Where does this paranoia and territoriality lead? In a major essay in the New York Times Book Review, Wieseltier called for a worldview that is pre-Darwinian—“the irreducibility of the human difference to any aspect of our animality”—indeed, pre-Copernican—“the centrality of humankind to the universe.”

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, New York, 2018, p. 409