I've missed out a few pages of discussion here, but I'm going to inhabit Luke's favourite character, Saint Reason, and take issue with this:
Do we really want to align ourselves with 'reason' and 'rationality' as defined by reactionary old men?
Firstly, I think you're confusing genuine rationality with the pseudo-rationality used by guys like Dawkins as a cover for their own prejudices (although admittedly you gesture towards this with the use of scare quotes). Much of what he comes out with isn't rational at all, like the notion that kids shouldn't read Harry Potter or watch The X-Files because apparently it'll turn them into science-phobic muddle-heads! That's not rational at all, that's nuts. More seriously, there's the severe anti-Islam stance taken by people like Sam Harris, which goes way beyond a reasonable wariness of the problems of jihadism and intolerance among fundamentalist Muslim communities and into the realms of out-and-out Us-vs-Them tribal prejudice; just the sort of thing Enlightenment-loving types are supposed to abhor.
Second, how about aligning ourselves with
genuine reason and rationality as defined by progressive young men and progressive young women? Or, if you reject the idea that any definition of 'reason' can be genuinely universal and absolute, how about some version of it that rejects the reactionary tendencies of both religion and some of those who most harshly criticize religion; that says "religion isn't for us, but we accept that it can be a force for good, or at least neutral, and that forcefully trying to beat it out of people is a bad idea because it often ends up causing them to adopt a more hardline and reactionary version of their faith". In fact, some people are already identifying as part of a "
New New Atheism" movement.
Lastly, it's pretty fucking obvious that taking an anti-science/anti-reason position is by no means exclusively "left-wing" (and even when it is, it's generally found among the more regressive elements of the Left). Look at the massive, and I mean
massive, anti-science prejudice held by vast swathes of white, conservative, Christian America - the people who've put Trump in the White House. Anti-evolution, anti-vaccine, AGW-denying, young-Earth creationist. This is the vanguard of the Counter-Enlightenment just as surely as po-mo philosophy professors and the
Social Text journal.
So really, I see this: