This criticism boils down to a disappointment in humanity's progress. It's true that humanity could be Star Trek-level in 2018, if things had gone a bit better for us historically.

But we'll get there in 2118 or whatever. It's an inevitable result of technology building on itself. Even if it costs a dozen World Wars and rebuilding civilization from ashes. And it hopefully won't even cost us a WW3, though it may.

The journey will be a rough ride for humanity but on the other side is an end to most forms of human suffering and limitation.

We don't even know what's on the other side of this level of progress except that humanity will not remain humans as we think of ourselves today.

Well, he is frequently met with outright ridicule. But to be fair, he does address those points. I haven’t read his stuff for a while, but I think he argued that, even with the two world wars and all the other atrocities of the 20th century, there were still fewer violent deaths per capita than in the previous century.

I don’t agree with everything Pinker says but there does appear to be a statistical fact that fewer people die from violence each century. He looks for for explanations for this general trend.

> Steven Pinker uses statistics to argue that health, prosperity, safety, peace, and happiness are on the rise, both in the West and worldwide.

How do you feel about the statistics Pinker uses? Do you agree with his assessment about human progress?

>The cult of positive-think is strong - I imagine anyone criticizing him publicly would be seen as 'being negative'.

Are the down votes on this comment a form of irony?

Yeah, those are bad things, but Pinker’s thesis is that things are improving. All the historical societies I’ve read about had astounding levels of savagery and brutality. Along with disease and no real medicine.

Why is it so hard for people to grasp this idea of “progress.” It implies improvement, not perfection.

Humanity lived through mane wars. The ones you are talking about happened more than one hundred and more than seventy years ago. That's generations.

I blame it on the schools. Academia has a fetish for "dead shit", and the "enlightenment" was the most recent batch of dead shit within the average level of reading comprehension.

It's not just Pinker. Both mainstream ideologies have been circling up around nth-order regurgitations of enlightenment thought for as long as I've been alive.

"the best of all possible worlds"