Well, in my opinion, the question and others like it have caused us to jump the shark a fair bit.
Consider the 2nd degree, and the topics we are instructed to learn.
When is the last time you've seen a good healthy seminar on one of those topics at a lodge? For me, the lodges doing Masonic discussion and whatnot - and so standing out from the lodges who do little education at all, they talk almost exclusively about speculation from this or that book as to the history of our order, the meaning of this symbol or that, and so forth. And all that is well and good - we are an order with a deep history and a whole sack full of symbols.
But it seems to have jumped the shark. Music, philosophy, geometry and so forth - these and others are the sort of thing that our ancient brethren were into. But we've become obsessed with studying ourselves. And many men off the street are a lot more interested in the mysteries and potential conspiracies surrounding our order than they are our quest for more light. Its a form of stagnation, in my opinion.
I'm partially playing devils advocate here. I've cracked a bunch of books on our history as well. And I can't hold that same curiosity against anyone.
Its just that its a lot smaller part of what we are actually about that I think a lot of folks give credit to.