Huh. Have you ever wondered what a sandwich sounds like?

Not much to it, is there?

Unless, of course, it's a Walker's sandwich.

Mmm, that is good.

Now that's what Asani should sound like.

Go all crisp in with walkers.

Delicious.

Hi there, I'm Jason Gots and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

I admit it. I confess. I've got a touch of what my guest today calls progressophobia.

Ever since Charles Dickens got hold of me back in middle school and William Blake after that,

I've been a little suspicious of the great onward march of science and technology.

Gene therapy, healthy crops, safer, more efficient forms of nuclear energy, very nice, very nice.

But what about eugenics, climate change, and Fukushima?

For every problem human ingenuity solves, doesn't human nature create a new one on a bigger

scale?

Damn it, Spock.

Can your cold calculating reason fathom the mysteries of the human heart?

But you know what?

After devouring all 453 pages and 75 graphs of psychologist Stephen Pinker's new book, Enlightenment Now, I admit defeat,

the defeat of defeatism. The man has done the math. Since the 18th century, things have been

getting better in pretty much every dimension of human well-being. Health, safety, education, happiness,

you name it. And we've done it with the most reliable tools we have available, reason, science, and

...