Come on, Hegel thought of social progress as the side-effect of a literal World-Spirit, an actual ghost trying to haunt the entire planet in increasingly "self-realized" forms. You can't be seriously criticizing Steven Pinker on that basis, he shares nothing of that basic worldview. There are books that try to tell an "inherent self-propelling progress" story along the lines of Hegel's basic intuition (I can think of "Non-Zero" as one) but even those try to make a better-phrased argument to hang that intuition on than just talking about a mysterious World Spirit.