What is Enlightenment Now about?

Enlightenment Now is Steven Pinker's argument that the ideals of the Enlightenment — reason, science, humanism, and progress — have been responsible for a dramatic and continuing improvement in human wellbeing across virtually every measurable dimension, and that these ideals are under threat from counter-Enlightenment movements on both the left and the right. The book is partly a data presentation, partly a philosophical argument, and partly a polemic defending liberal modernity against its critics.

The data section is the book's most substantial contribution. Pinker covers seventy-five metrics of human wellbeing — life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates, caloric intake, literacy, hours of work, safety from violence, political freedom, gender equality, happiness — and shows that most have improved substantially over the past two centuries, and particularly in the past few decades. The improvements are not evenly distributed and some metrics move in more complex patterns, but the overall direction is strongly positive. Pinker argues this is not coincidental: it is the result of the application of reason, science, and trade to human problems.

The philosophical section argues for the values underlying progress: life over death, health over disease, knowledge over ignorance, freedom over coercion, wellbeing over suffering. Pinker presents these as the values that Enlightenment thinking both articulated and implemented, in contrast to counter-Enlightenment values: religious authority, romantic nationalism, utopian radicalism, and the glorification of heroic struggle. He sees resurgent authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, anti-science movements, and both left and right populism as threats to the institutions and norms that make progress possible.

Critics have argued that Pinker is selective in his data, too quick to credit the Enlightenment specifically for progress that had multiple causes, and too complacent about the challenges that continue and those that lie ahead — particularly climate change, nuclear risk, and the concentration of economic and political power. The book is most persuasive as a corrective to apocalypticism and as a survey of actual progress; it is least persuasive as a causal story about what produced that progress.