Enlightenment Now

Pinker assembles data across seventy-five charts to argue that measures of human wellbeing have improved substantially, and attributes the improvement to the application of reason, science and humanism. The domains include life expectancy, child mortality, disease, famine, wealth, inequality, environmental quality, peace, safety, terrorism, democracy, equal rights, literacy, leisure and happiness.

The empirical section is the book's substance and the numbers are largely uncontroversial in direction. Global extreme poverty has fallen dramatically, life expectancy has risen everywhere, child mortality has collapsed, literacy is near-universal among the young, and violent death rates have fallen over centuries.

The second half is argument rather than data. Pinker defends Enlightenment values against critics on both the political right and left, attacks what he calls declinism in intellectual culture, argues that pessimism is systematically overrepresented because news reports events rather than trends, and addresses the objections from existential risk, climate change and inequality.

The criticisms are substantial. Pinker's causal attribution of the improvements to Enlightenment ideas is asserted rather than demonstrated, and the same data supports other explanations including fossil energy, colonial extraction and specific institutional developments. His treatment of climate change is thinner than the risk warrants and his dismissal of degrowth arguments is brisk. Critics including John Gray argue that the intellectual history is a caricature. The environmental chapter has aged least well. The data compilation is genuinely useful; the causal story should be treated as one interpretation among several.