What is the Enlightenment? There is no official answer, because the era named by Kant’s essay was never demarcated by opening and closing ceremonies like the Olympics, nor are its tenets stipulated in an oath or creed. Enlightenment’s motto, he proclaimed, is: “Dare to understand!” and its foundational demand is freedom of thought and speech. We will never have a perfect world, but - defying the chorus of fatalism and reaction - we can continue to make it a better one.What is enlightenment? In a 1784 essay with that question as its title, Immanuel Kant answered that it consists of “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity”, its “lazy and cowardly” submission to the “dogmas and formulas” of religious or political authority.

In making the case for an Enlightenment newly recharged for the 21st century, Pinker shows how we can use our faculties of reason and sympathy to solve the problems that inevitably come with being products of evolution in an indifferent universe.

But the way to deal with them is not to sink into despair or try to lurch back to a mythical idyllic past it's to treat them as problems we can solve, as we have solved other problems in the past. The challenges we face today are formidable, including inequality, climate change, Artificial Intelligence and nuclear weapons.

These are the values of the Enlightenment: of reason, science, humanism and progress. Such progress is no accident: it's the gift of a coherent and inspiring value system that many of us embrace without even realizing it. If you follow the trendlines rather than the headlines, you discover that our lives have become longer, healthier, safer, happier, more peaceful, more stimulating and more prosperous - not just in the West, but worldwide. Yet Steven Pinker shows that this is an illusion - a symptom of historical amnesia and statistical fallacies. THE TOP TEN SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Bristles with pure, crystalline intelligence, deep knowledge and human sympathy' Richard Dawkins Is modernity really failing? Or have we failed to appreciate progress and the ideals that make it possible? If you follow the headlines, the world in the 21st century appears to be sinking into chaos, hatred, and irrationality.

Steven pinker enlightenment