This book will attract some hammering itself: It contains something to upset almost everyone. When not attacking the populist right, Pinker lays into leftist intellectuals ... Pinker’s book is full of vigor and vim, and it sets out to inspire a similar energy in its readers ... Enlightenment Now strikes me as an excellent book, lucidly written, timely, rich in data and eloquent in its championing of a rational humanism that is — it turns out — really quite cool.

Pinker is as interested in how to think as what to think. Worried about the big, global, existential threats — overpopulation, resource depletion, nuclear war and climate change? Pinker urges us first to change the way we think about them. They are not apocalypses in waiting but problems to be solved … The Enlightenment is a notoriously fuzzy concept — pretty much every historian has their own version — so it is no criticism of Pinker to say that his Enlightenment is a kitchen pantry for the modern ideas that interest him …. Pinker wants progress to be a law of nature, what he calls a ‘reality’ that numbers and charts can show. Yet he finally settles on surprisingly religious arguments about progress … Pinker’s gift is to challenge us not only to update the Enlightenment but to think beyond it.

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 … The book is really a polemic, albeit one with a vast number of footnotes. With some deft intellectual moves, he manages to position ‘enlightenment’ and ‘science’ on the right side of every argument or conflict, while every horror of the past 200 years is put down to ignorance, irrationality or “counter-enlightenment” trends … The vice-like grip of Pinker’s reasoning derives from his curious relationship to intellectual history.

The great writers of the Enlightenment, contrary to the way they are often caricatured, were mostly skeptics at heart. They had a taste for irony, an appreciation of paradox, and took delight in wit. They appreciated complexity, rarely shied away from difficulty, and generally had a deep respect for the learning of those who had preceded them. Enlightenment Now has few of these qualities. It is a dogmatic book that offers an oversimplified, excessively optimistic vision of human history and a starkly technocratic prescription for the human future. It also gives readers the spectacle of a professor at one of the world’s great universities treating serious thinkers with populist contempt. The genre it most closely resembles, with its breezy style, bite-size chapters, and impressive visuals, is not 18th-century philosophie so much as a genre in which Pinker has had copious experience: the TED Talk (although in this case, judging by the book’s audio version, a TED Talk that lasts 20 hours) ... what Pinker has actually crystallized in books like Enlightenment Now is our anti-intellectual era, one in which data and code are all too often held to trump serious critical reasoning and the wealth of the humanistic tradition and of morally driven activism is dismissed in favor of supposedly impartial scientific and technological expertise.

Just a few sentences into the book, I am tangled in a knot of Orwellian contradictions ... this is a profoundly anti-intellectual book ... By eliminating skepticism from his rendition of the Enlightenment, Pinker has done the equivalent of removing every second word of a book: what’s left behind is not half the sense of the original, but just nonsense ... This brings up another important point: the origins of Pinker’s data. Just over a third of the charts and tables in his book come from a single source: Our World in Data, housed in an Oxford University entity called the Oxford Martin School, founded in 2005 with the largest donation in Oxford’s nearly millennium-long history by an IT consultant, best-selling author, and technology evangelist named James Martin ... Then there are the graphs that do not appear in the book: graphs showing rising sea levels, rising temperatures, the resulting natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, and wildfires, mass shootings, and the list could go on. Indeed, it should set off alarm bells that every single graph in the book points in the same direction: every day in every way, better and better. My point is not that things are getting worse rather than better, but that history is not a straight line up or down, and that presenting 'data' as though it produces and speaks for itself is worse than useless: it is profoundly dishonest.

As a demonstration of the value of reason, knowledge, and curiosity, Enlightenment Now can hardly be bettered...But a countervailing tone is also evident in Enlightenment Now, one of brash certainty and overstatement; of contempt for those he considers anti-rationalists, such as people of faith; and of sneering dismissal of those he might be likeliest to win over with his argument, such as intellectuals, essayists, critics, and journalists … Enlightenment Now leads inevitably to the battle between science and the humanities … a valuable if at times an irritating book.

His book has two points to make: that things are much better than popular sentiment would have you believe, and that any mistrust in the merits of reason, science, and humanism is unfounded, foolish and harmful to making the world a better place. With a wealth of knowledge, graphs and statistics, a strong grasp of history, and an engaging style of writing, he not only defends the usefulness of Enlightenment ideals in the world today, he contends that they are the only stars to guide us on our way ... From confirmation biases and availability heuristics, to a paradox of rationally choosing tribal allegiance over rationality, Enlightenment Now offers up important ideas about not only the world itself, but also in how we make it our own.

Negative news is one reason why people consistently underestimate the progress humanity is making, complains Steven Pinker. To discern the true state of the world, he says, we should use numbers. In Enlightenment Now, he does just that. The result is magnificent … Pessimism has its place—it fosters caution. And the human instinct to focus on problems is sound—it means they often get fixed. Nonetheless, Mr Pinker’s broad point is surely right. Things are not falling apart. And barring a cataclysmic asteroid strike or nuclear war, it is likely that they will continue to get better.

Enlightenment Now is not without flaws. Pinker's characterization of 'greenism' as apocalyptic, quasireligious, misanthropic, indifferent to starvation, and subject to ghoulish fantasies seems, well, hyperbolic. His attacks on 'the institutional review bureaucracy' in the sciences and social sciences, and on bioethicists for bogging down research, impeding work on 'medical miracles,' and 'failing to protect, and even harming, patients and research subjects,' seem rather one-sided ... Most important, perhaps, Pinker's 'conditional optimism' and his claim that 'problems are solvable' underestimate, at times, the political and cultural challenges to sustaining what he calls 'the benevolent forces of modernity.' That said, at a time when science, reason, and objectivity are being stigmatized, Enlightenment Now is an urgently needed reminder that progress is, to no small extent, a result of values that have served us - and can serve us - extraordinarily well.

Pinker explores the fallacies that critics of progressive ideals employ and presents graphs and statistics to demonstrate that issues such as income inequality, terrorism, and racial intolerance are not at the crisis levels the hysterical media commonly suggests. He astutely captures the deceptive techniques of the naysayers whose opinions alter those of the wider public … In an era of increasingly ‘dystopian rhetoric,’ Pinker’s sober, lucid, and meticulously researched vision of human progress is heartening and important.

Enlightenment Now posits that life has improved by several measures over the last 350 years, in large part because of the Enlightenment … Pinker measures progress as related to particular topics, such as health, wealth, sustenance, equal rights, safety, quality of life and happiness. He does not limit himself to the Western world, but instead seeks a global point of view, relying on academic works from a dizzying array of disciplines (medicine, history, sociology and psychology) to provide evidence for his claims. Because of this vigorous approach and Pinker’s articulate authorial voice, as well as the elegant graphs that accompany each chapter, this ambitious book is an entirely absorbing read.

Enlightenment Now not only tackles widely held misconceptions about major issues, but also quantifies the many ways in which cool-headed inquiry has improved the lives of billions … Pinker’s assertions may sound fanciful, but they’re supported by detailed data. Drawing on the research of dozens of historians, economists and social scientists, the Harvard psychology professor demonstrates that for an ever-greater portion of humanity, things are far sunnier than they were just decades ago … But Pinker isn’t always so convincing. At times, he downplays some of the 21st century’s biggest worries.

Each chapter is an enthralling read on its own. Throughout, Pinker presents quantifiable specifics — with tables and graphs — to underpin his arguments on the substantive, measurable, global progress we’ve made in all these areas, many of which presented problems once thought to be intractable ... Yet when discussing existential threats, the author reaches a bit, and his willingness to let technology solve our problems tends to skip past the Law of Unintended Consequences ... Enlightenment Now might generally be preaching to the converted, but its thought-provoking and wide-ranging analysis of the state of Enlightenment-era ideas and values might spur some of the converted to greater engagement in problem-solving.

Not only does Pinker argue that these advances fulfill Enlightenment hopes, he proposes they are a direct result of the Enlightenment itself...which Pinker defines as a reliance on institutions to counteract the evil and violent propensities of humankind while coaxing the capacity for cosmopolitan sympathy to its maximum ... But Pinker’s view is catastrophic for anyone who seriously aims to foster progress, since those who claim too flimsy a warrant for optimism—and fail to recognize that it is a matter of faith—do not just fail to convince skeptics. Their complacency blinds them to unexpected reversals in history and conceals from them the threats to their own hopes ... Big changes rather than gleeful self-congratulations are in order if progress is to become our mantra anytime soon. The most formidable challenge to Pinker’s vision ultimately comes from the Enlightenment itself. Not only is authentic optimism not data-driven, but it may have to be established by heirs of reason and humanism who make Pinker look complacent.

The bomb? The plague? Trump? Not to worry; things are getting better. So writes eternal optimist Pinker … In a long, overstuffed, impeccably written text full of interesting tidbits from neuroscience and other disciplines, the author examines the many ways in which Enlightenment ideals have given us lives that our forebears would envy even if gloominess and pessimism are the order of the day … For those inclined to believe that the end is not nigh and who would like to keep up with recent science, this book is a…well, not a godsend, but a gift all the same.

Pinker...presents an idealized version of the era, one packaged altogether too neatly in a box bearing the label 'reason, science, humanism, and progress.' To his credit, however, he acknowledges that '[t]he Enlightenment thinkers were men and women of their age, the 18th century. Some were racists, sexists, anti-Semites, slaveholders, or duelists' ... One of this book’s strongest features will strike many as counterintuitive; Pinker affirms that the world does in fact face existential threats. The first is climate change ... Does the author consider it futile to reason with those who maintain that the world is going to hell in a (non-biodegradable) handbasket? Hardly ... you could start by arming yourself with the arguments in Enlightenment Now. Consider, also, keeping an extra copy of the book on hand – for anyone who expresses a willingness to read it.