Why it’s here. Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now” is the most ambitious recent attempt to make the empirical case for the Enlightenment project — for the values of reason, science, and humanism as not merely philosophically defensible but as demonstrably productive of human welfare. The book marshals an enormous quantity of data: life expectancy, extreme poverty rates, war deaths, literacy, democracy, access to clean water, child mortality, violent crime. The trends are, across most of these dimensions and most of the world, positive — dramatically positive when measured over centuries, and substantially positive even over recent decades that feel, in daily news consumption, like unrelenting catastrophe. The book’s argument is that our pessimism bias — our tendency to remember bad events more vividly than good ones, and to consume news that selects for disaster — systematically distorts our picture of how the world is actually changing. This argument is important, and a substantial portion of it is correct. The book belongs on this shelf because it makes the positive case for Enlightenment values with genuine intellectual energy.
What it offers. The chapters on data — on what has actually happened to human welfare over the past two centuries, and on the mechanisms by which those improvements have been achieved — are the book’s most valuable sections, and they deserve to be read and taken seriously even by readers who disagree with Pinker’s political and philosophical conclusions. The data, carefully interpreted, really does support the claim that things have gotten substantially better on most measurable dimensions of human welfare, and that Enlightenment-derived institutions — rule of law, scientific research, market economies, liberal democracy — have been the primary drivers. The book is also well-organized and clearly written; Pinker is among the best prose stylists in popular academic writing.
A word of caution. The book has been criticized, persuasively in several cases, for cherry-picking its data, for defining “progress” in ways that suit its argument, and for understating or dismissing developments that complicate the optimistic picture — environmental degradation, rising inequality within wealthy countries, the psychological costs of modernity. The philosopher John Gray, in particular, argued that Pinker’s secular faith in progress was as much a religious narrative as the religious narratives he was replacing it with, simply substituting “science and reason” for “God” as the engine of historical redemption. This criticism is not trivial: the book does sometimes read more like advocacy than analysis, and its confident dismissal of pessimistic counterarguments is not always commensurate with the strength of those arguments. Pinker’s account of the Enlightenment itself is also philosophically thin — he treats a complex, internally contested intellectual movement as a largely unified force for good, which it was not. Read the data carefully; be more skeptical of the synthesis.