Listening to Steven Pinker definitely makes me feel warm and fuzzy; he's an optimist and we need those. With that said though, I think that trying to show that

Listening to Steven Pinker definitely makes me feel warm and fuzzy; he's an optimist and we need those. With that said though, I think that trying to show that things are better could lead to an incomplete understanding of the world as better is not only subjective, but a value judgement, and therefore can only be given within the framework of the currently accepted morals of the present day. If you substitute different for better, then you are more free to consider all the aspects of a change, not just the ones that present day society considers the most important. So you might instead conclude something like: Current society is safer than societies of the past, but also more closely monitored, and therefore less free. We haven't had a war of naked aggression between major world powers for a while now, but probably because the weapons we have available to us are far more apocalyptic in nature, and everyone is afraid to use them. We are rapidly improving our control over nature, but at the expense of depleting limited reserves of various minerals, and polluting the earth's ecosystem. I don't know that I would necessarily describe any of those developments as better.