Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is a manual for liberal self-congratulation. This preening tome professes a pragmatic and quantitative approach to the world’s problems. For Pinker, modern capitalist democracy has basically gotten things right, and activism should at most consist of pushing for minor improvements, mitigating bad symptoms around the edges.

Systemic critique, ideologies, and “big ideas” are downright dangerous. Criticism of liberal capitalism is thus the provenance of hysterical populists on both the Left and the Right. What “Marxist professors” and racist Trump supporters have in common is that they just don’t know (or want to admit) how good they have it. Pinker is passionate in his tepidity, and contemptuous of anyone daring to criticize the present world order.

Superficially, Enlightenment Now is compelling to the fair-minded reader, as it is chock full of statistics and graphs ostensibly demonstrating the march of progress since the Age of Reason. Liberals will applaud Pinker’s frequent praise of social programs and the welfare state as necessary supplements to the “free market.” At the same time, reading Pinker gives one a subtle but persistent feeling of nausea that surfaces every time he excoriates “social justice warriors” or cites capitalist fundamentalists like Friedrich von Hayek.