With greater wealth has come more widespread education, greater access to knowledge, more leisure time, more access to art-more of the things that enrich and broaden the mind. What Pinker chronicles is not a mere physical improvement. And because this triumph is so unsung, the underlying ideals of reason, science, and humanism are unappreciated as well. The Enlightenment has worked-perhaps the greatest story seldom told. This evidence-based take on the Enlightenment project reveals that it was not a naïve hope. The bulk of the book is devoted to defending ideals in a distinctively 21st-Century way: with data. He sums this up by paraphrasing economist Max Roser, who points out that newspapers, “could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years.” Here is how he explains his approach. Pinker looks at (deep breath): life expectancy, child mortality, infectious disease, famine and malnutrition, global poverty, pollution, deaths from war, genocide, accidents, natural disasters, murder, political liberty, human rights, racism, literacy, and education.Īll of these measures of human well-being are on an often steeply upward trajectory, and have been since the Enlightenment.

“Charts” is the right word, because the book is packed with facts, figures, and yes, dozens of charts and graphs, showing massive and sustained improvements in just about every area of life that you can think of. One of the most prominent entries in that debate is Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, which sounds like a woozy New Age self-help book but is actually a long defense of the Enlightenment’s legacy, charting the vast improvement in the human condition since the luminaries of the eighteenth cntury first proclaimed that reason, science, and liberty could transform our lives. The Trump era-which has been characterized by a rise of anti-intellectualism, the Right’s ideological muddling, and a swerve toward illiberalism on both sides of the political debate-has, by way of compensation, also produced a mini-revival of interest and debate about the philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment.

Steven pinker enlightenment