Enlightenment Now

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) is a book by the Canadian-American cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. It follows his earlier The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), in which he argued that violence had declined over the course of history. Here he broadens the scope and contends that the Enlightenment values of reason, science, and humanism have been the main driver of a widespread improvement in human living conditions.

The central argument rests on a definition of progress that Pinker considers objective: most people prefer life to death, health to sickness, peace to war, and knowledge to ignorance, and progress means that these goods become ever more common. To support this, the book gathers statistical evidence on life expectancy, health, prosperity, safety, peace, equal rights, environmental protection, and quality of life across the world. Among the most cited figures are the rise of life expectancy from roughly 30 years around 1780 to more than 70 today, and the fall of extreme poverty from about 90 percent of the population in 1820 to around 10 percent in 2015. Pinker credits these gains to what he calls the Great Escape from misery that began in Europe after the Enlightenment, and to the Great Convergence between rich and developing countries visible in the twenty-first century.

The book also takes positions that many readers find contentious. Pinker argues that inequality in itself is not a component of wellbeing, unlike health or prosperity, and that what is morally objectionable is poverty, which has declined. He defends nuclear power as a tool against global warming, considers genetically modified food an effective answer to hunger, and downplays the existential threat posed by artificial intelligence. According to him, the main forces that could derail progress are religious fundamentalism, political populism, and postmodernist currents that question science, and his final chapters defend reason, science, and humanism against them.

Reception was sharply divided. Bill Gates publicly praised it as one of his favorite books, and several reviews, such as that in The New York Times, applauded its clarity and its defense of a rational humanism. Other critics, including The Guardian and John Gray, faulted it for excessive optimism, selective use of statistics, and a simplified reading of the history of ideas, especially of the Enlightenment itself.