Steven Pinker

This man is on a mission to convince you that, despite how bad it looks, civilisation is working. Who knew optimism could be such a hard sell?

- Amanda Petrusich

What if all our kvetching about the sheer misery of life on Earth is, in fact, self-perpetuating hooey? What if humanity is healthier, wealthier, happier, safer, better educated and more peaceful than ever before? What if there truly is no greater time to be alive than right now?

Steven Pinker — Professor of Psychology at Harvard University in the US and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of more than 10 books about human behaviour and instinct — has written that the idea of the present as a dystopia marked only by decay and suffering is “wrong-wrong, flat-earth wrong, couldn’t-be-more-wrong.” We’re flourishing, he argues. Not only that, but our boundless cynicism has left us vulnerable to demagogues who weaponise ambient anxiety and use it to justify dangerous agendas.

Pinker’s latest book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, is an encomium for the present. Rather than blindly panicking, he suggests we focus on “the historical sweep of progress,” with an eye toward its perpetuation. “Every measure of human well-being has shown an increase,” he told me recently. “You can’t appreciate that reading the newspapers, because news is usually about things that go wrong. You never have a reporter standing in front of a school, saying, ‘Here I am, reporting live in front of a school that hasn’t been shot up today.’ ”

Taking a formal tour of the United Nations with a man who holds nine honorary doctorates (in addition to an actual doctorate, from Harvard, in experimental psychology) is surreal for a handful of reasons, chief among them being that he knows the right answer to every single question the guide asks.