He argues that history since the Enlightenment represents improvements in essentially every human dimension, and mostly on this basis he predicts that these trends will continue. As one would anticipate, Pinker’s science-championing case for the existence of progress is evidence-based this represents about three quarters of the book. But even adding the needed nuances – and acknowledging the salience of some existential threats – still leaves a strong case for predicting continued human progress.
The book has limits Pinker’s sometimes narrow reading of the economics literature leads him to underestimate the scope of challenges to addressing problems including extreme inequality. The book offers a compelling perspective on the human project of building a better world, drawing on two centuries of improvements in individual wellbeing this is placed in a contemporary social context, offering an insightful diagnosis of current social problems, and proposed applications of Enlightenment ideas as a basis for addressing them. Subsequent scientific discoveries, research and accumulated data are deployed in defense of the Enlightenment – and its associated ideas of progress in history – with great force of argument. It offers a concise summing up of ideas of the Enlightenment.
Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress is a remarkable book. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, by Steven Pinker, New York: Viking, 2018.
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