Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Described by Bill Gates as 'my new favourite book of all time', Enlightenment Now considers 15 measures of human success in order to assess how and why the world is really getting better.

Is modernity really failing? Or have we failed to appreciate progress and the ideals that make it possible?

If you follow the trendlines rather than the headlines, you discover that our lives have become longer, healthier, safer, happier, more peaceful, more stimulating and more prosperous - not just in the West, but worldwide. Such progress is no accident: it's the gift of a coherent and inspiring value system that many of us embrace without even realizing it.

These are the values of the Enlightenment: of reason, science, humanism and progress.The challenges we face today are formidable, including inequality, climate change, Artificial Intelligence and nuclear weapons.

Already one of the more controversial books of 2018 – Steven Pinker’s insistence of positive progress, matched with empiric data, has met with both praise and discontent – Enlightenment Now is a summation of how far we have come and how we may use reason and science to meet the challenges of the future. A companion work to his earlier The Better Angels of Our Nature, Enlightenment Now is Pinker in his prime, a virtuoso display of argument and evidence to prove, as Bill Gates summed it, ‘the world is getting better, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.’