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Enlightenment Now
I finished Pinker's book a couple days ago. I liked it. There were a few things I found to quibble with, and reviews pointed out some more, which is disappointing, but I don't think they cancel out the point of the book. Like the last one, the book is a linguist/psychologist doing amateur very long form journalism, so some errors aren't a surprise. But as I see it, the gist of the book is "worrying about things in the right way actually works to make them better, look at what it's done in the past". Which I would like to think is too banal a claim to need defense, but long experience in arguments has taught me otherwise: quite a few people think the world is doomed, often with apparent glee at their supposed inside knowledge, or think wealth is a zero-sum game where the rich countries are rich only because of exploiting poor ones, or that population is still exploding without bound, or that acknowledging improvement is a betrayal and denial of existing problems. And that's the arguments I get into; then there are all the people who think crime is soaring, that terrorism is a major threat to the US, that American teens are at increasing risk of sex trafficking and whatnot.
So most of the book is lots of graphs and citations about how the world is living longer, is wealthier, is becoming more equal across countries, is more educated, is more educated between the sexes, is becoming safer in terms of wars, homicides, and accidents, etc. etc. I checked: the WHO really does say that global life expectancy at birth is now 71. The worst off countries are at 50.
Here is an old (2005) table of literacy rates over 1985-2005, selected because I found it easily. This compares total and youth literacy for some Mideast countries, in 2012 going by the URL; e.g. 47% of Yemen women being literate, but 74% of 15-24 yo women.
The first part of the book is a description and celebration of the Enlightenment itself, which he boils down to four values: reason, science, humanism, and (belief in the possibility of) progress. 'Reason' gets misused a lot -- I know an Objectivist Catholic who touts a Reason (capitalized) that apparently means listening to his gut and ignoring evidence -- but Pinker expands it as the belief that people can and should be more rational, by learning about and compensating for cognitive biases, and by building institutions (e.g. neutral judges, or scientific practices and community) that compensate as well.
One tiny bit that I really liked was his contrast of 'complacent optimism' ("things are getting better so there's no need to worry") and 'conditional optimism' ("things can get better if we worry about them and make them better"). The book is openly a big celebration of conditional optimism, but I've already seen people attacking it as if it were complacent optimism.
So most of the book is lots of graphs and citations about how the world is living longer, is wealthier, is becoming more equal across countries, is more educated, is more educated between the sexes, is becoming safer in terms of wars, homicides, and accidents, etc. etc. I checked: the WHO really does say that global life expectancy at birth is now 71. The worst off countries are at 50.
Here is an old (2005) table of literacy rates over 1985-2005, selected because I found it easily. This compares total and youth literacy for some Mideast countries, in 2012 going by the URL; e.g. 47% of Yemen women being literate, but 74% of 15-24 yo women.
The first part of the book is a description and celebration of the Enlightenment itself, which he boils down to four values: reason, science, humanism, and (belief in the possibility of) progress. 'Reason' gets misused a lot -- I know an Objectivist Catholic who touts a Reason (capitalized) that apparently means listening to his gut and ignoring evidence -- but Pinker expands it as the belief that people can and should be more rational, by learning about and compensating for cognitive biases, and by building institutions (e.g. neutral judges, or scientific practices and community) that compensate as well.
One tiny bit that I really liked was his contrast of 'complacent optimism' ("things are getting better so there's no need to worry") and 'conditional optimism' ("things can get better if we worry about them and make them better"). The book is openly a big celebration of conditional optimism, but I've already seen people attacking it as if it were complacent optimism.