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

by Steven Pinker

The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers.

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.

When properly appreciated, I will suggest, the ideals of the Enlightenment are in fact stirring, inspiring, noble—a reason to live.

Criminal punishment, they argued, is not a mandate to implement cosmic justice but part of an incentive structure that discourages antisocial acts without causing more suffering than it deters.

And if you’re committed to progress, you can’t very well claim to have it all figured out.

Entro, evo, info. These concepts define the narrative of human progress: the tragedy we were born into, and our means for eking out a better existence.

People have goals, of course, but projecting goals onto the workings of nature is an illusion.

Things can happen without anyone taking into account their effects on human happiness.

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind.