'Enlightenment Now' review: Pinker continues to see the glass half full

Improvements in health have bettered the human condition enormously

Optimism is not generally thought cool, and it is often thought foolish. In the previous century, Voltaire’s Candide had attacked what its author called “optimism”. After suffering through one disaster after another, Candide decides that optimism is merely “a mania for insisting that all is well when things are going badly.”

Yet one might argue (and Steven Pinker does) that the philosophy Voltaire satirises here is not optimism at all. If you think this world is already as good as it gets, then you just have to accept it. A true optimist would say that, although human life will never