In a time of existential threats from climate change, computer-based superintelligences, AI-accelerated nuclear and biological warfare and more, we can no longer avoid some profound questions about what’s going on.

Why is it that what we’ve been taught to celebrate as progress, as modern history’s greatest social and technical achievements, are now threatening our very existence?

Author Wade Rowland writes that the worst of these global crises are the fruits of a basic error made by well-intentioned Enlightenment thinkers at the dawn of the scientific revolution: a misunderstanding of the essence of humanity. In assuming the worst about human nature and fashioning a civilization based on those false assumptions, some of early modern philosophy’s most revered thinkers set us on a dangerous path.

Rowland argues that by better understanding human nature in the light of current scientific and philosophical knowledge, we can better—and we can do better.

Because we have what it takes—because we are good.