“How reasonable is the hope for continuing progress? That’s the question I’ll consider in this last chapter in the Progress section, before switching in the remainder of the book to the ideals that are necessary to realize the hope. I’ll start with the case for continuing progress. We began the book with a non-mystical, non-Whiggish, non-Panglossian explanation for why progress is possible, namely that the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment set in motion the process of using knowledge to improve the human condition. At the time skeptics could reasonably say, “It will never work.” But more than two centuries later we can say that it has worked: we have seen six dozen graphs that have vindicated the hope for progress by charting ways in which the world has been getting better.”