The Enlightenment was one of the most consequential intellectual revolutions in human history, and I mean that without irony. The slow dismantling of superstition, the insistence on evidence, the separation of church from state, the idea that a human being has inherent rights not conferred by a king or a priest are genuine achievements, hard-won, and still worth defending. I am not here to burn down the Enlightenment. I am here to notice that it made a promise it could not ke