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 twenty-first century appears to be sinking into chaos, hatred and irrationality. Yet, Steven Pinker shows, if you follow the trendlines rather than the headlines, you discover that our lives have become longer, healthier, safer, happier and more prosperous-- not just in the West, but worldwide. Such progress is no accident: it's the gift of a coherent and inspiring it. These are the values of the Enlightenment: reason, science, humanism and progress. 
In making the case of an Enlightenment newly recharged for the twenty-first 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-- deying the course of fatalism and reaction-- we can continue to make it a better on.