The historical period and French thinkers were mentioned but I did not see specific analysis of the Revolution itself. I clipped this as a taste:
The loss of civilizational and moral knowledge that this has entailed has had practical consequences: sloppy thinking by people who have never been taught how to weigh evidence, reach conclusions, or recognize the flaws in their own reasoning; the astonishing decline in literacy; loneliness; the sense of purposelessness that marks so many lives; people who don’t understand themselves or one another. How sick does a civilization have to be to not pass down its own sources of wisdom and meaning to its children?
From the September 2023 issue: David Brooks on why Americans are so awful to one another
Because we have neglected our own humanistic traditions, a growing gap has opened between our scientific, technological, and economic progress on the one hand, and our social, emotional, and spiritual decay on the other. Fixing this problem doesn’t require that we go back and live in monasteries and nunneries. Nor do we have to confine ourselves to, say, the 1930s canon of Western Civ, or the 1950s version of what constitutes high culture.
I agree with the traditionalists that tradition is important, but I don’t think of it as something we need to go back to. Rather, I see it as something that each generation pushes forward. And for this, we need a humanistic renaissance. In schools, universities, and culture at large, we need to focus more explicitly on the big questions of life: What is my purpose? How should the next generation live? What role should beauty play in my life? How do I build a friendship? What do I owe my spouse, my community, my nation? We need to use the best that has been thought and said by all of the great civilizations of the Earth, but especially by Western civilization, which is our own particular home, our core resource while we try to stumble toward a better future.
Though Christopher Lasch considered himself to be on the political left, he is sometimes embraced by the traditionalists for his celebration of rootedness, community, and the traditional family, and for his critique of the meritocratic elite. “The populist tradition offers no panacea for all the ills that afflict the modern world,” he wrote. “It asks the right questions, but it does not provide a ready-made set of answers.” The traditionalists have no panaceas either, but they also ask the right questions. They remind us how important it is to embed ourselves and our children within the great humanist conversation that extends back thousands of years. What we should take from the traditionalists is the idea that restoring our society’s connection to its humanistic legacy and long-standing sources of meaning can actually help us better realize the promises of progress.