Steven Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" and the sequel "Enlightenment Now" briefly helped to restore my faith that humanity is not entirely an evil virus best gone the way of the dinosaurs. Don't get me wrong though, these books are not easy reads. In the first one Pinker does spend an inordinate amount of time cataloging humanity's centuries of evils against itself before he can make the case that we're doing better now, so don't consider these to be light reads.
Going to assume that your use of "briefly" there is preceding your attempt at a short synopsis, rather than that your views have shifted again.
Personally I'm depressingly cynical when it comes to Pinker's views, looking at, e.g., https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1496685550241292293 and then thinking about how now, given modern weaponry one man's decision could basically destroy all life on earth. A few billion dead in a single conflict would be all it'd take to really mess up Pinker's trend line.
I have sympathy for what he is trying to do (actually put data on what people traditionally just use "gut feeling" for) but yes, it is the sort of thing that might sound sadly misguided depending on how things turn out, much as how late 19th century writers like Spencer suggested that the trend of the 19th century suggested that things like war and famine were fading away not predicting the world wars or the famines of Stalin and Mao in the 20th.
