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.
You’re forgetting something.
Some of the cultures this practice is coming from will do things like “honor”
killings or acid attacks as a means to control women.Consider child marriages. Some people might potentially miss out on true love if we ban them. However, the vast majority of the time, child marriages are going to take place in an atmosphere of coercion, and “but what if the child wants to marry a man twenty years her senior?” is only acting as cover for this.
Children cannot be reasonably expected to refuse even if they genuinely want to, because they lack the power to do so.
However, if child marriage is illegal, the child can make the appeal “but it’s illegal! The state will punish you!” (Or, more frequently, the adults involved will have to hold off for some years out of fear of being punished by the state, giving the child time to become more powerful and able to resist coercion.)
There is a real potential cost, however that’s quite small compared to the potential benefit. If someone really does want to get married to someone at the age of 15, then we’ve deprived them of 3 years of that potential marriage. If someone doesn’t, then we’ve just given them a way to escape a lot of pain.
I’m significantly less liberal / liberaltarian than a lot of people around here. In fact, some might even call me “right-wing,” or “right-wing, but in like a weird way.” (Or perhaps even “the right-wing of a country that doesn’t exist.”)
I consider the cost of banning child marriage relatively small, and I think that we should do so. To heck with the religious exemptions. Freedom of religion is a means to manage the fact that so many people have been mentally bound by warring religions without them killing each other. It’s an evolved response.
What is the “natural” rate of cousin marriage? Is it 50%+, as in some regions of the world where it is a means to reinforce the patriarchal line, or is it closer to the 1% of the Western peoples, or a few percent more for parts of Asia?
I’m inclined to believe it’s one of the latter, and thus it could be cut in some populations by a factor of 10-50x before we even get into the group of true cousin lovers you’re trying to protect.
Do these groups genetically differ so they only love cousins? I very seriously doubt it. Are we not cousin marrying enough to find true love here in the West? I very seriously doubt that, too.
And how many of that remaining group could not find a high-quality relationship without marrying their first cousin? How many would truly face the question of marry their cousin or be forever alone? Nine in ten? One in ten? One in one hundred?
I can’t just ban cousin marriages for one ethnic group and not others, until the cousin marriages in that one group came down towards regular population norms for that geographical region. That would be considered racist. I can’t establish a cap-and-trade system for cousin marriages. That’s politically non-viable in any typical country.
Are you trying to horrify me with parallels to other kinds of relationships that are considered Automatically Problematic? Because I started by pointing out that there are all kinds of relationships that get bucketed as Automatically Problematic, and that oftentimes there is in fact a huge extra risk factor involved there…but that also there are always costs to blanket bans that should be taken seriously.
There is a real potential cost, however that’s quite small compared to the potential benefit. If someone really does want to get married to someone at the age of 15, then we’ve deprived them of 3 years of that potential marriage.
Putting the value judgment aside, the empirics here are certainly correct. Which does make the case that the various incest taboos are among the most potentially destructive relationship restrictions; you can wait until you’re of age if that’s the issue, you can find a different job or a different class or whatever, but you can never stop being someone’s cousin.
Are we not cousin marrying enough to find true love here in the West? I very seriously doubt that, too.
Heh. I actually do suspect that, given genetic compatibility etc., we are cousin-marrying at a psychologically suboptimal rate (due to taboo).
But of course the relevant factor is not “would a ban actually ensure that you could never ever find love again?” Anyone whose valued relationship or potential-relationship gets destroyed this way is quite justified in saying “fuck you and your ‘you’ll get over it’ bullshit, let’s see how you like it when I dissolve your relationship and tell you to smile and wait for the next one.”
I can’t establish a cap-and-trade system for cousin marriages.
If the calculus ends up suggesting that cousin marriage is actually an intolerable problem that can’t be satisfactorily addressed indirectly – which I very much doubt, but whatever – this is the best proposal for dealing with it that I’ve yet heard.