Cousin marriage isn’t ‘unspeakable’ But what is it we're actually saying?

The vibes continue to shift. Five minutes ago, “cousin marriage” was the punchline to a highbrow joke about the Hapsburg Jaw, or perhaps a lowbrow one about what counted as Normal for Norfolk. Now all of a sudden, the relative silence about it reveals the “unspeakable face of liberalism” according to Matthew Syed in The Times. And it seems lots of others agree with him.

Formerly in the historical deep freeze, it’s the fact that cousin marriage occurs disproportionately in British Muslim communities that has turned it into a hot button issue. Syed — himself of Pakistani extraction — first drew attention to its prevalence in an influential column last year, reminding us that where cousin marriage is practised over several generations, it exposes couples to a significantly heightened risk of bearing children with autosomal recessive disorders. Obstetricians in isolated rural communities have always known this, and now modern access to gene mapping is emphasising the risk.

But the real meat of Syed’s initial case was not medical but cultural — or at least, a bit. It lay in the claim that consanguinity increases the separation of certain ethnic and religious groups from mainstream UK values, encouraging them to be “clannish” and to become “ever more detached from the moral trajectory of wider civilisation”. Controlling patriarchs often have the upper hand in such environments, he suggested. Things like female genital mutilation and so-called honour beatings are more likely to take place there, along with corruption and a tendency towards groupthink.

And talking of the latter, in this week’s piece Syed adds a third complaint: the reticence of UK academics to discuss the problems, which he takes as yet more evidence that a culture of political correctness, timidity, and fear reigns in academia. As a result, he argues, information in the public interest, essential to the well-being of immigrant communities, has not been disseminated or even gathered properly in the first place. Researching the links between consanguinity and forced marriage, Oxford academic Dr Patrick Nash has related to Syed how he would be taken aside by colleagues and warned off the subject. And as the columnist himself looked into the available medical evidence, he says he struggled to find geneticists who would risk their careers to talk to him about it.

I have no doubt this bit is true. Still, I disagree with Syed’s assertion that the studied silence of British academics in this area reveals liberalism’s “unspeakable face”. On the contrary, I think it shows academics in quite a good light, relative to things they easily might otherwise be doing. Gender Studies lecturers — as far as I know — are not positively trying to destigmatise cousin marriage in the name of deconstructing oppressively hegemonic Western norms, which comes as something of a relief when you know their modus operandi. Equally, although it is not unusual to find philosophers arguing that physical disability is mere difference, socially constructed to be “bad” —  perhaps with the chaser that such construction maintains colonial and racist power games — few have been so bold as to go out to bat for the essential value neutrality of life-limiting haemoglobin disorders or congenital deformations. Weirdly, or perhaps not when you think about it, the job of dismissing the harm of birth defects seems to have been left to libertarian commentators, upping the ante by arguing that siblings should be free to marry too.

The best the progressive mindset can do in this respect, it seems, is to put the physical risks associated with consanguinity in context, by comparing them to risks with which the general public are apparently much more culturally comfortable. And so we find the authors of a report from a Bradford NHS Trust equating the risk of birth defects to married cousins with those of white women getting pregnant “at or after the age of 34” as a result of “choosing lifestyles embedded in liberal values such as preferring jobs, careers, bodily fitness and individualism”. Now, if you factor in cousin marriage happening generation after generation, this comparison isn’t right. But the deeper implied point is that, if girlboss white women can happily run risks to future offspring without attracting moral censure, there should be no particular problem for brown ones. Interrogating the avoidable harms of career-delayed motherhood in women is a bridge too far, it seems, even for the boldest of critics of the British way of life.

And there is another way in which Syed is wrong about the harms of cousin marriage being “unspeakable” — at least if we are being literal-minded. If it really was impossible to talk about such things, liberalised societies with high immigration such as Sweden and Denmark would not now be moving to ban cousin marriage; Robert Jenrick wouldn’t be seizing the moment to argue for the same thing in the Commons; and Syed himself would not be writing well-received columns about it. In fact, decrying cousin marriage is now apparently one of the most socially acceptable means of expressing disquiet about the legacies of immigration in liberal societies. And it might be worth examining why.

One reason seems to be that the two prongs of Syed’s argument bring unashamed social conservatives and shy sensible centrist types together in an unusual way. For those in the latter much larger category — normally wary of engaging in any discourse that would explicitly pit subjective British or Western values against those of immigrants — there is the objective shield of scientific data to protect them from anxieties about accusations of racism. As long as we are using technical-sounding words like “homozygosity” and “autosomal inheritance patterns”, and assessing quantifiable health risks to physical bodies, it seems clear that we are in the world of Rationality and Data — and who could argue with that? Equally, since physical health, in the basic sense of freedom from serious disease, is a prerequisite for doing nearly anything else, it is hard to imagine a contemporary value system that wouldn’t recognise its importance.

Equally, though, precisely because the acknowledgement of disease-free health as a basic good is foundational to most conceivable worldviews, it won’t get you very far in articulating a positive moral vision for society; and nor will it furnish much material for cultural critique. David Hume’s dictum that you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is” is not quite right: some activities are obviously bad for us and limit well-being, given facts about human nature (severely limiting contact with other humans, say; staring at screens in dark rooms for most of the day; starving yourself, or cutting off physically healthy flesh). But what is true is that the recommendations thereby produced won’t be very detailed, confined mostly to ought-nots.

Meanwhile, turning to the more explicitly cultural arguments mounted by Syed, it seems they too are designed to attract nervous initiates in the art of sticking up for a specifically British way of life. For on closer inspection they hover mostly in the realm of the abstract. As noted, there are concerns about “clannishness” and “insularity” and the negative consequences upon “integration” with the mainstream, with only limited forays into naming specific objectionable practices like forced marriage or FGM. And perhaps this degree of distance from unpleasant particulars further helps incipient social conservatives, gingerly dipping toes in fraught culture wars, to feel less like they are engaged in full-frontal confrontation.

But at the same time, this still vague critique threatens to cloud the bathwater and so lose the baby. For — as has long been argued by post-liberal thinkers and is now becoming obvious even to civilians — the choose-your-own-adventure neoliberalism we now have in much of the UK, while pretending to be value-neutral in the public realm, is actually partisan as hell. Though theoretically speaking, liberalism pretends not to favour any subjective conception of the good, in practice elements of the British “mainstream” tend to champion malignly impersonal activities (replacing skilled workers with machines, breaking up mothers’ bodies for surrogacy parts, “assisting” frail and vulnerable people to die, etc) while simultaneously undermining the sorts of institution that enrich local social life for many (small businesses, public libraries and swimming pools, pubs, church congregations etc).

Much of this wrecking is done explicitly in the name of secularism, not religion. And in this context, a bit of “clannishness” and “insularity” among dissidents goes along way — or at least, when rebranded more positively as “showing solidarity”, and “building strong moral boundaries against the prevailing neoliberal tide”. Trade unions, parishes, and grassroots political organisations can be clannish and insular too, in both good and bad ways, yet as a society we would surely be much worse off without them.

Squeamish as some recovering liberals are to criticise immigrant practices directly, there is a temptation to zoom out a bit before taking aim, hoping that some of the generalised argument then sticks to the right targets. But the danger is that valuable things are destroyed in friendly fire. Literally incestuous communities definitely pose a problem for British society, but metaphorically incestuous communities may or may not do: it all depends what exactly goes on there. If we don’t want British Muslim girls to be forced into marriages, genitally mutilated, or beaten for perceived apostasy, there are quicker and less ambiguous ways to say it.

---

Kathleen Stock is Contributing Editor at UnHerd.

Docstockk