Imagine that someone you love read Steven Pinker’s 2018 book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. They were dumbstruck by the evidence: consistently, across domains, across several hundred years, life has improved. The average human is living a longer, healthier, safer, and happier life than ever before.

This person knows that you aren’t easily reconciled to the status quo. It’s not for nothing that you read socialist magazines. So they bought you your very own copy of Pinker’s bestseller.

Then came the argument. The average person lives better than ever before, your loved one insisted. Therefore the world is better than it has ever been. And therefore you should make your peace with the status quo. Left-wing anti-Pinkerism, they said, is an infantile disorder.