First, thanks for a thorough explication of Pinker's position.

One mistake almost all people (modernists, postmodernists, and non-modernists--people, mostly religious, who reject science, Liberalism: the modernist meta-ideology, and postmodernism) make is to equate 'reason' with 'rationality'. The two are not necessarily the same thing. We can reason perfectly well from from beliefs, such as a belief in God or a (secular) belief that all people are 'equal'. The products so such reasoning are no more rational than the non-rational beliefs from which they follow.