Notes from Nina

Week of 12th February

Welcome to the first of my free weekly notes for Compact. We also have a weekly podcast where I discuss the news of the week with my colleagues Sohrab Ahmari, Matthew Schmitz, and Geoff Shullenberger. We have other podcast-related plans in the works too, so stay tuned. I’ll also return to writing columns for the magazine in the near future.

So, what of this week? Lent began on St Valentine’s Day, so anyone giving up sex would have a good opportunity to reflect on what has happened to our collective libido. The Western world, South Korea, and even the French are now apparently too tired. I interpret this as a morbid symptom of techno-individualism, a kind of alienation from the skin and from each other. Screen-time promises an extended adolescence, but the body has its own time which is at odds with the modern world. In any case, I’ve given up complaining for Lent. This was also my New Year’s Resolution. I was discussing the Silent Generation (those born between 1928 and 1945) recently with a friend, and I recalled my grandfather speaking only infrequently (though kindly when he did). I never remember him complaining. It might be worth experimenting with a return to…well, if not exactly repression, then at least a dignified attempt to grin and bear it. Complaining simply annoys everyone around you and it’s not clear that it helps solve any of the problems — physical, mental, spiritual — we are naturally heir to.

Latest pieces in Compact

For starters, to celebrate all the new content we have planned — more original reporting, more podcasts, more live events — we’re offering a sale: New readers can use this link to join for just $30, or 67 percent off the regular price, for a full year of access to all our stuff.

This week, as we relaunched our beautiful site, we published Compact editorial fellow, Stephen G. Adubato on Lexi Freiman’s new novel, The Book of Ayn, which examines the limits of self-centered individualism through Anna, who decides “to forge a Randian lifestyle, relying solely on herself and refusing to make excuses, while also emulating Rand’s romantic pursuit of younger men.” Perhaps today’s sexlessness is merely the next stage in a Randian self-reliance?

On Valentine’s day, we published Malcom Kyeyune on the continued failure of US foreign policy. Kyeyune usefully compares the current state of the American empire to turmoil in France around the 1789 revolution: “France had gone from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy to a republic to a radical revolutionary police state, only to then become a dictatorship and finally an empire, before it eventually reverted back to a monarchy all over again. Each time, the various political figures in France tried to stabilize the political system, and each time they were defeated.” Kyeyune predicts that “We are likely looking at a very similar denouement for our own world order in the months and years ahead.”

We also published an important report from Senegal by Mamadou Ndiaye, who describes the daily riots and political turmoil in the country, including the recent postponement of elections: “Now, with Senegalese youth out on the streets, feeling they have nothing to lose, the entrenched elite seems willing to sacrifice democracy to remain in power and avoid prosecution. The only alternative is the ascent of a new government that reflects the younger generation’s aspirations.”

To celebrate our relaunch, we published an epic piece by Sam Kriss who we made buy everything advertised in a single issue of National Review. Sohrab has already discussed the piece and its political implications for conservatism here, but suffice it to say, you must read it: “If Buckleyite conservatism no longer carries the weight it used to, it’s because its revolution is already complete. This might not be the result that Buckley envisaged, but when you turn human beings into tools, all you are is the process that turns human beings into tools.”

photo by Ryan Zickgraf

Just today, we have Ryan Zickgraf on Fani Willis: “Whatever happens in the Trump case, expansive use of RICO is here to stay. As courts for partisan political gain, more sweeping racketeering cases are inevitable. ‘What’s to stop conservative prosecutors in small counties from bringing flimsy charges against Joe Biden?’ asked David A. Graham of The Atlantic. Good question.”

Nina Recommends

I’ve long been a fan of Anthony Galluzzo, a writer and academic from New York. His recent short book, Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today (Zer0 Books), revisits John Boorman’s 1974 psychedelic film Zardoz (you’ll recall Sean Connery in a red leather thong). While the film was at the time a commercial and critical disaster, Galluzzo finds in Boorman’s vision a “strand of early Seventies countercultural thinking that challenged the hypermodernist vision that drove both US capitalism and Soviet state socialism.” Describing Zardoz as a kind of “social science fiction”, Galluzzo sees a pre-emptive strike against what he calls '“Star Trek socialists” who perpetuate a techno-utopian Promethean fantasy of unlimited growth, and who imagine that the machine will somehow usher in plenty for all.

In a genius coinage, Galluzzo introduces “critical Aquarianism” where, in place of therapeutic New Age cults of the self, he imagines a program “that combined individual exploration and communal spirit, folk traditionalism…neo-Luddism and a revisionist utopianism within limits.” Galluzzo is as critical of left technophiles and accelerationists as he is of a destructive right-wing vision that imagines the cosmos as an infinite resource, defending instead “the transformation of eco-social relations such that birth (and death) are not horrible things to be denied, abolished, or transcended.” I strongly recommend Galluzzo’s book — and you can see a fascinating and fun discussion between him and Compact contributor, Rhyd Wildemuth, author of the recent Here Be Monsters: How to Fight Capitalism Instead of Each Other (Repeater), here.

In other news, I’m midway through teaching a course on Evil at the Mary Ward Centre (an adult education centre) in Stratford, London. I’ve been thinking this week about ponerology — the study of political evil — and about the work of Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Łobaczewski in particular. Among the many useful concepts Łobaczewski introduced in Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes (1984), is the idea of “pathocracy”: when political systems and whole societies are taken over by insanity. Łobaczewski analyzed the deeper roots of this danger without simply reducing the phenomenon to “left” or “right.” It’s well worth reading if only to remind ourselves that as advanced and critical as a species we might imagine we are, we are always at the same time prone to the infectious madness of small numbers of bad actors and that we are most in danger of evil when we imagine the concept no longer has any explanatory value.

Until next week!

Nina