GAZETTE:In a recent conversation with Bill Gates you talked about the notion of tribalism - of focusing on yourself and those immediately around you to the exclusion of others. The goal, too, is a gift of the Enlightenment, namely the moral commitment to humanism, in which the ultimate good is the well-being of people. The answer, I suggest, is an embrace of the ideals of the Enlightenment: that through knowledge, reason, and science we can enhance human flourishing - if we set that as our goal. Human flourishing has been enhanced in measure after measure, and I wanted to tell the broader story of progress, and also to explain the reasons. Prosperity has increased longevity has increased from about 30 to about 71 years worldwide, and 80 in the developed world. Literacy has increased from about 15 percent to more than 85 percent. Extreme poverty has been decimated: It’s gone from 90 percent of the world’s population to 10 percent. Pinker: To my pleasant surprise, war is not the only scourge that has declined over the course of history. Why expand the premise of that book for “Enlightenment Now”? GAZETTE:In “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” you explored how the trend toward peace has steadily increased. His new book, “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,” picks up on that theme, exploring how other threats to human well-being have been in similar retreat. In his 2011 book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argued that despite common assumptions, violence has dropped dramatically from biblical times to the present.

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