Your opinion is in fact the popular opinion through out history. Picture the see no evil hear no evil monkeys. Stephen Pinker is a very nice man with a soothin

Your opinion is in fact the popular opinion through out history. Picture the see no evil hear no evil monkeys. Stephen Pinker is a very nice man with a soothing voice and a very curly haircut. And he attended Harvard. And has a warm and fuzzy message of optimism in his best selling mass market book, which has angels in the title. Pixar should make a character based on him. Practically a real life Dumbledore. Surely everything will pan out just so. Meanwhile, the "sate of the world" is such that he wrote his prognostications over a decade ago when the US was still the single remaining superpower in a unipolar world steeped in the longest stretch of relatively violence free global economic expansion. And at the moment they ring hollow. Of course we all wish for the positive trends to continue indefinitely, but the night is in fact dark and full of terrors. It really is. Baseless optimism is simply the flip side of the doomer-ism you deride. Everything is still on the line. Everything.