Problematic Relationships
A lot of social theories that you see these days, coming from all sides of the political universe, hinge on the lots-of-good-fish-in-the-sea model of sex and romance. (Also other kinds of relationships, sometimes, but let’s just talk about sex and romance for now.) “Having a relationship with someone under $SOME_PARTICULAR_CIRCUMSTANCE poses a bunch of potential problems. So you should never do it, and we will punish you if you do! You can just go find a relationship with someone else!”
It turns out that this is a really broken model, especially for people who are not-totally-normal in any serious way. Humans are not fungible. When you meet someone, at least on some level, you will never meet anyone like that person again – and while in many cases the relevant differences aren’t very substantial, there are also many cases where they are. Sometimes staying away from someone means killing a beautiful, totally-irreplaceable thing. Sometimes one individual is the difference between a life of joy and a life of misery.
And that’s true even if that person is your boss. Or your professor. Or your first cousin. Or even your sibling, I guess. There are like a million of these, and they always seem incredibly distasteful and pointless until suddenly the person you love falls into the relevant category.
Now, to be clear: it’s not wrong to say “some circumstances make relationships many times riskier than normal, some circumstances are ripe for abuse and horror.” This is 100% accurate.
It is a cost. It gets weighed against the cost of “society has deemed that your love is A Problem and therefore forbidden regardless of how anyone involved actually feels,” which is a cost whose weight you should understand very well indeed, whatever your particular personal politics happen to be.
So how do you resolve a balance-of-costs problem?
Well, if you’re a policy-maker or a norm-setter, you can in fact just steamroll any objections and issue a blanket rule. And maybe the utilitarian calculus would justify that. Maybe you’re correct that the chances of victimization / cultural disease / birth defects / whatever are so much weightier than whatever-joy-will-come-out-of-these-unions that it makes sense to be the Relationship Police. But at the very least, this is a thing you should do solemnly, with a keen awareness that you are wrecking actual individual lives – and trampling on normal, culturally-key standards of individual autonomy in the realm of personal satisfaction – in order to achieve your aims.
Or you could try to introduce mitigation protocols. You could spread memes to the effect that relationships of Type X are minefields of potential disaster, much more so than other relationships on average, and therefore anyone entering into one would be wise to take precautions A B and C for the sake of his own welfare, and that doing so is a sign of love and faith-in-the-relationship rather than the reverse.
But, y’know, to do that you actually have to be willing to admit that sometimes a relationship of Type X is the right thing.
Do not think that I am celebrating, happily, Balioc.
Much of human history involves wars of conquest, competition, and displacement, not peaceful coexistence.
Civilization is fragile. A significant disruption to food or water supplies or even electricity could topple the country. A sufficient collapse in birth rates could leave millions of elderly people to die in an economy that cannot support them. And so on, and so forth.
When cousin marriages were at or under 1% of the population, we could afford to ignore them almost entirely. A bit higher, so long as it isn’t intergenerational, might be sustainable.
It was when various Western countries started importing populations where the rate was much, much higher that it became a problem.
The thresholds matter. It makes a big difference whether something is 1:10,000, 1:100, 1:10, or 1:2.
Hit 50%, and you become Pakistan. Do you want to live in Pakistan, Balioc?
Because I sure don’t.
Development can go backwards. It has, in various times and places. Humanity may not require an iron fist, but it does require some level of discipline.
You can have the cousin marriages back once the rate among all sub-groups collapses back to something under 4% and it is once again de-normalized.
Leaving aside all other considerations – in making your points against cousin marriage, you repeatedly and explicitly say “taking this precaution will cost us virtually nothing; even if you suspect this is pure voodoo logic, we should go ahead and institute the ban on the off-chance that the voodoo works, because the downside is so low that we effectively get this one free.”
It’s not free if you’re in love with your cousin. And the ease of steamrolling that kind of thing is precisely why people get defensive about the rules that safeguard their individual autonomy.
I’m not in a position to say whether or not you’re celebrating, but you certainly don’t sound like someone who’s advocating a great sacrifice for a greater good.