this reminds me of

...me, at age 10, when eating the dictionary was my favourite pastime,
happily inherited by all my children alhamdulillaah.

Reading the OED: One Man, One Year (excerpt from a NYT review)

Ammon Shea, a sometime furniture mover, gondolier and word collector, has written an oddly inspiring book about reading the whole of the Oxford English Dictionary in one go. Shea’s book resurrects many lost, misshapen, beautifully unlucky words — words that spiraled out, like fast-decaying muons, after their tiny moment in the cloud chamber of English usage. There’s hypergelast (a person who won’t stop laughing), lant (to add urine to ale to give it more kick), obmutescence (willful speechlessness) and ploiter (to work to little purpose) — all good words to have on the tip of your tongue when, for example, you’re stopped for speeding.

Shea’s book offers more than exotic word lists, though. It also has a plot. “I feel as though I am eating the alphabet,” he writes halfway through, and you want him to make it to the end. This is the “Super Size Me” of lexicography.

Back in the ’90s, Shea read Webster’s Second from beginning to end — no easy feat. Did doing so help him in any way? No. It didn’t make him a better or smarter person, or improve his test scores. In fact, it seems to have hindered his capacity for self-expression. “My head was so full of words that I often had trouble forming simple sentences out loud,” he writes, “and my speech became a curious jumble of obscure words and improper syntax.” But Shea seems to have loved this experience of verbal overspill — he underwent the prolonged brain-shiver that comes when thousands of unfamiliar meanings pour in without stopping. “It felt wonderful,” he says.

The logical next step was to read the O.E.D., but here Shea hesitated. The O.E.D. is huge, as everyone knows. It’s monstrously deep and serious and maddeningly detailed, each entry a miniature etymological seminar. And the lovely-ugly words, words that Shea didn’t know existed, leap up to his hand. Acnestis — the part of an animal’s back that the animal can’t reach to scratch. And bespawl — to splatter with saliva. In Chapter D, Shea encounters deipnophobia, the fear of dinner parties; Chapter K brings kankedort, an awkward situation.

Months in, Shea arrives — back-aching, crabby, page-blind — at Chapter N. “Some days I feel as if I do not actually speak the English language,” he writes, his verbal cortex overflowing. “It is,” he observes, “like trying to remember all the trees one sees through the window of a train.” Once he stares for a while, amazed, at the word glove. “I find myself wondering why I’ve never seen this odd term that describes such a common article of clothing.”

By Chapter O there is evidence of further disintegration. Is he turning into, he wonders, one of the “Library People”? The bag-toters and mutterers who spend all their time there? “Sometimes I get angry at the dictionary and let loose with a muffled yell.” At night he hears a deep, disembodied voice slowly intoning definitions.

But then, thank goodness, he breaks through into sunlight. In Chapter P he finds a rich harvest of words, including one, petrichor, that refers to the loamy smell that rises from the dry ground after a rain, and a nicely dense indivisible word, prend, that refers to a mended crack. He notes these down in his big ledger book.

Théophile Gautier read the dictionary to enrich and exoticize his poetry. Walter Pater read the dictionary to keep his prose pure and marmoreal — to learn what words to avoid. Shea has no interest in purity or poetry. His style is simple. He just wants to identify and savor, for their own sweet sakes, malocclusive Greek and Latin hybrids that are difficult to figure out how to pronounce. He is fond of polysyllabic near-homonyms — words like incompetible (outside the range of competency) and repertitious (found accidentally), which are quickly swallowed up in the sonic gravitation of familiar words. And a number of Shea’s finds deserve prompt resurrection: vicambulist, for instance — a person who wanders city streets.

The effect of this book on me was to make me like Ammon Shea and, briefly, to hate English. What a choking, God-awful mash it is! Surely French is better. Then I recovered and saw its greatness afresh. The O.E.D., Shea notes, is “a catalog of the foibles of the human condition.” Shea has walked the wildwood of our gnarled, ancient speech and returned singing incomprehensible sounds in a language that turns out to be our own.

Ghada Karmi's book: In Search of Fatima

...is one of the most straight-forward, unselfconscious and unaffected piece of writing I've ever read. These are the highest compliments I can think of for someone of her intellectual stature and experience. It is so easy for academics to fall into the trap of intellectualising everything, it's a major miracle how someone with her background avoided that and came up with such a beautiful book.
She struck a chord with me for several other reasons...a semi-lonely childhood, a house frequented by her father's famous intellectual friends, a convent-school education, studying medicine instead of the arts even though she loved reading and writing to fulfill her parent's wishes...her (self-admitted) anglophilia, her friend's opinion (and her own) of her as "a dark-skinned English girl" and subsequent devotion to the Palestinian cause.
It reminded me in parts of Edward Said's memoir 'Out of Place', but 'In Search of Fatima' is special because it's written from a Muslim perspective, albeit by a person who describes herself as non-practising.
I bought the book at duty-free and could not put it down until I'd finished all 450 pages.
Good stuff.

the mummy's curse

We don't do days, but this mother's day article is worth a peek: Free us from the curse of the yummy mummy
"On this special day, shouldn't we seize the opportunity to kill off the myth of the Yummy Mummy once and for all and perhaps replace her with the far more realistic Bummed Mummy? [...]
What else could explain the bizarre trend, started by celebrities, for women to slim back down to the size of a Twiglet straight afterbirth or how the fact that they've managed to get back into 'those pre-pregnancy jeans' is routinely perceived as far more marvellous, much more of a 'miracle', than giving birth itself?
[...]Despite society's best efforts, parenting has not turned into a Boden catalogue, so, arguably, neither should we[...] maybe it's time women stopped envying the Yummy Mummy and started seeing her for what she is - just another tiresome fiction of perfection that no sane person has got time for.
Do the women of today really want to be remembered as the Yummy Mummy wannabe generation that cried their eyes out because they weren't Posh Spice? Do they really want inscribed on their tombstones: 'Her greatest achievement was to get back into her jeans quickly'?
Thought so. In fact, to any mother reading this: just for one day, forget all about trying to be 'yummy'. Instead, relax...and spend the rest of the day barking instructions at your progeny to attend to your every need. Isn't this what Mother's Day is all about?"

you don't say!

Interesting: 7 Deadly Sins of the blogging world - a far cry from Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy and Pride!

places on paper

The Guardian has this list of books that transport you to places you've never been to before, except on paper. Ever had that feeling while reading a book? They've even got a name for the phenomenon: international books. Neat!

I have my own list, though:

Any biography of the Prophet /Companions to take you 1400 years back in time.

Palestine, by Joe Sacco for a virtual visit to the Holy Land.

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy for all things Kerala.

Anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez to transport you to a place where it's hot, mosquitoes abound and there's the smell of gun powder and bitter almonds, while parrots squawk outside on guava trees.

My son's father by Nadine Gordimer to apartheid South Africa.

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell to south American cotton plantations.

Pride and Prejudice / Sherlock Holmes' adventures / PG Wodehouse to Victorian England.

The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck to China.

Enid Blyton books to a place called childhood.

''say you're sorry!''

interesting article in 'Slate' that debates whether getting kids to apologise (to each other/otherfamily members during fights) and to others (if they're misbehaving in mixed company for example) is a good idea or a bad one?:

"OK, sorry," clears the air. It's one way to strive for a modicum of family civility. And after all, growing up is sometimes an exercise in learning to go through the motions, and sometimes a genuine feeling can follow upon an action that's repeated until it's instilled. If I tell my kids to say they're sorry 10,000 times, I can hope that someday the grudging mutter will turn willing and sincere.

The other time I hear myself barking "Say you're sorry!" is when I'm with a friend and his or her kids, and one of my kids is being obnoxious, and I'm embarrassed. This one I can't really defend: It's a cheap way to signal that I, for one, have some manners; that I know my kids are being trolls and won't let them get away with it, at least not entirely. Forcing an apology is a lot easier than imposing a real punishment. So, it suits for small- to medium-sized infractions that I feel like I should address (or rather shouldn't be seen letting go). Especially, if I'm honest, toward the end of a long day.

walking the tightrope on a keyboard

This one's an absolute MUST as in M.U.S.T read: Marina Hyde on treading the thin line between being an 'escribitionist' and an 'exhibitionist' on the internet, in The Guardian.

excerpts:

"'Do you really keep a diary?" a besotted Algernon asks of Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest.

"I'd give anything to look at it. May I?"

"Oh no," replies Cecily with princessy disdain. "You see, it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form, I hope you will order a copy."

Wilde's jokes are so faultlessly crafted that they tend to retain their bite even a hundred years later, but the latter does lose something of its surreal edge when considered against the news that today there are four million bloggers at work in the UK alone. Four million! It feels like the magic number at which the inner monologue could be officially classified as endangered.

These days, if it's in our heads, out it comes, edited to varying degrees into words and pictures, and presented to a real or imagined audience. Self-important? Perhaps. Often tedious? Certainly. But that doesn't matter as much as people make out.

Even if there weren't the vaguest of ironies in newspaper columnists wondering why people feel the need to share their views on life with anyone, it does seem time to move beyond the sneering accusations of Pooterism that traditionally form the basis of mainstream media attacks on self-published alternatives. If all we had to worry about in this brave new world was preposterous self-regard comingled with a comic lack of self-awareness, then it might be an idyll indeed.

Far more intriguing, and progressively alarming, is the degree to which we have embraced the new exhibitionism. An early term for bloggers - back when it was a frightfully niche pursuit and the internet was all fields and so on - was "escribitionists", and though the word was never what you'd call common parlance, what it stood for has become common practice as personal sites and social networking communities have exploded.

How odd, I found myself thinking recently, that in an age when we seem more and more concerned with encroachments on privacy, we are so increasingly keen to invade our own. My mistake, of course, was to assume there is a "we" at all. According to those who understand far more about communications psychology than I do, the great generational dividing line has been drawn. And broadly speaking, if you're under 30, your private self and public self are interdependent in previously unthinkable ways. Time and again, in surveys of what young people want from their online experiences, keeping socially connected is ranked way above privacy.

[...]But the view that this is a cultural shift with which we must all make our peace is wrong. Naive and cavalier is a dangerous combination, and a disdain for their own privacy will leave young people immensely exposed.

Consider the case of the 23-year-old Muslim woman who was found guilty this week under new anti-terror laws. Samina Malik worked for WH Smith at Heathrow, but was given to writing poetry about beheading non-believers and martyrdom and suchlike. Not long after she had begun visiting chatrooms, calling herself the "lyrical terrorist" - she thought the name "cool" - the knock at the door came. Examination of her computer revealed she had downloaded, inter alia, something called "How to win in hand-to-hand combat". She lives in Southall, awaits sentencing.

When we live in a society where reactionary bedroom poets are found guilty under terrorism laws, it makes you wonder whether their rather more seasoned and significantly more brilliant predecessors such as Swift wouldn't, in a similar climate, have realised the folly of bunging their every move on Facebook, and made alternative arrangements.

The world may be shifting, but we must attempt to encourage in young people an understanding of the value of privacy, and a sense of the very real dangers that might attend them should they discard it."

how the horse got its name

*very* interesting post on one of our favourite blogs: 'How the Horse Got its Name' at Arabic Gems.

Maa shaa Allaah, there's always something interesting and beneficial to read on that blog.

the sweetest links

just sharing the love...some links I've been sent and looked up recently...

My *absolute* personal favourite: The Official Large Families FAQ (with suggested replies)
...includes the all-time FAQest FAQs of all:
"Are they all yours?"
"I can't believe how you do it, I cannot even handle my two!"
"How can you afford having so many?"
"Are you planning to have any more?"
"I hope you aren't planning to have anymore?!?"

I also liked: Mikvah: Jewish perspectives on childbirth...very interesting and well produced site...I'm hoping to organise something like this for Muslims, in shaa Allaah, b/z most Muslim childbirth resources on the net are rather scattered and sketchy.

And a site that has all the nitty gritty about lactation: KellyMom : for the seriously scientifically inclined...has details on anatomy and physiology and hormones and graphs...all the stuff that I *really* enjoy...look it up!

must-have, wish-list

promises to be a good read: 'Detoxing Childhood' by Sue Palmer (of 'Toxic Childhood' fame) to be published by Orion, August 16 (£9.99). It is available from Times BooksFirst at £8.99, free p&p.

(anyone out there in an obliging mood? :P)

Quote and extracts from an extract in 'The Times': "...as an internet philosopher put it: “If you died next week, the company you work for would fill your place within a week or so. Your family would miss you for ever.”

One of the most pernicious myths of recent decades is the myth of “quality time”, those odd snatched hours with one’s children, when everyone’s supposed to be on best behaviour, “enjoying quality interaction”. But this isn’t how close family relationships work;

children aren’t like business acquaintances or casual dates who can be slotted into a busy diary.

Although special outings and occasions such as a “family viewing night” are great fun, it’s more important just to spend day-by-day time together, hanging out in the same place, following family routines and rituals, getting on with household chores or enjoying a hobby.

These are the times when you can communicate freely with your child, letting conversation develop naturally from whatever’s going on. It’s also the time when you pass on skills and leisure interests to the next generation. Your child is, in a way, your apprentice; by watching as you do daily tasks, such as making a cup of tea, checking e-mails or enjoying a hobby such as fishing or sewing, he or she learns life skills and life enhancement. If you let your child have a go, and give lots of praise for effort, your knowledge will soon be passed on.

Some of the skills you teach can eventually become your child’s responsibilities in the home. Seen like this, they are less like chores and more like a valued contribution from a family member who is growing up.

FORGING A FAMILY
The simple truth is that if children are to grow up happy and resilient, they need love, time and attention from the significant adults in their lives. Those adults don’t need to be parents – they could be grandparents or other relatives, nannies, childminders – but the care on offer has to be loving and consistent, and the adults have to be happy spending time with the child in their care.
Another simple truth has emerged from history: the best institution for providing loving care is the family. So whether you look after your child yourself, or find other carers for some of the time, you need to forge a strong family base to offer protection against the many risk factors inherent in 21st-century life.

just SAY it!

Just say NO

No. One of the shortest, easiest, most used words in the English language. It can also be one of the hardest to utter in any meaningful way – particularly if you are a modern parent. Those who work with children believe that a generation of parents have forgotten how to say no, with the result that as their children grow up they lack the self-control needed to negotiate adult life successfully.

“Children need to have the experience of an adult saying no,” says Jane Cassidy of the Association of Child Psychotherapists and joint chair of the Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist Division of the Tavistock Society. “If you always give in, they don’t learn that somebody can stay firm, so when they become young teenagers and adults they don’t have the capability to say no to themselves when they are under peer pressure in terms of drugs, delinquency or sex.”

The problem, teachers, psychologists and parents agree, is that when it comes to discipline, parents are hopelessly ill-disciplined. They tell their children that they should not do something or cannot have something that they want, but cave in to the child’s protests.

Dr Tanya Byron, clinical psychologist and Times2 columnist, says that dealing with this issue has become “the spine of my clinic. The majority of people I see really can’t say no to their children or can’t set boundaries. They can’t follow through to a consequence after saying ‘no’. Children don’t have a sense of who is in charge so they take charge themselves.”

The effect of parental ineffectiveness is all too obvious in society – nowhere more so than in schools. Earlier this year I spent a week at Banbury School, a comprehensive in Oxfordshire, shadowing the head teacher, Dr Fiona Hammans, a dynamic and nationally respected teacher who has been responsible for the education and wellbeing of thousands of children. She had no doubts about where many of the school’s discipline problems originated.
“You’ve got a generation of parents that does not believe in punishing their kids. They say ‘you’re grounded for a year’. And the kid cries and then they say ‘Oh all right, then!’ A whole lot of parents don’t know how to control their kids. The kids are in charge.”

Hammans certainly does know how to say no, and back it up. But her point was that what she said was far less important than what parents said and did. Hammans even described the extraordinary situation where parents were not attending parent-teacher evenings because “kids don’t want their parents coming up here”.

Jane Cassidy says that much of the rot set in relatively recently with “the whole idea of positive affirmation: trying to say yes, trying to avoid saying “no” to children because of the negativity”. Byron concurs, saying that our collective failure with the no word is a “huge change” from the situation when she first started working in the field 18 years ago. One of the chief reasons for this change, she believes, is that in the hurly-burly of the modern world we don’t want to spend what precious time we have with our children acting tough.

“We are very busy. In a lot of families where there are two parents, both work and they don’t want to come home at night and have to tell the children what to do. Or they are too bloody knackered to follow through with the discipline and so say ‘fine, do that, eat that’.” Food is one of the key battlegrounds. “Children have the most restricted diets because parents seem incapable of not giving in to what children want.” But according to Andrea Clifford-Poston, author of When Harry Hit Sally, by saying no to your children you are helping them to learn “not only that there are boundaries between you and them, but also how to put boundaries around themselves and other people”. Saying no, she explains, helps children to learn who we can say no to, when we can say no, why to say no and when we can stop saying no.

“If your children are going to have a good life, then they need to understand some of the rules about human beings being together,” she writes.
“If your child has learnt in the early years that you are someone who has clear and firm ideas about how you expect them to behave, and mean what you say and say what you mean, but don’t withdraw your love when your child has made a mistake, then you have built a solid foundation for the more complex years to come.”

Byron believes that the increasing isolation of parents is a crucial factor in how control over children has eroded. “Extended families don’t exist in the way that they used to and so many parents lack the wisdom and support of the older generation.” She also believes that parents feel under pressure to be seen to be raising well-behaved kids. “Parents are anxious not to be seen with unhappy children, so they negotiate and cajole in any way possible to avoid tantrums.

“We have forgotten what it is to be children. It is acceptable to have temper tantrums. Young children are supposed to be defiant. It’s in the job description. They are learning the rules of the game. Let them have a tantrum. Eventually they will learn that when you say ‘no’ it means ‘no’.”

Then there is the modern, highly risky need to be friends with our children. I recently received the following e-mail lament from a friend, a mother of two. “Parents have this warped view of parenting,” she wrote. “They don’t really want to be parents. They want to be down with their kids, to be popular with them. That’s why you have these scenarios of parents picking fights with teachers and encouraging children to do the same: the teachers are the enemy, the boring/repressive authority figures. That’s also why you see parents dressing the same as kids. I am forever seeing families in Wagamama, boy and dad in boardshorts, Converse and logo T-shirts, mum and girl in combats, Crocs and logo T-shirts. The thinking has to be: ‘We are too young and with it to be bossy authority figures, aren’t we? Better to be MATES with the kids and listen to the same music and watch Doctor Who together or fight over the PlayStation.’ I am surrounded by people who seem to treat parenting as a popularity contest. The thought of their child disliking them, however briefly, is very frightening.”

Cassidy agrees: “A lot of parents just want their children to like them. There’s nothing wrong with that but a lot of parents seem to think that you can negotiate with children. You can’t negotiate with a two-year-old. They don’t have the cognitive skills we have. Sometimes you have to get to the point where you say ‘because I told you so and I’m daddy and that’s just the way it is’. You can take time to explain but they have to understand that when you say no, you mean no. They need rules and consequences. They have to learn that if dad says no to something and they still do it, something will happen that they won’t like.”

Or as a friend who is a child psychologist likes to put it: “No negotiation with terrorists.” Cassidy says that parents’ behaviour is often confused by their own childhood experiences. “For example, if they hated school and a child expresses concerns about going to school, the parents’ feelings become muddled up in the child’s feelings.” Her basic strategy for parents who have lost control is to focus on what aspect of the behaviour they want most to change. “If they think that everything is going wrong, they need to start with the worst problem. So you might say ‘we are going to stop the hitting’ and state what the consequences will be for the child if they continue. They get a warning, they know what is going to happen and then if it continues, you remove a toy. But it is important that the consequence is something the child cares about.

Parents say ‘I can’t stop him going to football because that’s what he really loves’, but that’s the whole point. It has to make sense, and then you can have a lot of fun with children once you know what the rules are. Children like knowing what the rules are.”
Byron suggests that where many parents go wrong is in their attitude to dealing with unruly behaviour: “It’s not about discipline, it’s about respect. Parents don’t want their kids to hit but they smack them, which I think is bonkers. They don’t want them to shout or scream, but they shout or scream at them. We should be role models.”

Cassidy agrees that actions speak louder than words: “Children don’t necessarily listen to words. You can say ten times ‘I love you’ but if you are not there they don’t feel they are important.”
It may sound funny coming from professionals, but both Byron and Cassidy believe that one of the burdens for parents is that they are presented with too much information. Byron feels this so strongly that her next book on children will be her last. “A lot of parents feel overloaded by information and disempowered,” she says. “We have got to get to a situation where parents feel empowered to do what they want to do. That may be something that an expert says, but you can do whatever you want as long as it works for you.”
Cassidy says that it is unhelpful for parents to think that there is a right or a wrong way of doing things. “I try to talk to parents about what their instinctive sense of parenting is. They need to have a confidence in themselves and their own sense of authority. If there was a totally right way, there would only be one book, there wouldn’t be hundreds and hundreds of books. We are all different.”
These are encouraging words for parents. The ‘yes’ generation should be able to learn to say ‘no’ again. But as any parent knows, it’s not what you say, but the way that you say it. And say it. And say it. And say it .

can't fool all the people, all the time

Given that the overwhelming majority of self-described "Potter-maniacs" believe it's only uber-religious nuts who find fault with Harry Potter books and the premise they are based on, I found this book review refreshing... alhamdulillaah for the occasional triumph of common sense in popular media.

Harry Potter's big con is the prose

"It is time to make a stand against Harry Potter. A futile stand, no death or glory involved: just popping my head over the trenches so it can be mowed off by the vast, unstoppable juggernaut of popular acclaim before I have begun to open my mouth.
[...]

I have come, with some regret, to this conclusion: their style is toxic. And this is Rowling's fault. I know that I am anticipating what the style of the latest book will be in advance of actually seeing it, but really, I don't think I'm going out on a limb here. Of course, if she has turned into a first-class writer with her forthcoming Potter book, I will happily, no, joyously, eat my words.

But until then, we have to swallow hers. And for all that she is gifted enough in devising popular scenarios, the words on the page are flat. I think it was Verlaine who said that he could never write a novel because he would have to write, at some point, something like "the count walked into the drawing-room" - not a scruple that can have bothered JK Rowling, who is happy enough writing the most pedestrian descriptive prose.
Here, from page 324 of The Order of the Phoenix, to give you a typical example, are six consecutive descriptions of the way people speak. "...said Snape maliciously," "... said Harry furiously", " ... he said glumly", "... said Hermione severely", "... said Ron indignantly", " ... said Hermione loftily". Do I need to explain why that is such second-rate writing?

If I do, then that means you're one of the many adults who don't have a problem with the retreat into infantilism that your willing immersion in the Potter books represents. It doesn't make you a bad or silly person. But if you have the patience to read it without noticing how plodding it is, then you are self-evidently someone on whom the possibilities of the English language are largely lost.

This is the kind of prose that reasonably intelligent nine-year-olds consider pretty hot stuff, if they're producing it themselves; for a highly-educated woman like Rowling to knock out the same kind of material is, shall we say, somewhat disappointing.

Children exposed to this kind of writing aren't learning anything new about words, or being stretched in any way; as Harold Bloom said, they're not going to be inspired to go off and read the Alice books, or any other enduring classic.

People go hoopla because they're delighted that Rowling has got children reading books - big, fat books without pictures at that. Can't argue with that: and maybe they will learn something about sheer reading stamina in the process. But it's all too easy.
The popular writer whose style is most similar is, it suddenly occurs to me, Jeffrey Archer (all those dead adverbs). All that paper, all those trees felled, all those words ... surely Rowling could have chosen some better ones, or put them together in a more exciting way?

fascinating with a capital N

found this really cool essay 'How the West really lost God' that relates a shrinkage in the size of the family with a corresponding shrinkage in 'religiosity' in the West...*very* interesting...courtesy: Austrolabe

''Why does it matter whether the decay of the natural family has been an unappreciated factor in the decay of religion itself? Because if the argument of this essay is correct — i.e., if people come to religious practice much of the time, or even just some of the time, because of their experience of the natural family rather than vice versa — then a very different verdict about the fate of religiosity in the advanced West suggests itself from the one that has been written by the conventional secularization script.

For there is nothing fixed or inevitable about today’s low birth rates or (bearing in mind that fertility is just one of several measures for the vitality of the family) low marriage rates or, for that matter, notions about the desirability of the natural family itself — in Europe or anywhere else. All these measures of family vitality have fluctuated throughout history, sometimes radically so. Both the low birth rate and the waning of marriage among Roman patricians, for example, were of sufficient concern under the emperor Augustus as to result in the imposition of the family-friendly “Julian laws” (incidentally, pronounced a failure by Tacitus a hundred years later).

During the modern Depression, to take a very different example of flux, the birth rate in the United States was roughly two children per woman; only a historical blink later, in the years of the Baby Boom, it was four. Moreover, even the nations of Western Europe – now home to some of the lowest birth rates on earth — all experienced a baby boom recently enough to be within the living memory of those who are in late middle-age today.

Similarly, one can imagine the personal decisions that go into the social and demographic data changing under any number of scenarios. One potential catalyst is economic. Every advanced Western country faces a coming fiscal and political crisis in its social security system. Default or collapse, somewhere, seems inevitable, with possibly catastrophic reverberations. If and when that happens — if the state can no longer be counted on to help support the elderly — then young men and women might make radically different choices about whom they might prefer to rely on in old age, including the traditional solution of more children. In fact, the intellectual foundations of such a reversal would already appear to be laid in the counter-literature lately issuing from thinkers who have examined the population “bomb” and found it a dud.33

There is also another less tangible but nonetheless real reason why one can imagine a turnaround both in marriage rates and family size.34 The world has not experienced these historically low rates of natural family formation for long — or their attendant problems. Single motherhood, for example, though cheered by feminists a generation ago in the name of “liberation,” is now widely seen for what it really is: an inhumanly difficult task for almost any woman to execute, let alone the poorer and more vulnerable women among whom it has become common. Similarly — though it is politically charged to say so at a time when gay marriage, polygamous marriage, surrogate births and other novel family arrangements are being championed — a generation of social science has established that children do best when they grow up with married, biological parents in the home and that children who do not enjoy that advantage are at higher risk for a large number of problems.35

It is interesting that both marriage rates and childbearing among relatively affluent educated American women now seem to be on the uptick for reasons that have set sociologists quarreling. Maybe learning from the recent past, in particular from the problems that have arisen from other kinds of family structures, is one reason for that change.

And people do learn that way, after all. Consider the example of smoking and how many decades it took to change the global consensus from benign encouragement to widespread opprobrium. That example is a powerful confirmation of the truth that social norms do change in unexpected ways. All kinds of things might affect any individual’s calculation about whether to marry or any couple’s calculation about whether another child or two might be desirable — from sublime considerations like what that might add to their extended family’s happiness to prosaic factors like how many children can fit legally into most cars.

And of course one of the largest of these parental considerations — access to education — is also susceptible to political change. In the United States, where most urban public schools are seen as substandard and undesirable, parents in such areas often make decisions about family size based on what it costs to send children to school elsewhere. Any number of factors — restoration of public education, meaningful tuition tax credits, innovations in home-schooling networks — could affect that calculation in another direction.

For these reasons among others, it seems possible to imagine a sea-change in how some people of the future regard family formation as the consequences of some current trends — which is to say, the negative consequences — continue to reverberate. Such a change would also square with demographic facts of life in America and the rapidly aging rest of the West. It is one thing to be a healthy childless 40-year-old, say, free for all the travel, nightlife, entertainments, and the rest that are off-limits to most 40-year-olds with children. But it is another to be a sick 80-year-old in a nursing home, perhaps with a middle-aged child living in a different city, facing pain, mortality, and the hardest questions of life with strangers in brightly patterned hospital scrubs. The passing from middle to old age of the Baby Boom generation alone seems guaranteed to put these issues front and center in the next few decades.

For the same reason, it is hard to read of doings on the outposts of family shrinkage without feeling as if something precious has been lost, whether for the tens of thousands of nursing-home residents who died in the heat wave in France a few years ago or other stories from the front lines of the global experiments in life with few relatives. In Japan, at the very demographic cutting edge of the shrunken family, pathos appears hand in hand with the overall prosperity: the “renting” of nonfamily members for ceremonial purposes; the stories of villages emptied of all but the very old; the craze for cuddly automated talking dolls among older women who claim to find the companionship in them that earlier generations got from grandchildren. People of the future may well appreciate better than many of us today the particular human joy not only in one’s own offspring, but in their offspring too.

There is plenty of reason for pessimism about what the future holds for religious belief if by “pessimism” one means further decline. Divorce and illegitimacy — to say nothing of maternal surrogacy, polygamy, polyandry, multiple parenthood, and related political experiments involving children that defy the empirical evidence about what’s best for them — all these and other forces are battering the natural family. The more we modern people experiment with it, retooling it to suit our material desires, our political agendas, our busy lives, the more we would appear to risk losing what it is that makes many people religiously inclined in the first place. Nevertheless, in the religious anthropology proposed here — and contrary to that of secularization theory — there is nothing inevitable about the decline of the natural family and thus, by implication, religion too.

Of course all this is meant as a generalization about groups rather than a description fitting any one individual. It is an account of how many people in many places might arguably find themselves inclined for religion or indifferent to it. Hence the obvious if necessary qualifications: Of course, merely having families and children is no guarantee of religious belief; and plenty of bustling hearths have proven home to every vice and sin in the book. Of course also, as the history of clericalism and monasticism shows, many childless single people seem to hear the voice of God without family bonds of their own formation entering the picture; and conversely, surely there are atheists happy with families of more than a child or two. This argument with Nietzsche is not an attempt to explain all cases, or indeed any individual case whatsoever. It is rather an effort to ask what makes a lot of people religious or a-religious a lot of the time.

In sum, we can leave open the possibility that for some people, such as the childless philosopher Nietzsche, religiosity goes out as he described it: in a top-down process hammered out by a tortured soul sitting in a study and then left for intellectual heirs to disseminate. But for many other people, it seems safe to say, this religious anthropology does not describe why things are what they are — and the recent history of Western Europe, in which declines in fertility and family life preceded or ran alongside declines in religious practice, corroborates the point.