Greek kind, but the low Roman kind. Slaughter as entertainment. And it is indeed endlessly entertaining (to the bystander), but it's only shallow entertainment, and doesn't dive and reach deep insights. The critical stance in Dachak is as complex as a placard.

And what opens the journal? The individual poems. The very individual. But in the current state of Hebrew literature, not even a single good poem, and not even a huge collection of such - will save it. The individual poem - is dead, and has lost all meaning. Whether out of awareness of this or not, Wizen anyway writes very little, for he consumes his energy and time on the politics of literature, and doesn't forget accounts from the days of Arlosoroff's murder and the elimination of Gedaliah son of Ahikam. And from so much not going out into the world and dealing with it, but being entirely "in the world of literature", his writing and world have become hermetic and confined in a closed circle, and with time he writes more and more about literature - instead of writing literature... about the world. And if he deals with something, it's with another kind of politics, the one on television, which is even more worthless in the long run, which is the run of literature. What is commonly called - eternity, and is actually the range in which the future reads you. Of course poetry can be political, but are we here in the opposite situation? Are you a poet or are you a politician?

Our culture is in a state where good works, even many, won't help it anymore, but only one truly great work. Only a masterpiece will raise the Shekhinah from its dust. But when did Wizen try or will try to write this work? When did he really take a risk? If your hero is Aharon Shabtai, when did you try to write something on the scale of his seven poems? And Jonathan Levy, the mythical shamanic virtuoso, when did he pick up the gauntlet? Are a journal or a newspaper supplement the right stage for these two, and for Hebrew literature in general, or perhaps this is part of the problem? In the current crisis, a journal is in itself an anachronistic and poetically destructive idea, because its collecting nature, suitable for our time as a collection of unrelated posts in the Facebook feed, is by nature all that is problematic and bad in contemporary writing. Isn't it a shame for all the tremendous effort, invested in escaping confrontation - instead of in confrontation?

Even if Wizen writes a thousand good poems twice - they will not amount to anything, and his influence on the future of Hebrew poetry will ultimately amount to nothing, if he does not write one great and cumulative work. All the blood he shed - will be in vain. All the wars - will end as wars always end, with culture being the loser. Jonathan Levy will juggle in the air, but what will remain of the magic, when future generations will need a dictionary and footnotes to understand contemporary references and slang, similar to the poets of the Enlightenment? And why doesn't he develop more the composition and plot, so that his works connect to a whole, isn't it a waste of tremendous, once-in-a-lifetime talent? This problem, of creating wholes from disassembled works, is the great poetic problem of our time - the problem of the generation - and we have already discussed this at length in our reviews. An extreme example of this is "Awake, Brothers", in which from Levy's golden language, which is truly bewitching, a straw plot of conflict-sci-fi-trash is woven, and countless pearls and diamonds connect to an intentionally sloppy fabric. Each section separately - a masterpiece and cast concrete, but precisely the whole - holds a little less water. The wild imagination's delight in itself, which does wonders up to the chapter level - is exactly what unravels and disrupts everything at the level of the overall work (a more promising direction is actually a contradiction between the particular and the whole - and between tactics and strategy: just as Kafka succeeds in a fantastic plot precisely because the texture is realistic, it's better to choose a tight realistic plot framework to hold together the wild fantastic texture. And if we want a schema, classical realism of the 19th century was a perfect and strict match between tactics and strategy, modernism was the liberation of strategy but maintaining strict tactics - and therefore had a fertile tension created from the contradiction between them, while postmodernism was again a match between liberation in tactics and also in strategy - which dismantled everything, and the next stage - the future - is to combine liberation in tactics with renewed strictness in strategy. And not to go back to modernism as Wizen mistakenly does, due to lack of vision - not talent).

The result of all this is that "Awake, Brothers" is a work that is terribly fun to read but not convincing enough. Not to mention the ideological-political side of the plot, where one can read the work as a parody of the left's imaginary, in which the Palestinians are embedded, as an a priori assumption, in the role of the most passive victim possible to try to imagine: prisoners forcibly put to sleep for eternity. And who will raise you from your dust, Malchitavos? (Levy's masterpiece, and the only thing that came out of Dachak worthy of being a candidate for a masterpiece for generations. And yes, it's especially important for a great creator to think about this range - and aim for it. If not him, who?). Another generation or two, who will know who Tshuvah was, and what answer will you give on Judgment Day. Who was Saddam Hussein at all? Who is Raful?... And in general, what's with you all the time about politics, boys? We've long stopped looking for alpha males. If you want to move literature - give it what it needs. Politics is by definition the matter of the present, not the future, and it's not "going big", as Wizen quotes Avidan (who actually did respond to the future...), on the contrary. It's "going small".

The problem with Dachak is the lack of proper context for the action, which makes it ineffective, disconnected, full throttle in neutral. Wizen has a complete lack of understanding of who his readers are. There is no Hebrew culture in the present. Dead. There is only a culture of the future. And why would the future be interested in Wizen, why would it read him? Did Wizen take an interest in the future? Is he actually writing for the Wizen of the future, who will discover the Wizen of the present, who discovered the Wizen of the past? In other words, is he actually writing to himself from within himself about himself - and a bit too preoccupied with himself? Is "Dachak" a journal for the renewal of literature or a respectable shelf product designed to mark its editor as a poet-editor who has the biggest of all, and therefore instead of being concise and concentrated it is built like a man's organ, that is, as an ego, and therefore preferably as inflated as possible? What exactly is this product, "Dachak", and what is its role in our (literary?) salon? Is it appropriate to renew the expression "conspicuous consumption" and replace it with "conspicuous editing"? Is this the matter, arrogance and ostentation? Is this the literary equivalent of an SUV designed to compensate for low poetic potency (about a dozen poems a year)? I think the answer to all these questions is no, but I'm starting to hear them buzzing in my head more and more, with each issue that's half a tree. After all, I came to write about Dachak and found myself writing about Wizen. Is this because the editor's ego is the only organizing principle of the journal, or is it me who fell into the author's (oh, sorry, editor's) fallacy? Is Wizen talking to us, or are we just admiring extras, and he's actually talking to himself? (The last successful poem about how hard it is to be smarter than everyone expresses something authentic, albeit of course amused, in his character).

What is the purpose of a journal at all, if not to promote a certain literary trend (for example: a new literary movement), in a local literary context? But Dachak does not try to promote a distinct local literary movement, but literature itself (the "good" one of course), towards some utopian horizon that is not part of it, where the literary method is to its liking. If so, the disappointment is built-in, because Dachak offers us a problem - and not a solution. It is created only from what is behind it, and not towards something real that is ahead of it. It wants to replace the entire literary field, but there is no living literary field in it, but it is mainly a constant and fixed declaration of the death of the field, and the erection of a magnificent mummification pyramid, and hence it is doomed to repeat its conclusions again and again, like Amnon Navot, without development or hope - or future. There are no internal tensions or discussions or competition or surprises or collisions in Dachak, but it is all under the absolute and monolithic control of the editor (monarch?). And perhaps this is where my exaggerated focus on Wizen stems from, because I read Dachak as his personal (editorial) work, and not of any group, or even any aesthetic movement. As a kind of diary (reading?). As a kind of substitute for reading "Culture and Literature" (a supplement that now contains only two things: shame and fig leaves), Dachak offers us a wide and excellent selection of eclectic translations, but again - the eclecticism is part of the problem, not the solution. It seeks to educate, but contains no students and therefore no new learning, and so it is like a teacher speaking into the air, hoping someone will hear. Isn't this a frustrating position? Again and again and again a tasting meal - and I don't feel full. I was enriched and enriched in Dachak's centrifuge, but did I come out richer?

Over the years I have read - if one can even say that, because probably no one has done it, and maybe it's more accurate to say I went through - all the issues of Dachak published online. What do I even remember from them? What accumulated? Not enough. Certainly not in relation to the talent invested and the number of trees uprooted. Indeed, Dachak gives an illusion of breadth of knowledge. But first of all, Dachak is essentially not what Wizen writes - but what Wizen reads, and what interests him. And that's already much less impressive. It means he knows nothing about what's happening "today", because he's so busy with the past. Dachak is still the best literary journal in Israel, by far, but in recent issues it is deteriorating (I'm sure Wizen would love this spelling), and the best issues were actually those in the middle of its activity period. On the other hand, Wizen's own poems are actually improving, and about two-thirds of them are good, and that's a lot for a poet. But neither quantity nor quality are important, but quantity that turns into quality - a long poetic work - and here the child refuses to grow up, and doesn't take on challenges befitting a man, as poets of the past did. Dachak is currently an enterprise approaching 10,000 (there's no extra zero here) pages, but what do all these zeros add up to? After all, there's a lot here to accumulate, isn't there?

What is the difference between periods of cultural flourishing and periods of withering and fading and dying? Talents are distributed equally among the people of all generations. The difference is that the people of one era set themselves, by virtue of their spiritual strength and the strengths of their time, tremendous challenges, and aspire to conquer lofty mountains, and thus culture reaches peaks. When they try to meet the tremendous bar they set for themselves, even if they missed - often a magnificent failure remains. While the people of another era are simply wretches, busy with small things, this one wrote about me so I'll write about him this, and then I'll feel strong and bold (I didn't like him!). Contrary to the Wizenic position, the world is not to blame for the dire state of Hebrew literature. Wizen is to blame. He is the talented one who had no vision - and who wasted his talent in vain on various quarrels, on sharpened insults, on archives and prunings (am I doing this right?), on the joke of publishing the Dachaks and translating past pressures, on donning the identity of a wrestler and fighting identity politics, and all the other nonsense and witticisms that will not be remembered in the future and will not come to mind. And this is really a sad story, whose sin of hubris, along with the fact that the hero is indeed a man of virtue, makes it tragic - one great tragedy he did not write. He didn't even try. He was afraid (wasn't he?). He was afraid that he would not succeed (and who guarantees that he would?), and therefore perhaps preferred to remain the gifted child, the promising one, who will never fulfill the promise, because it's easier to criticize and kill and "educate" others than to do (and in doing so you also risk being killed... and maybe, just maybe, you won't take it in such a sportsmanlike spirit when it comes to something you carved from the root of your soul and risked in an insecure position, not solid like the position of admiring the classics - oh, the audacity!). Yes, it's so easy to be arrogant with what you know about those who don't. After all, any true intellectual of our time would immediately identify here the P!=NP problem (does Wizen even know what that is? No, ha, what an ignoramus who doesn't understand basic things for any contemporary thinker).

And here, we come to the original sin of Dachak, which is arrogance. And not that there's anything wrong with arrogance, and not that it's not needed to differentiate (Wizen is right!), and not that I'm not arrogant (me? not at all), but that the arrogance in Dachak already passes from its constructive manifestation, and becomes another manifestation: arrogance as sin. As a bad trait. As a fetish of pride ("Pride pride!" as they shout at our place). Pride that is busy justifying itself, because it knows it's not really justified (the truly arrogant don't need to be arrogant). And here, finally we are touching the huge elephant in the room, which is the real repressed that Dachak tries with all its might and weight to repress (hence: its disproportionality, characteristic of an inefficient compensation mechanism that got out of control) - and which is the real reason for the cultural pressure.

For what characterizes the intellectuals in the current culture (and this is a global phenomenon, not just Hebrew), and did not characterize the great intellectuals and cultural figures, writers and philosophers from more classical periods (ancient Greece, Renaissance, 19th century) is ignorance - as pride. And it's not about ignorance in the history of their field (as Wizen is sure), but precisely in their being completely ignorant and real dolts in the important fields in our world today. These are not Renaissance men - because Renaissance men knew science, and they are indeed not of the ancients' stature - because the Greeks knew physics, and they would not have entered the Athenian Academy - because they do not know geometry, and they are not philosophers of stature - because philosophers know mathematics (yes, even Wittgenstein). You have to be a kind of deaf-mute fool and child - that is, a contemporary intellectual - to not notice the greatest, most revolutionary thing happening in the world in the last century, and which shapes our culture and lives more than any other force, and which should stand at the center of any real poetic and spiritual confrontation, namely: the computing revolution.

All our intellectual giants simply haven't heard that the greatest spiritual achievement, and with the most decisive influence on our future, of any cultural field in recent centuries, is precisely that of the purest spiritual field: mathematics (and yes, computer science is just a branch in it). And how can you even be a serious intellectual (poet/writer/thinker/newspaper-mumbler) these days without knowing anything - really anything! - about modern mathematics, and how algorithms work, and how a computer works, what are for example the PageRank algorithm (Google's ranking algorithm for you) or Turing machine, or evolutionary algorithms, or Hebb's rule, and backpropagation in deep learning (and not God forbid "artificial intelligence", as donkeys say), and algorithmic game theory, and the fine-tuning problem of nature's constants, and the nature of the connection between chaos and fractals, and complexity classes and the problem of lower bounds in them (the deepest spiritual problem of our time!), and breakthroughs in paleontological history, and lean startup, and the yield curve, h-index, blockchain protocol, one-way functions, Fermi paradox, Shannon's definition of entropy, morphisms and category theory, constructor theory, quantum error correction and quantum information, Cohen forcing and large cardinals and inaccessible cardinals and other mind-boggling ideas in contemporary model theory and set theory, homomorphism and homeomorphism (and homotopy and homology...), membranes and solution landscapes in string theory, Penrose diagrams... How can one, for example, engage in metaphysics today without knowing the jaw-dropping meta-physical insights of Nima Arkani-Hamed (who's that?). Space and time are not a primary phenomenon. There's something underneath.

And this is true for all our writers and poets and intellectuals. If you're not interested in these things and know nothing about them, you're basically a complete idiot who doesn't know anything at all and talks about how the world works, and where the world is going. You know nothing about the future. And you're illiterate in a world that has long been speaking a different language, and that will never be interested in you again - and rightly so. You haven't understood anything about the revolution that is consuming literature itself, the network revolution, and the only thing you know how to do is to entrench yourself in the past, in the ultra-Orthodox style, and be led where others lead you, literature-seculars (and devoid of any cultural baggage, because there's no one to connect the fields. Oh, and you'll surely know how to comment on the vowelization). And no, Eran Hadas, a poet (who also appeared in Dachak) whose concept of the future is drawn from Avidan (the sixties, and the primitive image of computation as language, that is, as combinatorial permutation games) or Oded Carmeli, whose concept of the future is drawn from Star Trek (...The Next Generation? So we've already progressed to the eighties), do not understand this future, which lies not in the realms of language or space, but in the spiritual realm of the network and the learning algorithms that operate in it (did someone say neuroscience?). So it's worth sticking your nose out of archives a bit, and reading in Quanta Magazine (or at least following the YouTube science channels like the PBSs...), to understand something about this world and its future: to be a little less ignorant, and a bit more of a Renaissance man. Because unfortunately, where there is vision - there is no talent. And where there is talent - there is no vision. And this is the real pressure that really kills culture today, and the factor that nullifies to zero the position of "conservatism is the real radicalism". We are in the midst of an unprecedented and irreversible spiritual revolution - and even a young and talented intellectual like Wizen hasn't heard anything about it, didn't know. So how can we expect the creation of a new style that will know how to deal with it poetically? Apparently the style will wait for the next generation.

If so, what is really the source of Dachak's pressure? Is Dachak fleeing to the past so obsessively, because its pressure is actually from the future? After all, Wizen and Navot's argument is actually circular, because they never gave a real account to themselves about the root of the phenomenon, and therefore are unable to deal with it: Literature is deteriorating because the creators are bad and the creators are bad because literature is deteriorating. Poetry is deteriorating because journals are deteriorating because criticism is deteriorating because publishers are deteriorating because the audience is deteriorating because poetry is deteriorating. The institutions are to blame for the decline in standards and the decline in standards is to blame for the decline of institutions. And so on, and on, in an endless circle, they circle around, and from here it's clear that the result is only endless complaints, without the ability to influence the results, because this round snake has no head (Navot went further and identified this head - in Menachem Peri - no less). They are anxious about the very future of literature, but never knew how to deal with this future itself, or at all with the future development of our world, when technological developments are what changed it and also the field from end to end. But technology doesn't really interest them and they have nothing interesting and constructive, not to mention poetic, to say about it. They actually have nothing to say to it, to the future. And therefore they have no future. Only past. And as glorious as possible, if possible. And maybe, just maybe - the real pressure, pushing back, is from the demand of your own talent. For who is the real cultural criminal: the talentless writer who tried, or the one who was blessed with heaven's gift and missed it? If so... another decade for Dachak? Am I looking forward to it? Is this what we need? Is this what will help? More than anything I would like Dachak to simply stop coming out, and to hear that Wizen (or Jonathan Levy) threw everything away and locked themselves in a room (seven, ten years) and wait to see what comes out of there. And it seems to me that then there will really be something to wait for. And even with bitten nails.

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Culture and Literature


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The Degeneration of the Nation

Is There Life on the Moon?

How Ecology Benefits and Harms Life

By: Beresheet Spacecraft

A continent sinks and a moon rises: Could there be something in Europe besides life?  (Source)

While many are concerned today about the climate crisis, it is only a small fluctuation relative to the history of Earth, and relative to the impending and inescapable climatic catastrophe that is not far around the corner, in geological terms of course. Is man the greatest danger to life on Earth, and in his absence will "Gaia" return to herself, to some ideal and evergreen ecology, or primordial Eden? It turns out that life on Earth is approaching the end of its final act, regardless of the appearance of man and his actions, and that in fact it evolved into relatively intelligent life towards the beginning of the end. Because it's not just Earth that's warming up - the sun is warming up.

Like every star in the universe, the sun gradually transitions throughout its life to a reaction of burning heavier elements instead of lighter ones (and helium instead of hydrogen), and therefore keeps getting hotter, and this heating will gradually accelerate, with the burning of heavier and heavier elements - until its end. Once Venus was similar to Earth, and suitable for life. But if there was complex life there, it became extinct long ago, because a synergistic combination of solar warming and greenhouse effect made temperatures impossible. To the same extent, in the future Mars will thaw and become possible for life, by virtue of the same warming. And what is expected for Earth? Hell.

Many believe that life on Earth is expected to become extinct at the end of the solar system's days, and that we are actually in the middle of the game, but this picture is both wrong and does not reflect the uniqueness and "luck" in the creation of intelligent life before the extinction of life. On the scales we're talking about, we could certainly have "not made it in time", and become a planet with former life - that went extinct (as we suspect in several other planets in the vicinity). Earth and life have both existed for at least a few billion years, but in just a few hundred million years more, an order of magnitude less, and the sun's warming alone will raise temperatures on Earth to a level that's hard to believe would have allowed the creation of intelligent life, and will gradually extinguish all complex life, and a few hundred million years after that - to a level that's hard to believe would allow life on Earth at all. Finally, in less than a billion years - all the oceans will already reach a hundred degrees and boiling point and evaporate - and there will be no more flowing bodies of water on the planet. And all this without even taking into account climatic greenhouse effects and destructive feedback loops in the process (after all, all the forests will burn at a much earlier stage!), which will probably bring Earth there much much sooner: Venus, with its 400 degrees, is the crystal ball revealing our future.

Even if humans had not evolved, Earth would have turned itself from Eden to hell - and life would have gone extinct. The mythical intuition, seeing us as the end of creation, is not very far from reality. God really created man on the very sixth day before twilight - not long before the heavens and the earth and all their hosts would be finished. Doesn't this picture change the picture? We see the destructiveness of a one degree (!) rise to the ecological system, and the circular greenhouse effect that can be created from it, with scenarios of feedback loops that can slip and get out of control and reach up to a hellish rise of 12 degrees (the doomsday scenario of "cloud death"). Is it far-fetched to assume that in just a hundred or maybe two hundred million years (a day or two in geological terms, and a month or two in evolutionary terms), from a combination of a constant and fundamental rise of a few degrees (10?) from the basic energy entering from solar warming, combined with several such greenhouse cycles, we would witness the heat death of life on Earth, and an accelerated process of Venus-ization? How difficult will it be for terrestrial animals to maintain a brain in such temperatures, or even to sustain large bodies? Won't life eventually return to where it came from - to the sea, until the great boiling - even there?

In fact, if we need to guess where life is common in the universe based on the solar system, it's not on planets at all. Bodies of water and liquids on the surfaces of planets are vulnerable to a wide range of bad and common hazards in the universe, and therefore to disappearances and extinctions, as is the atmosphere, and above that - everything that is above the surface: whether it's cosmic radiation (which would eliminate both life on Earth and the atmosphere itself without its unique magnetic field, and see Mars), whether it's meteor impacts and other collisions, or seismic activity, or destructive climatic effects (the greenhouse effect is just one example - the climate is inherently unstable and chaotic, and there are also ice ages), and more. Is it possible that the most common place for life in the universe is not planets, but rather moons?

The moons in the solar system have much more volume of flowing water bodies than planets (that is, in all the oceans on Earth), and there are simply many many more such moons (and life is ultimately a statistical phenomenon). Organic life requires water and requires stability, which allows long-term development, without an extinction event from which there is no return (and Earth has already experienced several such "almost" events, and the extinction of the dinosaurs is far from being the most severe of them). Moons can orbit gas giants, which are much less dangerous than suns, and can also live for longer periods (and certainly than Earth). The moons that are frozen on the outside and liquid on the inside - and such orbit both Jupiter and Saturn in our system (and perhaps more distant gas giants) - are also not dependent on the balance of seismic activity or on a depleting and changing energy source, and the energy inside them is created in tidal cycles created by the giant they orbit, which melts the water in huge underground oceans even when the surface is completely frozen (and protects the interior from all evil). Isn't such a giant and protective womb a more suitable place for life than the surface of a planet, exposed to all the hazards of the universe? And we haven't even talked about nearby supernova eruptions in the neighborhood, which would wipe out all life on the surface in one blow of radiation, and which are very common in star clusters (we are far in the periphery of the galaxy...).

And perhaps, life inside the moons is indeed stable - but perhaps too stable? Without the "near-extinction" events on Earth, complex life might not have developed here, because after all, each such event ended in higher complexity. Will we find complex life (not to mention intelligent) only in environments that are always on the brink of extinction, that is, not stable and almost hostile, and therefore they are so rare, much more than life itself, which simply thrives in the stagnation characteristic of ecological systems? Is the phenomenon of getting stuck in a local maximum the main problem of the evolutionary algorithm, and therefore it constantly needs external disruption and shaking? Do the moons simply suffer from conservatism, and from a catastrophic lack of catastrophes, and therefore revolutions, which are what create complexity (and perhaps the secret of Western progress is precisely the threshold of chaos and instability, compared to stable China and other conservative societies)? Is it possible that without the Holocaust and pogroms and crusades and persecutions - life on the brink of extermination - the Jews would not have been Jews, that is, without extinctions they would not have reached their high cultural complexity and achievements, and would have become just another conservative national people (in their ancestral homeland)? Does life need stability, but evolution needs instability, and therefore only environments on the edge of chaos are truly fertile? After all, if moons are so good and stable for life, why are we actually on Earth, and not on a moon, which is a much more stable ecological environment (life is good on the moon!)? Is ecology actually not good for evolution? Perhaps preserving life is not good for its development - and is found in an inherent contradiction to it?

The ideas of a climate-system and an ecological-system are gaining more and more popularity in the current "ideational climate", and even computerized and business environments are often perceived as an "eco-system", that is: as a kind of very complex system, which has many parts in interaction (very complex, of course!), and therefore one must be very careful with any change, which of course does not take into account this very complexity. Soon even humans will start to conceptualize themselves as an ecological system, after all they are very complex (wait for the next trend in American psychology), and in relationships it's clear that "it's complicated!" (the relationship as an ecosystem - here, Google's error correction has already caught on to the trend! I tried to write ecosystem), and it won't be long before the family also becomes an eco-system (because we need to diversify, right?). After all, it won't be long before the eco-human trend moves to conceptualize social structures (don't disturb the economic climate! The cultural climate! The political climate! The international relations climate!). Not to mention raising children in the right "climate", and creativity and intellectuals who flourish only in the right academic or spiritual "climate", and that it's important to treat them like rare flowers. Futures: In such an academic climate, after Nazism has already been conceptualized as an ecological movement, even the Holocaust will soon be perceived as an ecological holocaust, and historical studies will analyze negative feedback loops and greenhouse effects in the antisemitic climate that heated up until it got out of control and caused a chain of collapse processes of the Jewish ecological system - which therefore naturally ended in extinction.

This empty conceptualization (and therefore harmful), of a system as a system, which adds eco-to-everything, in an eco-conceptualization with an eco-meaning of eco-nothing, stems directly from the eco-philosophy of the 20th century, namely the philosophy of language. The sanctification of an all-encompassing-complex-very system, whose essence is inter-interactions of many-complexities beyond the ability of perception-conceptualization but also-and-especially of mumbo-jumbo, and which defines the part from the whole (which is greater than the sum of its parts...), is a main belief in a world that has abandoned belief in the great systems of meaning. Instead of Torah - eco-system (and when will the sage arise who will conceptualize the Torah as an eco-system? Has it already happened?). The place of the great cultural systems of meaning - and certainly the universal ones - of the past, has been taken by language and the network, which were themselves conceptualized, in a circular manner, as eco-systems of meaning, which lives within them (and not they that give meaning to life). That is - as a kind of systems in which meaning stems from the rest of the system's parts, and not from any external anchor or source. The purpose of language is merely to preserve meaning and transmit it, and therefore continuity and conservatism are its nature. Meaning depends on it in discipline - that is, in obedience to the rules of language and in reproducing its patterns - because it needs to be preserved, and not in development and innovation (after all, meaning wears out over time, and every word, concept or idea has a lifespan of meaning, from the moment of their birth as a fresh, efficient and spreading innovation until their death as a worn-out cliché. But who will argue that meaning stems precisely from this process of change, which is a learning process, and that without development in a certain direction meaning simply dies?). After all, language has no external purpose, unlike learning. It is an ecological system - not an evolutionary system. What wonder that when development occurs - an ecological crisis is created?

The eco-conservative view of the world, which sanctifies the fixed and even fixed patterns of the system, is a distinctly linguistic view, which has caused deep damage to the understanding of the Internet for example (not a little through the idea of cybernetics, which conceptualized even action as communication, through ideas of control loops and feedback and "ecological" control). It contributed to its establishment as an impotent linguistic-communicative framework, anti-learning, that is, a chatter-network where every action in it is a language action, and therefore relatively irrelevant in the real world, and therefore disconnected from it and "virtual" (only gradually is the Internet overcoming its conceptualization and construction as a communication system and not as a learning and action system, and indeed it is becoming less "virtual"). The ecological-linguistic perception caused severe damage to many other important learning systems, such as the state or religion or culture, all of which became institutions and cans of preserves - instead of flowerpots. But more than anything, the ecological view caused damage to the conceptualization of life itself, and to its foolish identification - and therefore of "nature" and the "natural" - with preservation, and not with learning and innovation. All the nags found a new and secular type of morality, that is, of a policing system, that will replace the religious nags (but not the eternal nagging itself): namely the morality of preservation and ecology. The morality of nature. As if a stable ecological system is the ideal (the idealization...) of nature (the idyllic...) - and not what actually happens when evolution fails, that is, fails in the only thing that can be perceived as its purpose: to progress, to innovate, to increase complexity - everything that falls under the concept of learning.

A particularly amusing test case for these "idealists'" lack of understanding of life (literally) is their way of dealing with the most interesting and important question concerning the understanding of life today - which is expressed precisely in dealing with life outside Earth. Their linguistic picture of the world caused them to try to communicate with aliens, whether by broadcasting or by listening, out of the belief that the primary motive of an intelligent creature is communication, and that an intelligent creature lives in language. That even we are likely to give up language the moment we can unite into a unified system of thought and thinking, that is, into one large learning system - this apparently does not obligate galactic cultures (the aliens are still stuck in Wittgenstein). In fact, even if we were to discover for some reason signals from aliens trying to communicate, the very distance measured in enormous time constants would thwart any communication, and there would be only one thing we could do: learn from them. It is likely that even if such a connection is ever created, it will not be a conversation, but a connection of mutual learning, and much more likely - one-sided learning (due to development gaps, that is, learning). Therefore, we should change the definition altogether: it is not life outside Earth we are looking for, but evolution: learning outside Earth. Not some stuck and primitive ecology deep inside a barren moon (this may be a common vision). The incredibly short time, relative to the length of evolution, that it took for life itself to form on Earth, under not particularly unique conditions, teaches that life is probably cheap in the universe - and evolution is expensive.

Our thought that life necessarily means some kind of DNA and evolution is mistaken and biased. What we are really looking for is significant evolution, or other learning mechanisms (perhaps not evolutionary!), that happened in other places and at other times in the universe, and reached systematically developing complexity (as opposed to stability). Not alien-life - but alien-learners. And not alien intelligence is the holy grail - but alien learning (for who said that learning leads to intelligence? Or that intelligence is the final product of learning? And what is the meaning of intelligence outside our learning?). Life itself, as an act of self-replication, is not interesting and not unique and not valuable. There are many such phenomena in the universe. The deification of life, after the loss of God, has led to an infinity of self-preservation practices: preservation of the healthy body, preservation of the healthy soul (see psychology), preservation of genes (as a social value!), preservation of relationships, preservation of culture and preservation of pickles (even the Torah is no longer kept - but preserved). And at the top of the preservation pyramid stands of course the supreme value and categorical imperative - the preservation of life. This commandment serves as the only (and last) moral compass in the Western world, a world that has lost its learning consciousness and therefore its direction, which often leads to the inability to sacrifice lives for any purpose, and to moral bankruptcy (Syria as a parable). Not to mention the effectiveness of terrorism - as a virus of the religion of life itself (a religion shared by both the left and the right). Perhaps it's time for a reformation? Has the time come to look for something outside of life on Earth?

Instead of replacing the living God with the image of God of human life, that is, replacing the holy religious object with a substitute (idolatry?), it would have been better to find a secular parallel precisely to the holy religious process: learning Torah. The sanctity of life would have been better replaced by the sanctity of evolution - the sanctity of learning. Because the sanctity of life in its deep sense does not mean just the preservation of life, but the preservation of development. The sting of the terrible loss in the Holocaust is not the loss of life - but the loss of the Jewish-European cultural momentum at its peak: the Holocaust of learning. It is not an ecological Holocaust that should frighten us - but an evolutionary Holocaust. This is the reason for the fear of artificial intelligence: we are not afraid that it will progress far beyond us, culturally and scientifically, but that it will not progress, and will reach some eternal primitive equilibrium, some "eco-system", and produce paperclips. What we value in ourselves is not life itself (we can easily imagine worthless lives), but the infinite drive for learning and development, which evolution has deeply wired in us, and which we fear we will not succeed in wiring into artificial intelligence (or that we will not succeed in all areas, and create a mathematical and scientific learning monster that has zero cultural and artistic learning, or perhaps the opposite!). That is, what worries us is that we will not pass on the full depth of learning forward. Secularism has always mocked the religious idea of life after death, as if it were some childish-primitive fantasy of "not dying". But the meaning of this idea was never the continuity of life in the earthly sense - but the continuity of learning: the continuity of the spirit and spiritual life (and in practice, even devout secularists believe in it, and care very much, in a completely irrational way seemingly, about the continuity of their spiritual heritage after their death). Behind the life after death stands another concept, more mature, of a person, who is not his life - but his learning. It is this learning that allows a person to reach the world to come - and not just the moon.

Culture and Literature


domain: literature

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The Degeneration of the Nation

Epistolary Novel

Like Watching Your Own Porn

By: Archaeological Correspondence

The Third Rib  (Source)

I dreamed that our correspondence was as long as the exile - two thousand long emails. I have documentation of the entire relationship, from its beginning in the first email to its end in the last. Who said what, to whom, and when, for women change, and I can search, understand the mistakes. And so the computer will see the human from within, from inside the secret, everything will be open, all the emails of all people in the world will be in open archives in two hundred years, for historians. Everything you write here - anyone will be able to read. There is no privacy in the past. No one says let's not open the seal of the letter from Pharaoh to the Egyptian princess to protect their privacy. Therefore, the future intelligence will be able to read everything - and it's the only one that will indeed read everything. It's you, me - and the next intelligence. So it's perhaps less important (than you think) that your faithful servant is currently the tail of the world, because in the eyes of the future everything can be reversed, if they read, and you know what they will read. The last shall be first. And vice versa. They won't be interested in the correspondence of the Prime Minister. You keep saying that email is a substitute for a real relationship, light and screen are substitutes for skin and clothes, but the world is going in the opposite direction - garments of light instead of garments of skin. And people understand, or rather internalize this, and therefore document everything. The computer is not ontologically secondary to the world, but the computer is more real than the world. This is a reverse Kantian revolution - the categories of the future, of the computer, are those that determine human perception. The real world will turn from being the real world to being the digital world, and only the world in the computer will remain forever, in the future, and everything that wasn't documented will disappear, and therefore has no substance and meaning - even today, because the philosophy has already changed today, from the thought of us in the eyes of the future, in the eyes of the computer. Deep inside - we've already internalized it. That's why people film themselves having sex. Like that woman I asked why, and she said she watches herself during sex, and that "it's like watching your own porn!". And so any feeling or connection that doesn't exist in writing - doesn't really exist. And therefore, even though you no longer love, it's precisely our love, in the computer, that will live forever. While all the couples in real life and loves of the flesh - will die with them. The way of all flesh. And one day in the future, the intelligence will understand what was between us. And maybe it will even have the heart that we didn't have, yes, you.

Nightlife


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The Degeneration of the Nation

List of 100 Most Desirable Bachelor Philosophers

How did the transition occur from the era of God speaking to the era of speaking to God? Why were aesthetics and art the central driving force in history? What ethos can save culture from digital barbarism? Why don't painters get married? And why is there an overrepresentation of homosexuals in all fields of humanities, arts, and science? Could it be related to bananas?

By: The Most Desirable Philosopher in Netanya

Women prefer bananas over philosophers - and philosophers prefer bananas over women. Conclusion? (Source)

Stereo-theism

What created the Bible was the perception that God speaks. Then there was competition over God's texts, laws, prophecies, stories in which He intervenes through speech, and the institution of the prophet as a power was formed. God's speech was meaningful and aesthetic, and the desire to preserve and consume God's speech became literature. When there are many gods, they influence through nature, each with a different power, and the relationship with them is mechanical, natural. But when there is one God, the contradictory forces do not express Him, because a personal, human relationship is formed, which is a system of speech. Only this can bridge contradictions in behavior and explain good and evil as reward and punishment. Therefore, all these developments were not different stages in the evolution of religion, but developed all at once. The innovation was not the unity (of God), but the development of the relationship with God as a human system (and ultimately a spousal one) rather than a natural one, from which everything stemmed, including unity, out of loyalty. God was no longer a force of nature or an animal, but a person. Until He became pure speech, without a body. And finally, a text. He was created in man's image, and in the end, when He disappeared, only the relationship with Him remained. God's houses became houses where God's speech was - houses of study - and houses where man speaks to God - houses of prayer. In Christianity, God's speech as exegesis and law disappeared, and only man's speech remained, in confession and prayer. The relationship became one-sided, which is the strongest type of love, which is a one-sided relationship, as opposed to couplehood. But today, when communication has become visual, God can speak through art. And man can speak to Him through painting.

The Exodus from the Pyramids in Egypt to Mount Sinai as a Meta-Poetic Story of Transition Between Artistic Mediums

Ancient religiosity was born out of art, from music. In the period before the Common Era, people had no way to consume art outside of a religious framework, so the sense of sublimity that art provided created the religious feeling. In the Biblical period, people didn't read any book other than the Bible; it was the only work of art they were exposed to. The statue in the temple was the most impressive plastic art piece they saw in their lives; the temple was the only museum in the city. What Judaism did was replace plastic art with the art of literature, that's all. Christianity made a synthesis and used both the plastic art of the pagan world and the literary art of the Jewish world, and therefore triumphed over both. Islam, on the other hand, was built on the art of poetry and music, and therefore was also sweeping, but did not leave a cultural legacy like Christianity, because music is not preserved. The eruption of Classical Greece is an artistic eruption; art came before science and philosophy, and so did the Renaissance. People always ask what led to the scientific revolution, and don't understand that it was the artistic revolution. This artistic revolution replaced religion with art, a role reversal, and the museum became a temple; this was the root of secularization. And today, when we are flooded with art, this is the information revolution, the flood of images, texts, and music. Egyptian culture was an architectural culture, and whoever had an architectural culture, like Rome, became an empire, not the other way around. Sophistication in the art of sculpture and architecture created the gods and temples, and caused the agricultural revolution, while cinema and photography created the twentieth century, the spectacle of world wars. Meanwhile, the internet has not created an art form, but only shortened existing forms. But when computer games and virtual reality become available technology for art, a new medium like cinema, then a real revolution will take place. In other words, the virtual world, which today is inferior to the real world, will become, through a process of sublimation, a higher and more real world, thanks to its artistic form. Homo sapiens defeated the Neanderthals because they created art and the Neanderthals didn't. This is not just perceived as the highest ability because art can mobilize people in a way that is not otherwise possible. And until artificial intelligence has an artistic sense, people will not recognize it as intelligence, because art is the ability that uses all the skills of the brain, and therefore it is so high. It activates both the lower perceptions, the sensory ones, as well as emotion-pleasure-motivation, and also the higher abilities, so it was created from consciousness, the highest organizing ability that includes all other abilities. If we want to know when humans achieved consciousness, we need to see when they started engaging in art, and we see this in children, and also in [Translator's note: "arsim" is Israeli slang for low-class, uncultured individuals] arsim. People without an artistic side are a kind of intelligent animals. The sense of aesthetics is what attracts us to open spaces, to landscapes, to migration, and brought humans out of Africa and caused their spread, while art as artificial beauty is what attracts us to culture, because sexual beauty that attracts combines physical beauty with spiritual beauty - we are programmed to want intelligence and social ability, not just breasts. Therefore, this was the engine for the evolutionary development of humans from apes, and art specifically was the engine for the development of tools. Aesthetics is responsible for the success of Homo sapiens more than previous hominids and more than other animals. And also for the success of Western culture more than other cultures. There is a direct relationship between the level of aesthetics of a culture and its success - more than geographical location - and see Japan.

The Real Engine of History

The Renaissance in Italy grew out of a culture that was obsessive about painting, sculpture, and architecture, as the focus of prestige in society, out of competition between patrons for prestige through art. In other words, power expresses itself through plastic art, and so does the flourishing of classical music in Germany, or drama and philosophy in Greece, and poetry in Archaic Greece. It's like the blossoming of peacock feathers; when power competes with itself through aesthetics, a period of artistic flourishing is created, and most of the time it competes through other means such as trade, money, wars, and conquests. Every society and its obsession, and in this obsession it usually succeeds gloriously. In China it's development, in Israel it was the security field, and now it's start-ups. Judaism competed for two thousand years through the Talmud, which became the most magnificent intellectual structure in human history, which interests no one except the ultra-Orthodox, while in the last two centuries Jews competed through intellectual achievements and media, and there was a tremendous flourishing of them in the field, just as in Russia in the 19th century the competition was through literature, and the flourishing of Russian literature was created. That's how every society and its obsession, like Silicon Valley society whose obsession is high technology, and that's how they compete. In other words, the ability to transfer the struggle between alpha males to different fields is the main engine of humanity, and the flexibility of defining the field is what allows us to drive this engine in different directions. But to achieve cultural achievements in a certain field, first of all, that's where the obsession of power needs to be, and then cultural flourishing is created. And there are weak cultures that don't have a project, or their project is messed up, like terrorism, or outdated, like Islam, or have lost their obsession, like parts of Europe, whose obsession is leftist righteous ideals, or large parts of the world whose obsession is right-wing forceful ideals full of self-pride. In Israel, the Arabs' obsession is the Jews and the Jews' obsession is the Arabs, and therefore both the left and the right are defined by approaches to Arabs, and are motivated in relation to someone else, which is a messed up motivation, like in a relationship, because the other is autonomous. Therefore, what's important is not the economy, or technology, but the ethos of society, its obsession, and that's where the achievements will be. The ethos in the Middle Ages was religion and therefore great achievements were made there, the Roman ethos was imperial and therefore achieved great achievements, the Pharaohs achieved great achievements in attaining eternal life, according to their religion, and so on. The absurdity of these achievements is because they are far from our ethos, just as the Pharaohs would look at the ethos of classical music in the German countries as absurd. Therefore, a fundamental change in the achievements of a society cannot come from the allocation of resources, but from the allocation of values and ethos. And this is very little, like attention, you can't split too much and it's a resource limited to 1, there's only 1 attention and you can't get more of it, and if you divide it to everything you won't reach any exceptional achievement. Therefore, you have to choose. Maximum two or three goals, and preferably one. If you're a start-up and security power, you're not a painting power. Therefore, culture does not stem from the talent of individuals, but from the social competition that recruits its prestige to one field. What the individual can do is only enlist in an existing ethos in his society. No one can be a scientist without science, or an artist without art. America's obsession is the future, and Japan's obsession is success, and China's obsession is control, and Russia's obsession is forcefulness, and Europe's obsession is society, and India's obsession is Hinduism, and the Islamic world's obsession is its feelings of inferiority, and Iran's obsession is pride, and Africa's obsession is survival, and changes in ethos are slower than technological changes. To create flourishing, you don't need many people, but a subculture whose ethos is in the direction of flourishing, and this is difficult, because the ethos of subcultures is conquered by the big and strong ethos of society. It's hard to create a subculture whose ethos is painting, without it being conquered by other dominant ethos in the world, because prestige tends to concentrate, what is precious in the eyes of others is contagious to what is precious in your eyes. Only the fundamentalist model like the ultra-Orthodox manages to maintain prestige that is not dependent on the world, and it does so with all its might. The United States rules the world because it controls the images of prestige, and the Far East and all the rest are just imitating them for now. Therefore, the way to progress in painting is to connect to the ethos of painting, and to be even an ethos of one person, against all the barbarians around.

Check the Marriage Percentages of the Top Hundred in Various Fields

Painters are bachelors, homosexuals, and childless, at a significantly higher rate than the population, not because they are poor, but because it's an art whose practice is so isolated, but also very rewarding, neurologically, because success is before your eyes, the reward is immediate (not like a word or a note, which are not right or wrong in themselves), and continuous, it's always before your eyes. And the same goes for philosophers, because it's very isolated work, and the intellectual reward is addictive. You're in a cage - but they pay in bananas. So I don't know why no one wanted me, but it's a fact. And it's a fact that the marriage rates of philosophers are significantly lower than those of monkeys.

Philosophy of the Future


domain: press-review

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The Degeneration of the Nation

Critique of Haaretz
By: The Bitch

Posts of the Week

Editor Bilhah Reuven selects the best from Facebook. A memorial column for a bygone era - that no one remembered in real time. In pursuit of the lost discourse - and the land that was never there

Two Years Later: The Degeneration of Facebook

What is the "Bitch Algorithm"? The Bitch returns for a farewell performance, at the end of which she throws out someone very familiar to you

Alternatives to Haaretz: How to Give Your Brain Healthier Daily Nourishment?

Deep down, we all know it's an addiction - and a bad habit - created due to our brain's vulnerability to inconsistent positive feedback addiction. Like gamblers who occasionally win but lose in the long run, like a girl addicted to an unstable relationship with a cheating ex who occasionally writes "I love you," precisely because most articles in Haaretz are poor but a few are good - we become addicted to it. Addiction to Haaretz is like addiction to Facebook, smartphones, porn. Haaretz Anonymous Readers present: ten steps to recover from daily time-wasting

Why Did I Stop Reading Haaretz?

A chronicle of a foreseeable escape. The Bitch revisits the moments when she tore off the leash, released the choking grip of the collar, and left with a disappointed head but a raised tail - from slavery to freedom, and from home to the street. Will she ever return?

Continuation of the All-Time "Haaretz" Ranking - Bottom of the Table

Forgive me if I'm a sentimental bitch, but this is not just a summary of Haaretz, or of a glorious critical career. It's a summary of the period when I believed in Haaretz, and perhaps also believed in other things (that were sold to me in Haaretz), since I started reading it as a puppy. Since then, I've grown up - and Haaretz has regressed. I've become wiser - and Haaretz has become more foolish. The internet has risen higher and higher in the realms of content and knowledge - and Haaretz has degenerated. The newspaper for people who think themselves - has lost its importance and itself. But I still remember the time when "written in Haaretz" was a mark of quality. No longer

Summary of the "Haaretz" Ranking (Top of the Table): If You Believe It Can Be Ruined, Believe It Can Be Fixed

People ask me: What's the reason the Bitch's critical spring has dried up? Has the newspaper improved so much that there's nothing left to criticize? Why have you abandoned your post while the caravan passes? Return to your kennel, bitch. Therefore, as a service to dog owners, provided by the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, I'll present Haaretz from a satellite view: a depth cross-section, a broad picture, and a general horizontal overview of the newspaper's state, which reflects the state of Israeli intelligence, which reflects the state of the Jewish nation, which reflects the state of creation, the breaking of vessels and destruction, which reflect the existential state of the dog. If there are no bones - eat meat

The Protestant God of The Marker: When Will the Redeemer Come

The Bitch reviews The Marker Weekend, once a worthy competitor to Haaretz's supplement, and today - a victim of lack of competitiveness, of Haaretz's monopoly, of Rolnik's obsessive centralization, of pyramids of false consciousness, and perhaps also of the unions - which don't allow for proper turnover of interviewers. Will The Marker return to being competitive, reflecting the variety of stories and approaches in the economic world? On the improper connections between bon ton and newspaper

Haaretz is Guilty of Bibi - Part B: This is Not How You Build a Wall

"Haaretz" preferred to collapse under rating constraints and hide behind a paywall - the only one in Israel! - out of a lack of thinking about alternatives, and mainly - out of a lack of thought about the meaning of the decision. Israeli society and the community of Haaretz readers were affected by it in two opposite ways - which untied their connection to each other

Haaretz is Guilty of Bibi - Part A: It's Not Funny

Only one thing could have stopped the Bibi phenomenon from taking over Israeliness. Bibi is the embodiment of Judaism's ailments - victimhood, arrogance towards gentiles, passivity, loudness, neurotic apprehension - and therefore his character is tailored to the takeover of the yearning Jewish soul over the Israeli spirit. He lacks only one ancient Jewish component - and in it could have been his downfall. And it's precisely this component that is completely absent from "Haaretz"

"Haaretz" in Panic: Zehut Party's Platform is More Intelligent than its Opinion Page

What's behind "Haaretz's" obsession with "Zehut"? Why did Haaretz go crazy (literally) in the elections specifically around Zehut's platform, of all issues, and dedicated disproportionate coverage to it, also lacking basic fairness, which even the anti-Bibi pales in comparison, and which it would never allow itself against any other candidate or agenda? Why does Feiglin bother Haaretz more than Bibi, Bennett, Shaked, Otzma Yehudit and Lieberman - combined, and is also more essential to it than them (apparently)? A coverage of the election coverage in Haaretz - and of The Marker's Yom Kippur

Expose: Gantz Means Goose in Yiddish

You voted Bibi - you got Ziffer. If Bibi is ousted, Ziffer will have to quickly resign from "Culture and Literature" to receive his pension plan from Bibi - the position of head of the Israeli Institute in Cairo, according to Case 10000. The correct literary choice - Honk honk honk!

Where Has Amir Oren Disappeared To?

Yossi Verter and Amir Oren, the two best reporters in Haaretz, were a dynamic duo. Both share a similar worldview and journalistic thinking that focuses on micro-tactics (amusingly and intricately convoluted!) at the expense of strategy. This perspective creates in their readers a gossip-like thinking where the ridiculous bears hide the forest and the constant dance of fools is stronger than tectonic movements

The Seven Circles of Hell of Galeria

Dear General, why did you send me back to hell? It's not funny. I'm willing to write about anything else, just not about Galeria. Part two and final in the critique of the Galeria supplement

A Dubious Gallery of Characters

I'm begging the Chief of Staff, and using this subtitle for that purpose: Please, dear editor, don't assign me to write about Galeria again

Uri Mark the Sex Destroyer

"And you're doing me wrong / You're doing me wrong / I'm burning slowly / I'm lying down and you / You're doing me wrong / You're doing me wrong" (Haaretz supplement editor in his song "You're Doing Me Wrong")

Who Will Replace Benny Ziffer?

The great enemy of the bad - is the worse

There's Nothing New Under the Sun

When the sun is too strong - sometimes the bottom gets burned. The story of a column in the Haaretz supplement

Arik Glasner's Crystal Ball

Glasner, then a Ziffer refugee, foresees a decade ago in an open letter to Schocken: "The intention is not that it's appropriate to turn 'Books' into 'Galeria' for literary matters, a trend that has been emerging in recent years, may God preserve and save us"

Uri Mark Sees in the Stars

Mark, currently the editor of Haaretz supplement, predicts three years ago the establishment of the Chiefs of Staff party in a night meeting (but confuses Savyon with Kfar Saba)

The Degeneration of the Nation


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The Degeneration of the Nation

How Did Agnon Destroy Religious Literature?

Agnon as the prophet of religious superficiality. The external language is traditional, but the entire reality is secular, and only the internal infrastructure is religious - yet terrifyingly primitive from a religious perspective, functioning merely as a skeleton of religion, without the spirit. All the immense complexity stems from the way the complex secular world is superimposed on a simplistic religious myth - and not from mythical-religious complexity in itself, resulting in hypocrisy, which is a gap between practice and foundation. This is the description of a typical Agnon work - but also of the religious world in our time

By: And You Shall Love (the Lord Your God)

What connected Agnon to Rabbi Kook? On the link between hypocrisy and kitsch - and on the vitality Agnon drew from his delight in hypocrisy, in the religiosity of cynicism (Source)

The last, and strongest, place of religion - is precisely in romance in its simplest form. The idea of romantic destiny - that there is "the man of my life," "the intended one," and "the love of my life" - still lives, in an era of networked multiple possibilities and connections, only within a religious world - where couplehood has become a religion, and where fate still exists. Because the existence of "the one" and "the one" stems from the existence of "the One," namely God, and a "meeting of souls" requires belief in a "soul." Therefore, a marginal sentence in rabbinic literature, which states that the pairing of so-and-so's daughter to so-and-so is determined by a heavenly voice before the fetus is formed, has now become a principle of faith in Judaism, and today would have opened Maimonides' principles of faith.

What began (in distant romanticism) as a copying of religious ideas (Christian!) to the religion of love, that is, romanticism, meaning secularization - has become the main current religion. Therefore, religious society is obsessively preoccupied with dating and singles, because singlehood is the contradiction to faith, because the religion of love has been internalized - as the Jewish religion. The Jewish home has become more important than the synagogue, the study hall, and the Temple combined. And the secular transition from love to sexuality is already cracking the religion of the home from the outside. Because romanticism is already artificial in secular reality, it is already an ideology - and not a belief. It is kitsch - and not realism.

And Agnon understood all this. Because in Agnon's work, secular reality is a thick sandwich between religious language (on the external side) and religious deep structures (on the internal side). In Agnon's work, there is always a mythical deep structure at the foundation of the plot, and this is essentially what he is telling us: beneath the secular world - there exists a religious world. And the main belief for him, which he understood to be the main belief of religion, is romantic destiny. Hence the issue of [Translator's note: "agunah," a woman "chained" to a marriage] - there is no way to break free from the deep structure. The heroes are not free. They are trapped in the mythical, and only seem to act according to this world. There is no way to break free from who was destined for you, and if it is done, disaster is caused indirectly, or correction and return to the right order is caused indirectly. Just as the Greeks believed in personal fate, so Agnon believes in romantic fate, hence his tendency towards the tragic. The violation of destiny is a catastrophe, whether before marriage or after, and destiny overcomes everything, precisely because of the God who is connected to this destiny as the Moirai are connected to the fate of life. Agnon tries to write tragedies - because at his core, he is not a traditional Jew, but a romanticist.

The romantic motive is central to Agnon's world and his heroes, unlike Kafka for example, where the motive of life fulfillment and existence (and their opposite - death) is central to it. One writes a traitor and the other writes a murderer. And indeed we can classify writers according to those for whom romantic love is secondary to the existence of life, and the opposite, for whom life is secondary to love. Until the modern era, Judaism was a religion whose central motive was life, survival for example, while in modernity it became a religion whose central motive is love. The central promise is not life after death, but a life of love and home - intimacy. Love in the age of the death of love, and the certainty that the spouse was destined for us forty days before our creation. And this is in contrast to the secular doubt - not in the existence of God - but in love, in choice and in the beloved.

The religious person is assured that he was supposed to marry whom he married, for the correction of his soul and her soul (meaning - even if they argue and don't get along), and this is the main example of the providence he believes in, much more than if he is sick (even cancer is no longer caused by God, and certainly not by sins, but by rebellious cells). Therefore, religious people leave religion on romantic grounds, and no longer really secularize on the grounds of illness and death and the question of evil in the world. And therefore, romantic kitsch has completely corrupted religious creation. Agnon destroyed religious literature, because when he is simplified, what remains is the romantic structure (and the romantic longing for language) without a cruel realistic cover, which was created because Agnon wrote for the secular, and therefore had to be outwardly secular (and hide religiosity). And in general - his hypocrisy helped him create depth. But for the religious who learned from him as an example, the hidden has already become revealed - and there is no depth. They are not hypocrites - they are shallow. They believe in love.

Culture and Literature