POST-HIERARCHICAL ANALYSIS · 003

Not a Pyramid, but a Thinking Culture

A post-hierarchical analysis of Arūnas Sverdiolas’s “The Architecture of Our Culture”

Concepts marked with ? can be explained without leaving the article.

Source analysed: Arūnas Sverdiolas, “Mūsų kultūros architektonika” [“The Architecture of Our Culture”], Šiaurės Atėnai, 24 July 2026. Read the Lithuanian original ↗

Arūnas Sverdiolas offers a severe yet, in many respects, accurate cross-section of contemporary Lithuanian culture. He sees it as a disproportionate two-tier pyramid: an immense base of market-supported popular culture and a small, fragmented summit of high culture with little public agency. The people at this summit do not form a living intellectual milieu. They remain in separate “honeycomb cells”, while digital communication usually produces only a short-lived swarm rather than a community.

Sverdiolas identifies a real problem: culture is losing the ability to distinguish depth from superficiality, competence from opinion, and the value of a work from its popularity. Yet his architectural scheme can suggest that the only alternative to cultural flattening is to restore a hierarchy—to return high culture and the elite capable of recognising it to their proper place.

A post-hierarchical perspective proposes a third possibility. Culture need not abandon height, quality, or competence. It must abandon the assumption that these qualities can be reliably embodied in a permanent hierarchy of people. Lithuania’s problem is not merely that the pyramid has too small a summit. The deeper problem is the absence of an architecture capable of connecting distributed competence into collective intelligence.

The article and its context

“The Architecture of Our Culture” was first delivered at the Santara–Šviesa convention in Alanta in June 2026 and published a month later. Sverdiolas speaks not as an external sociologist presenting a representative survey, but as a “participant observer”. His argument draws on a life divided almost equally between Soviet Lithuania and the restored independent state.

This historical break gives him a rare comparative perspective. Soviet cultural order was replaced by markets, consumption, freedom of movement, individual initiative, and digital communication. Yet political freedom and an abundance of cultural offerings did not automatically produce a mature public mind. More books can be published without being read; universities and libraries can exist without becoming places where living knowledge accumulates and circulates; social networks can connect people without enabling them to think together.

The essay is therefore less a nostalgic story about a lost culture than a question about Lithuania’s incomplete post-Soviet cultural maturation. The state changed, institutions reorganised, and information multiplied, but culture’s capacity for self-reflection and influence over public decisions remained weak.

What Sverdiolas sees clearly

Equality of persons does not mean equivalence of ideas

One of the essay’s strongest insights is its criticism of transferring democratic equality from persons to cultural works, claims, and decisions. People are equal in dignity and rights; it does not follow that everyone understands every issue equally well, that all arguments are equally grounded, or that every work has equal cultural value.

This distinction is also essential to post-hierarchy. Post-hierarchy is not levelling. It does not abolish authorship, mastery, competence, or quality. In hierarchy, an author’s status often overshadows an idea’s value; in post-hierarchy, the contribution itself must be assessed. People remain equal, while their particular ideas and arguments need not be.

Cultural institutions do not yet create a cultural milieu

Sverdiolas’s honeycomb may be even more precise than his pyramid. Universities are partitioned into departments and institutes, professionals close themselves into small circles, and conference participants deliver papers without listening to one another. Formal communities exist, but their members exchange too few ideas. Lithuania has creators, researchers, translators, and critics; what it lacks is an arrangement through which their competence can combine into a common field of cognition.

Digital connection is not collective intelligence

Sverdiolas correctly distinguishes a community from a digital swarm. Social networks organise visibility, instant reaction, popularity, and emotional contagion. They can mobilise many people quickly, but they rarely organise the testing of arguments, creation of alternatives, sustained evaluation, or a shared conclusion.

Many people discussing the same topic do not yet constitute collective intelligence. It appears only when participants interact in one system, encounter and evaluate one another’s ideas, revise their positions, and produce a result that no individual prepared alone. A swarm reacts; collective intelligence reflects. A swarm produces noise and disperses; collective intelligence leaves tested, reusable knowledge.

The market cannot be culture’s only selection mechanism

The essay shows that mass culture is supported by a clear logic of supply and demand, while demanding works often lack a solvent audience. Commercial success, however, measures present demand rather than durable cultural value. Markets efficiently provide what people already want, but do not necessarily create conditions for what society has not yet learned to recognise. Cultural value cannot be reduced to price, print run, or number of likes.

Public decisions lack genuine expertise

Sverdiolas’s observation that consequential cultural decisions are made without effective and independent expertise is particularly important. Expert conclusions become a formality, politicians decide at discretion, competitions invite adverse selection, and public argument is displaced by the loudest position.

This is not merely a problem of cultural consumption but of decidement itself: who decides what to preserve, build, finance, translate, and transmit as cultural memory? If a single official decides, expertise becomes decoration. If an unprepared majority decides, emotional mobilisation can replace judgment. The established system oscillates between administrative hierarchy and unorganised populism.

Where Sverdiolas’s architecture ends

The diagnosis is powerful, but its explanatory scheme remains two-tiered: mass culture below, high culture above. This model reveals disproportion yet understates the complexity of contemporary culture. Cultural phenomena cannot be arranged along one vertical scale. They may be judged by aesthetic mastery, theoretical depth, historical significance, originality, social effect, accessibility, or their ability to open a new perspective and connect a community.

A popular work may be profound, while an institutionally recognised one may be formal and insignificant. A professional may repeat established patterns, while an amateur notices what specialists missed. Culture therefore resembles a multidimensional evaluative network rather than a two-storey pyramid. It has no single permanent summit; different centres of competence emerge for different questions.

The idea of an elite whose quality is self-evident is even more difficult. Sverdiolas compares elite members to diamonds whose value is recognised by a connoisseur. Yet the value of a cultural work is not a physical property. It unfolds historically, in relation to other works, across interpretations, and through long-term effects. The central question remains: who recognises the connoisseur? An institution returns us to bureaucracy; other connoisseurs may create a self-validating caste; society returns us to popularity. In hierarchy, competence is assigned according to position. In post-hierarchy, it must become visible through contribution to each concrete question.

Post-hierarchy is not flatness

The horizontalisation Sverdiolas criticises must be distinguished from post-hierarchy. Horizontalisation puts all claims on one plane. Post-hierarchy creates procedures through which qualitative differences can emerge without relying on a predetermined ranking of persons.

1. Human dignity and the right to participate are equal. No one should be excluded merely for lack of status.
2. The value of ideas, arguments, and works is not equal. It must be tested by explicit criteria appropriate to the question.
3. Competence is not a permanent privilege. It emerges dynamically from a contribution recognised by other participants in a particular field.

Post-hierarchy abolishes not the vertical dimension of quality, but the permanent social vertical. Cultural height remains, but it is measured by the value of a contribution rather than the contributor’s rank.

From honeycomb and swarm to collective intelligence

Sverdiolas’s cells cannot be joined merely by encouraging more communication. Conventional discussion structurally favours authorities, fast speakers, and people with most time; ideas remain attached to names; disagreement becomes personal; and the exchange often has no defined result. What is needed is not another forum or conference, but another architecture of interaction.

In a post-hierarchical collective-intelligence environment, participants could evaluate proposals anonymously before the author’s name or status can influence judgment; encounter others’ contributions before submitting their own; assess arguments separately rather than persons; see not only average support but also consensus, polarisation, and resonance; and accumulate recognised competence through valuable contributions rather than appointments.

Such a system does not create truth automatically. It creates conditions in which distributed knowledge can meet, correct itself, and become a common result.

How cultural questions would be decided in post-hierarchy

1. Knowledgeable participants develop viable alternatives

Before society chooses, people who understand the domain should diagnose the problem, formulate evaluation criteria, propose alternatives, and expose their assumptions and consequences. Their role is not to make an unappealable decision, but to ensure that the choice is between serious possibilities rather than slogans.

Expertise itself should be plural and dynamically tested. Instead of one authorised commission, a sufficiently diverse group of knowledgeable participants works in a structured collective-intelligence process. Anonymity reduces prestige effects; reciprocal evaluation reveals which contributions command reasoned recognition.

2. Affected people choose among prepared alternatives

Those who will live with the consequences then select among the clarified alternatives. This preserves the equal political right to participate without pretending that every person must independently design a technically mature solution. The first stage protects quality; the second protects legitimacy.

The two stages also prevent two familiar distortions: experts cannot appropriate the final choice, and a majority cannot reduce a complex issue to an impulsive reaction before viable options have been developed.

How this would change Lithuania’s cultural architecture

Universities, museums, libraries, publishers, creators, critics, regional communities, and audiences would no longer need to be stacked in a single prestige pyramid. They could connect through problem-specific networks: one for translation priorities, another for cultural heritage, another for arts education, another for public-space decisions.

Competence would not disappear but become more visible. A person recognised in one question would not automatically dominate another. The cultural “elite” would cease to be a closed social stratum and become a changing configuration of highly valued contributions—selected by contribution, not appointed by position.

Is Lithuania really too small?

Sverdiolas worries that a small country lacks enough people for a dense intellectual milieu. Size matters, but interaction architecture matters more. A thousand isolated competent people constitute less collective intelligence than a hundred people who systematically exchange and evaluate ideas. Digital media can weaken culture when they produce swarms, but they can strengthen it when designed for sustained collective cognition.

Lithuania is not necessarily too small for a thinking culture. It may simply be organised in a way that prevents its dispersed intellectual resources from meeting.

A new cultural architecture

Sverdiolas is right that culture cannot survive by declaring every judgment equal, subordinating value to the market, or replacing communities with digital swarms. But the answer need not be restoration of a pyramid. The alternative is a cultural architecture in which quality distinctions remain real while no permanent group monopolises the right to define them.

A thinking culture is neither a crowd nor an elite speaking on behalf of everyone. It is a structured capacity of society to bring distributed competence into interaction, generate alternatives, evaluate contributions independently of status, and reach decisions that neither a central authority nor an unorganised majority could produce alone.

Culture’s future lies not in choosing between summit and plain. It lies in building a network capable of producing height.

flowchart TD
 A["Horizontalisation of culture"] --> B["All judgments are treated as equivalent"]
 B --> C["Quality criteria disappear"]
 C --> D["Sverdiolas's response: a cultural vertical"]
 C --> E["Post-hierarchical response: dynamically recognised competence"]
 E --> F["Collective evaluation based on participants' contributions"]
 classDef diagnosis fill:#e9e5dc,stroke:#6f6d66,color:#191916
 classDef sverdiolas fill:#f4f1ea,stroke:#191916,color:#191916
 classDef post fill:#f4f1ea,stroke:#a93b2b,color:#191916,stroke-width:2px
 class A,B,C diagnosis
 class D sverdiolas
 class E,F post