Overview: Recent events such as the storming of the U.S. Capitol, Brexit, and Donald Trump’s election signal what looks like a radical rejection of progressive ideals. Bringing Fire makes the case, however, that this is a temporary setback in a long journey toward our becoming better people in a better world.

Verdict: Insights from the author’s field of psychology, as well as from cultural history, evolutionary biology, and economics, indicate that the tendency to move forward is hardwired into our DNA and has been supported by technological advances over centuries.

As a result, we are in many ways more moral, effective, and reflective people than our ancestors, though times of regression inevitably occur along the way.

In what is a prose of confident boldness, dutifully given via a sanguine delivery of the facts as the author sees them, all combined with a genuine optimism about improving human nature and thus the world around us, author Dr. Robert McGrath’s new book Bringing Fire: How Innovation Helps Us Change and Makes Us Fight is a read that is not just coffee table material, but should be given out to every household as a staple of how to live their lives.

Arguing that today’s cultural struggles are unfortunate but inevitable setbacks in a long journey towards becoming better people, grounded in a deeply personal psychological insight, Dr. McGrath affectingly takes us on an enlighteningly intellectual, optimistic and at all times evidence-based and essential journey via his most wondrous, and dutifully sculpted narrative.

This journey - one where we keenly follow his footsteps, themselves steeped in the recon of psychology, history, philosophy, and technology - guides us through our human origins, through the moments in life where changes were made, on into the mire known as chaos, ultimately detailing the prospect of a future embraced within hope.

For it is the changes in how we think right now, how we feel right now, and how we relate to one another that have not just shaped our past and who we are today but moreover could; nay should direct us confidently ahead to work on helping to develop a more, well, humane future. To evolve. To strive to do better. To BE better.

In closing, this book concludes with predictions about where we and society are headed in the long term, as well as reasons to hope for an eventual return to progressive thinking and ways we can help foster that future.

About the Author - This book is the result of more than a decade of thinking about the meaning of human character, how character has slowly grown over centuries (yes, it’s true), how that has happened, and the tensions we’ve experienced along this long path. I’m betting I don’t get everything right, but I hope this book will spark engaging thought for you, as well as possible hope for the future in these troubled times.

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