teven Pinker is the greatest Whig theorist of our day. In book after book, he argues that the world is improving through the continual application of our rational intelligence. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, he showed that violence—whether in the form of crime or wars—has been on the decline for thousands of years. In Enlightenment Now, he argued that humankind has never been better off, despite persistent claims that things are getting worse. In both cases, he sees human reason as the engine of social amelioration, both in the technology it creates and the cooperation it commends. All we need for more progress is better science and more peaceful collaboration.
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