Someone to Watch over Us

Ara Norenzayan, a professor in the psychology department of the University of British Columbia, clearly had fun writing Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. His joy in ideas, his delight in being a contrarian and his unspoken but obvious pleasure in kicking senior members of the chattering class comes through with entertaining clarity. Without going all wittering on us, he makes it clear that he has more than a few reservations about old-school evolutionists (such as Richard Dawkins) who are weak on cultural evolution, and he is not keen on those members of the clerisy (an example would be Charles Taylor) who have explained why the world allegedly has turned all secular in the face of the evidence that there, in fact, are more religious people on the globe than ever there have been.

Norenzayan writes very well: relaxed and conversationally. So one is...