At our Postmodern Conservative blog Ralph Hancock shares some thoughts on Bastille Day . Ralph’s not a fan:
As I awoke this morning I was treated to a most light-hearted remembrance of Bastille day on NPR. Nothing is so merry, it seems, as stringing up a few “aristocrats” from light poles. Not that the jovial announcers at NPR are particularly to blame; their casual notice of what could be considered the political beginning of radical modernity is thoroughly typical of the complacency of our late modernity: an unquestioned secular rationalism, but without bearing any of the weight of reason’s responsibility. At least Lenin, a very conscious heir of the Jacobins, had some sense of the gravity of the decision by human beings to take over the sovereignty that had belonged to God. Now, however, reason rules with unbearable lightness.
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