![]() “How can we soundly appraise the state of the world?” he asks. ![]() Two thirds of the book, which is a kind of sequel to his bestselling The Better Angels of Our Nature, consists of chapter after chapter of evidence that life has been getting progressively better for most people. ![]() Pinker is up for a fight, and his main weapon is quantitative data. With Donald Trump in the Oval Office, populists on the march across Europe and US campuses at the centre of yet another culture skirmish, the timing of the book requires little explanation. Enlightenment Now is a bold, wonderfully expansive and occasionally irate defence of scientific rationality and liberal humanism, of the sort that took root in Europe between the mid-17th and late 18th century. ![]() Steven Pinker’s answer to this problem is to double down on progress: the policies of the past 300 years are still the best available. ![]()
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