First, it takes into account the recent rise of authoritarian populism, especially in the form of Donald Trump - a development that has led some to feel more despairing than ever. His new book makes the same case with updated statistics, and adds two extra elements. This optimist’s revenge on “Candide” is one of the passing pleasures in “Enlightenment Now,” Pinker’s follow-up to his 2011 book “The Better Angels of Our Nature.” The earlier work assembled banks of data in support of his argument that human life is becoming, not worse as many seem to feel, but globally safer, healthier, longer, less violent, more prosperous, better educated, more tolerant and more fulfilling. It’s not “best,” but it is surely better. A true optimist would say that, although human life will never be perfect, crucial aspects of it can improve if we work at it, for example by refining building standards and seismological predictions so that fewer people die in earthquakes. If you think this world is already as good as it gets, then you just have to accept it. Yet one might argue (and Steven Pinker does) that the philosophy Voltaire satirizes here is not optimism at all. 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.”

The optimistic philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in 1828, “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” In the previous century, Voltaire’s “Candide” had attacked what its author called “optimism”: the Leibnizian idea that all must be for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Optimism is not generally thought cool, and it is often thought foolish. ENLIGHTENMENT NOW The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress By Steven Pinker 556 pp.

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