As its title indicates, Enlightenment Now takes up the cause of the “ideals of the Enlightenment” by first noticing that those ideals actually need defending “more than ever” (Donald Trump, virtually a living negation of the Enlightenment, gets a mention on ). Pinker's new book takes much, much less for granted, and if its pieties still don't seem at all scuffed by the outside world, at least this time around they're informed by the evening news.

It was impossible to reconcile the world of The Better Angels of Our Nature with observable reality, which made its buoyant optimism feel embarrassingly silly. In that earlier book, Pinker looked out from the terrace of his ivory tower, surveyed as much of the world as he could see from that vantage point, and declared it the best of all possible worlds: that despite literally all the evidence, the world was in fact becoming less violent and miserable, because humanity was becoming more intelligent and peaceful – a conclusion that would have come as a surprise to the dozens of slaves starving to death in cargo containers twenty minutes from Pinker's front door, or to their families still living back in their war-torn homelands or in plague-ravaged refugee camps, or to the slaver-traders who found willing customs and shipping officials at every port and sea-lane along the way. Steven Pinker begins his new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, on a considerably less Panglossian note than the one sounded relentlessly in his hilariously clueless earlier book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Steven pinker now