Steven Pinker on Trump, violence, and religion

In the book, Pinker argues that war and poverty are in decline and that humanity's progress can be attributed to reason and science, central aspects of the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement in the 17th and 18th century. However, critics accuse Pinker of cherry-picking data. They point out that the statistics he uses to support declining death rates begin from 1945, thus excluding the millions killed the decades before, including during World War I and II. "The claim about the Enlightenment is not that it instantaneously brought an end to war, but the Enlightenment did bring the first ideas on how to reduce war out in the open," says Pinker. "The decline in war is really a post-1945 phenomenon."