My new favourite book of all time Bill Gates TOP TEN SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 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 st century appears to be sinking into chaos hatred and irrationality Yet Steven Pinker shows that this is an illusion a symptom of historical amnesia and statistical fallacies 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 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 These are the values of the Enlightenment of reason science humanism and progress The challenges we face today are formidable including inequality climate change Artificial Intelligence and nuclear weapons 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 In making the case for an Enlightenment newly recharged for the st 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 We will never have a perfect world but defying the chorus of fatalism and reaction we can continue to make it a better one