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

by Steven Pinker

As the heir to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn.

More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense.

newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears with a flick of a finger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world’s knowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket. But these are human accomplishments, not cosmic birthrights.

We know that countries can slide back into these primitive conditions, and so we ignore the achievements of the Enlightenment at our peril.

I have often been reminded of the need to restate the ideals of the Enlightenment (also called humanism, the open society, and cosmopolitan or classical liberalism).

This book is my attempt to restate the ideals of the Enlightenment in the language and concepts of the 21st century.