To date, the elaborate sophistry of western 'Enlightenment' --a project entirely dedicated to dissembling political and religious customs-- has subjugated untold millions of people to a value system administrated by a cadre, armed by covert and overt violence.

Violence (annihilation of another) is one system of human organization, preceded in point of fact by the biological emergence, if you will, of rationality in human being.

If one can trust that symbolic language signifies 'higher-order' cognition ('reasoning') and mutually intelligible speech, it follows that this faculty indeed defines humanity, bar none. These attributes are not severable. Obversely, irrationality expresses unintelligible speech.

This is another system of human organization: The purposes of exchanging known and expressing unknown knowledge between people should be self-evident, species preservation. The density of these exchanges in any space-time can be understood as an occurence "society," regardless of the symbolic term adopted by two or more people.

We generations of modernity have been tutored to name categorically religion that which is unknown experience. Known experience, oral and written artifacts (repetition) of organized human industry, predicates 'history'. More ridiculous in this age of abstract reasoning is, western imperial violence has systematically denied philosophical status in its ranks to the customs of its subjugated peoples.

Division of labor within a society is another system of human organization. It may be mutually agreed (contingent) or habitual as with hereditary assignment to each generation in a society or violence. We generations of modernity have been tutored to name categorically economics that experience with and esoteric knowledge of a division of labor.

The dominance of any one of these systems in the "rationalization" and organization of humans by human 'authorities' is cyclical. Neologism is rife.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Memo to self : try harder.

It's obvious that the writer is buying into Sullivan's (Sullivan's!) framing. And by your choice to meta-analyse Sullivan via a review of his rambling, trivial article, you are buying into it too, by considering the whole shambles to be worthy of comment. Frankly, it isn't.

To indulge you, I have read the first few paragraphs of Sullivan's drivel :

Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being.
[SNIP]

And we have the cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical. They are filling the void that Christianity once owned, without any of the wisdom and culture and restraint that Christianity once provided.

It doesn't seem to ever occur to anyone in this chain of commentary -- you at the top, down to Sullivan at the bottom -- that people can believe in things, and fight for them, because they are good in themselves, according to a self-defined system of values, without any need of tribal or religious validation.

That there are vast numbers of humans who have not achieved emancipation from their anthropoid need of tribal value systems, is self-evident, and the hardest political problem there is.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}