Enlightenment Now

You pick up your digital device to read the news and end up with this malaise that seeps deeper every time you sift through yet another breaking news headline. In short, the world is a shitty place and we’re all doomed. But, is it really? Yes and no. But as the author argues, we live in the best of times all things considered. Sure, there are bad things happening all around us but stepping back centuries, the data shows that we’ve progressed in an unprecedented manner. On measures such as human rights, terrorism, war, medicine, etc, it has been shown in the book that humanity has been constantly progressing and there’s good evidence that it’ll continue to do so.

This book has also been excoriated for misleading information on certain topics, including climate change, to cite one example. Another example, one that I personally encountered would be the discussion on inequality in the book. The author uses Singapore as an example about how inequality has little effect on a society but it goes directly against what was depicted in This Is What Inequality Looks Like which talks about how inequality really affects people, in Singapore, no less. This has led to many experts publicly denouncing the book.

Taking all of the above into consideration, I think the book still is quite a good read if you want to understand how far we’ve progressed into the world we currently live in and so, to appreciate what we have just a tad bit more than we currently do.

Recommended.