KISSING COUSINS…STOP THAT NONSENSE RIGHT NOW!

Nations; government; incest; Us-Them thinking; Social Identity Theory; social media; corruption

Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, all recently announced their intentions to ban cousin marriage. As recently as April, Tennessee joined several other US states in doing the same thing. Several other states have placed a ban under review. Meanwhile, cousin marriage remains legal where I am, here in the UK.

Is this really very big news? Should it concern us? You might be surprised. The historian, Rafe Heydel-Mankoo, recently discussed this very topic on the Triggernometry podcast.  If you’d like to hear him, you can click here:

Among other things, Heydel-Mankoo referred to ‘the genius of the West’. The phrase seems to originate with the anthropologist, Joseph Heinrich, whose book, The Weirdest People in the World, was one of the earliest and most important pieces of research in the area.[i]

We can trace Heydel-Mankoo’s ‘western genius’ back to a unique system of social organisation. It required and fostered psychological traits like individualism, innovation, and social trust. All find their roots in the nuclear family: an institution that grew strong only when tribal systems became weak. If you ask a western person to define him- or herself, what will they tell you? Probably they will mention the qualities that make them unique: ‘I am Jason. I am a psychologist. I have my own Substack’. Ask a person from Africa, and they may emphasise family connections: whose daughter she is; whose mother; whose cousin.

Click here to buy me a coffee. That’d be nice. I like coffee.

The (first) ban on cousin marriage seems to have happened some time in the early Middle Ages. By the eleventh century, it extended as far as sixth cousins[ii] (and if you know what a sixth cousin is, I congratulate you: you are way ahead of me). Europe had previously been a tribal society of the sort that most human beings live in even today. Tribes, of course, are largely composed of people who share a lot of genetic material with each other: in other words, family-members. The cement that holds tribes together is cousin marriage.

Once a ban was in place, westerners were forced to start marrying outside their own tribe. Bonds of favouritism and nepotism began to dissolve: bonds of social trust and cooperation slowly formed. So too did national identities. That meant national laws, ones that applied to every citizen equally. Before long, you were supposed to treat strangers just as well as you would treat, say, your cousins. You might even consider marrying one.

The philosopher, Daniel Dennett, reviewing Heinrich’s book in the New York Times, puts it this way: ‘this prohibition [on cousin marriage] changed the face of the world, by eventually creating societies and people that were WEIRD’.[iii]

You may be wondering exactly what that means and why Dennett was being quite so insulting. In fact he wasn’t. WEIRD is an acronym invented by social scientists, who have spent a great deal of time and effort finding out about people who are Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic. Indeed, one concern that social scientists routinely express is that they may not know all that much about anyone else. Many experiments that psychologists once thought told us about the ‘human mind’ turn out not to replicate in other cultures.

We are WEIRD in other ways, too. We (and I’m assuming you are WEIRD. If not – well, treat this as an exercise in anthropology!) have WEIRD psychology.  This is true even of thought itself. Weirdos actually think in ways that are different from billions of our fellow passengers here on Spaceship Earth. Different parts of our brains have become specialised for different tasks. Language processing and facial recognition, for instance, actually seem to involve different circuitry.[iv] Dennett puts it this way: ‘Roughly, we weirdos are individualistic, think analytically, believe in free will, take personal responsibility, feel guilt when we misbehave and think nepotism is to be vigorously discouraged, if not outlawed’. Globally speaking, these qualities are highly unusual.

Take guilt for instance. It’s an enormously powerful device for crime-prevention. At least one psychologist has suggested it may be the single most important deterrent (much more important than the threat of punishment, which is typically very much delayed and extremely uncertain).[v] Guilt seems to be a WEIRD quality. It signifies that I - an individual - have broken my own, personal, moral code, and feel bad about it. In other cultures, shame may be more powerful. It signifies that I - a member of a tribe - have let my people down. Different feelings have different implications.

One psychological consequence of tribal life is Us-Them Thinking. We human beings can hardly help it. Psychologists know that once we start assigning people to groups (whether those groups are tribes, or supporters of different football teams, or political parties) certain consequences follow. We think of Our group as the best one, its members as morally superior to, and even more attractive than, members of the Outgroup. We behave in ways that maximise our Ingroup’s advantages. The psychologist Henri Tajfel discovered in his so-called minimal-group studies, that simply splitting people into arbitrary groups based on their preference for different abstract painters was enough to produce ethnocentricism.[vi]

Tajfel’s experiments took place in a nice quiet English school, where the implications of ethnocentric behaviour were of course extremely limited. Zoom out to the level of an entire country and you can imagine the consequences. ‘Look at many of the world’s problems today -’ writes one journalist, ‘- from terrible clashes in Yemen and Syria to civil wars in Sudan – and you see the same root cause. All these places are riven by tribe, clan, and ethnic group’.[vii]

Tribes – ingroups and outgroups – lead to corruption on a smaller scale, too. In some places, kickbacks – despised and vilified in the West – are considered virtuous. After all, a kickback means taking from a member of a different tribe and giving to one’s own. Overcharge a stranger for a service, a ticket, or a building permit, and you have cash to bestow upon your kin. Meritocracy may suffer, but meritocracy was never the name of the game to begin with.

The more things change… The western world’s ban on cousin marriage seems to have dissolved – or evaporated – during the Early Modern period. It didn’t matter much, because it turned out that rather few cousins, given the choice, wanted to marry each other anyway. But life is different today, in our postmodern era of mass migration. Naturally, much of this migration is from areas of the world in which tribal systems operate (it could hardly be otherwise – most of the world is that way). The tribal system is replicated in many western towns and cities. In England alone one doesn’t have to venture very far into the alphabet to find cities that house entire communities of immigrants that are silo’d off from the rest of the culture. Birmingham, Bolton, and Bradford all contain such segregated groups, in which ‘marriages are often arranged (or forced), postal votes are centrally determined, and tribal animosities are imported’.[viii]

Clans turn with relative ease into criminal organisations. Take the emergence of the Mafia in Sicily in the nineteenth century. Many casual viewers are surprised that such a powerful entity could have had such apparently modest roots. They underestimate the power of tribal loyalty, suspicion of outgroups, and feelings of resentment towards laws that seem to have been imposed by ‘foreigners’ for their own profit.

Italy of course is a relatively young state. Some have said that it was easier to make Italy than to make Italians. Even today, certain Italian citizens (those who perhaps feel less Italian than others) too often feel justified in being breaking the law.[ix] It is, after all, not their law.

One other observation. Have you noticed how the word ‘tribal’ has changed lately? Have you noticed the mission-creep, the displacement, the drift? Where was ‘tribal’ a decade ago? Nowhere, that’s where. ‘Tribal’ is yet another gift of our information-age, with its silos, its fractures, and its manufactured suspicion. ‘Tribal’ loyalties are constantly tested; ‘tribal’ knowledge is withheld from outsiders; riots, debates, and political rallies are condemned as ‘tribal’. And you know what other word we see frequently these days, what other word keeps popping in uninvited, putting its feet up on our coffee-table, and waiting for the dinner-gong? ‘Corruption’, that’s the one.

In the same recent issue of the Sunday Times in which the journalist Matthew Syed published a column about cousin marriage, Camilla Long wrote about the corruption that seemed to become a hallmark of the UK’s new government inside a record-breaking 100 days: ‘I don’t see a hopeful leader; I see a man at a free concert, in free clothes, going back to a free house […] As for the rest of his thick, credulous cabinet, they fell over themselves to follow his example: among them Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, who, we now learned, “pressed” for a police escort of [Taylor] Swift, whose mother demanded, and received, royal levels of protection for her daughter whose concert the entire Cabinet seems to have attended’. If this seems a remarkable thing to be able to write about a British government, well, Camilla Long had only just got started. She went on to write about ‘the general, miserly tone of resentment and vindictiveness and Corbynista spite that is allowed to pervade all policy’.

Is it coincidence that two such articles should turn up more or less back to back in the same newspaper? Probably not. Perhaps it would be more surprising if they didn’t. These are, as I say, tribal times. Kickbacks, perks, baksheesh, and spite: they’re just the beginning of it all.

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[i] Heinrich, Joseph: The Weirdest People in the World - How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York, 2020

[ii] Syed, Matthew: ‘Scandinavia has got the message on cousin marriage. We must ban it too’, Sunday Times, 13^th October, 2024, p15

[iii] Dennett, Daniel: ‘Why Are We in the West So Weird? A Theory’, The New York Times, available here: Why Are We in the West So Weird? A Theory - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

[iv] Heydel-Mankoo, Rafe: ‘They’re lying about your history’, Triggernometry, available here: "They're Lying About Your History" - Rafe Heydel-Mankoo (youtube.com)

[v] Eysenck, HJ: Crime & Personality, Paladin, 1970, pp144-49

[vi] Tajfel, H: ‘Experiments in intergroup discrimination’, Scientific American, 223, 1970, pp96-102

[vii] Syed, Matthew, op cit

[viii] Syed, Matthew, op cit

[ix] Jones, Tobias: The Dark Heart of Italy, Faber & Faber, London, 2007, p84; p17