Ironically, while Pinker derides the Romantic backlash against Enlightenment myths, he ends his book with a gesture towards uncovering thepower of the Enlightenment. The case for Enlightenment values “may be cast as a stirring narrative,” he writes, “and I hope that people with more artistic flair and rhetorical power than I can tell it better and spread it farther. The story of human progress isheroic.” And so Pinker tells of how “We are born into a pitiless universe, facing steep odds against life-enabling order and in constant jeopardy of falling apart…Yet human nature has also been blessed with resources that open a space for a kind of redemption.” Endowed with the capacities for language and high-level thinking, we enjoy “the spiral of recursive improvement,” eking out “victories against the forces that grind us down, not least the darker parts of our own nature…We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter, and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences.” Despite the suffering and perils that remain, he assures us, “there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.” Perhaps sensing the irony, Pinker is quick to add, “This heroic story is not just another myth. Myths are fictions, but this one is true…And the story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity—to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being. For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.”