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

by Steven Pinker

In the pages that follow, I will show that this bleak assessment of the state of the world is wrong.

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

the ideals of the Enlightenment (also called humanism, the open society, and cosmopolitan or classical liberalism).

Harder to find is a positive vision that sees the world’s problems against a background of progress that it seeks to build upon by solving those problems in their turn.

Great point. Terrible syntax. (Or maybe it's just me.)

consider the diagnosis of Shiraz Maher, an analyst of radical Islamist movements. “The West is shy of its values—it doesn’t speak up for classical liberalism,” he says. “We are unsure of them. They make us feel uneasy.” Contrast that with the Islamic State, which “knows exactly what it stands for,” a certainty that is “incredibly seductive”—and he should know, having once been a regional director of the jihadist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.1

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