Is the world going to hell? Are we all doomed? Steven Pinker has consistently argued that not only is this view mistaken, the long-term trends of the world show steady improvement in human well-being. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress provides many specifics in support of this position.

Alarm and disasters sell in the news media. People want to appear serious by citing problems rather than progress. Organizations looking to raise money or get people involved focus on what needs fixing. Taken together, they can create the impression that only terrible things are happening and they’re getting worse.

Most of the book is devoted to rebutting the claims of doom. He cites data showing that the proportion of the world population living in poverty has plummeted. Two hundred years ago, the modern definition of extreme poverty fit the large majority of the world’s population; today it’s below 10% and still falling. The average life expectancy has grown vastly, even in poor countries.

Are people happier? This is harder to quantify, but Pinker gives data suggesting they are. Do we face threats to our very existence? They are always there; we can’t rule out a killer asteroid or supervolcano. But the threats that we know about have mostly declined. The book came out well before the COVID-19 pandemic, which has thrown a monkey wrench into many kinds of progress, but the disease will eventually fade into the background through herd immunity (even if it’s acquired the hard way) and vaccinations. In the long run, the pandemic should cause no more than a temporary dip in long-term trends, unless it scares us into permanent hiding.

Politically, Pinker is on the leftish side, but he understands economics better than the large majority of progressives, and he’s an advocate of civil liberties. He’s often been cited favorably in Reason and is a good ally to have. Occasionally he’s been targeted by cancel culture at Harvard. However, he doesn’t seem to grasp how often governmental actions supposedly designed to help people actually trap them in poverty or benefit the politically favored at their expense.

His approach to ethics, which he calls “humanistic,” raises some concern. His criterion is “maximizing human flourishing,” which he insists is not the same as the utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number.” He recognizes the traps in utilitarianism, which can sacrifice the minority to the majority, but I can’t figure out exactly what difference he claims. He contrasts his approach primarily with deontological (duty-based) ethics. The real alternative is an ethical system that regards all individuals as ends in themselves and doesn’t sanction sacrificing anyone to anyone else, even for a supposed net gain in flourishing.

Sometimes he resorts to straw-man arguments. I’d like to look closely at his analysis of the Y2K issue, where I have some relevant professional expertise. For those who have forgotten, a lot of software in the twentieth century used two-digit years for dates. When storage wasn’t as cheap as it is now, saving two bytes per record was valuable. It ran into an obvious problem as the year 2000 approached; the year “00” would sort before “99.” Ages would become negative, debts would appear to be overdue or might never come due, and so on.

A large number of software developers, often putting in unpaid overtime, averted nearly all the negative consequences by fixing the problems. They were so successful that they were mocked for saying there ever was a problem. Pinker, unfortunately, adds to the mockery by citing unlikely consequences that didn’t happen. “At that moment, bank balances would be wiped out, elevators would stop between floors, incubators in maternity wards would shut off, water pumps would freeze, planes would fall from the sky, nuclear power plants would melt down, and ICBMs would be launched from their silos.” He concludes that “the threat turned out to be barely more serious than the lettering on the sidewalk prophet’s sandwich board.”

Bank balances are time-dependent and were at risk, but I don’t know where he got the rest of his list. Elevator fail-safes have nothing to do with the date, and water freezes because of the temperature, not a calculation error. As for ICBMs, there was some concern back then that Y2K issues could increase the chances of human error, but they were in the context of concerns that there was so little margin of error in the first place. Pinker himself mentions the risks of launch-on-warning elsewhere in the book. I don’t have access to top-secret code, but I hope there has never been any that would automatically launch missiles because of a date calculation error.

The real danger in Y2K calculations lay in schedules, business transactions, and claims upon people. Errors could have led to negative interest, improper overdue charges, misclassification of people, and failure of payments. Some people could have suffered serious financial consequences or mistaken civil claims. Because of developers’ diligent work, not many did.

I’ve just devoted almost as much space in this review to analyzing one small point at Pinker spent making it. It’s a small nitpick, but it irritates me, and others may find a similar pattern where they have more expertise. Consider it a reminder to stay alert even when a book is excellent on the whole — a reminder which I’m sure Pinker would agree with.

Apart from making the case for historical optimism, the book takes a strong position in favor of what’s necessary to make the optimists right: the advancement of reason and science. He takes on the claims from the postmodern left that rationality is impossible (an assertion which, by its own standard, can’t be rational) and from the authoritarian right that we must follow a powerful leader.

It isn’t necessary to agree with Pinker on every point to appreciate the value of what he shows in this book. Rational discourse comes from people examining and improving on other people’s claims or throwing them out when they’re wrong. In a time when people often prefer to denounce each other, it’s important for people who value reason to find and build on areas of agreement. That’s what the Enlightenment in the book’s title is all about.