If 2017 was a rough year for you, look no further than Steven Pinker's engaging new book, Enlightenment Now, to cheer you up. Pinker is a paragon of exactly the kind of intellectual honesty and courage we need David Brooks, The New York Times

Words can hardly do justice to the superlative range and liveliness of Pinker's investigations IndependentĪ salutary reminder of the material progress modern science and commerce have delivered The New York Times This is the case for an Enlightenment newly recharged for the 21st century. But the way to deal with them is not to sink into despair or try to lurch back to a mythical idyllic past it's to treat them as problems we can solve, as we have solved other problems in the past. The challenges we face today are formidable. These are the values of the Enlightenment: of reason, science, humanism and progress. Such progress is no accident: it's the gift of a coherent value system that many of us embrace without even realizing it. Yet, as Steven Pinker shows, if you follow the trendlines, you discover that our lives have become longer, healthier, safer and more prosperous - not just in the West, but worldwide.

If you follow the headlines, the world in the 21st century appears to be sinking into chaos, hatred and irrationality. Is modernity really failing? Or have we failed to appreciate progress and the ideals that make it possible? One of the world's greatest thinkers tells the heroic story of human progress - and why we neglect it at our peril

Steven pinker now