Enlightenment Now takes another run at the argument and is organized into three sections: “Enlightenment,” “Progress,” and “Reason, Science, and Humanism.” The author discovered the extent to which people refuse to believe the “good news,” no matter how tall the pile of objective evidence (oh, the quirky charms of human nature). In that work, Pinker argues that human life held little value throughout the ages, and that the dramatic deepening in our understanding of human dignity can be traced back to the Enlightenment. He brings us Enlightenment Now as a follow-up to his controversial 2012 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker is a cognitive psychologist, linguist, Harvard professor, and the author of a host of books on language, culture, and humanity.

This book serves to disabuse us of mistaken nostalgia and point us all in a forward-looking direction. While it’s true that we are besieged every day by voices trumpeting the many ways things are bad and getting worse, Pinker makes a compelling case for why we need to adopt a more constructive outlook.įirst, to believe that things are worse than ever is objectively wrong second, by over-focusing on the negative, we waste energy that should be invested in solving fixable problems third, in buying into the downward-spiral narrative, we reinforce it.Ĭase in point: the election of a president whose toxic brand of populism harks back to a golden age that never was. Steven Pinker wants us to stop being so pessimistic.

Enlightenment now