Keeping it in the Family

Britain’s Cousin Marriage Conundrum

Johnny Sack: ‘What kind of man bangs his second cousin?’
Tony Soprano: ‘What are you, the friggin' cardinal?’

When I researched my family tree a few years ago I was surprised to learn of a first cousin marriage only about six generations back. My father’s family were lower-level English gentry – although we’ve gone down in the world since - and I was unaware of how common the practice was among that social class; it’s something I associated only with the very extreme ends of society, of royalty and the rural poor.

But cousin marriage had become quite popular among the upper echelons of British society in the 19^th century, according to one study estimated to reach around 4.5 per cent of the nobility, although these figures could be inflated. Certainly, by the 1920s, the overall national figure was just one in 300 marriages, so rare – but not unknown.

Many Victorians were well aware that there might be health risks involved; Charles Darwin, after the death of his beloved daughter Anne, agonised over whether his marriage to a first cousin was to blame, and the ill health (and low fertility) of their children has been attributed to inbreeding.

There was even an inquiry into cousin marriage around the time of the First World War, at the height of the eugenics craze, but it was never considered enough of an issue to pursue and the practice naturally declined. One possible attraction for cousin marriage was that it helped keep wealth within aristocratic families, and Lloyd George’s tax assaults on that class effectively broke them anyway.

The other side of my family are Irish Catholics, for whom in contrast cousin marriage would have been totally inconceivable, beyond the realms of possibility. The reason for this cultural difference is the Catholic Church’s ancient and insistent opposition to cousin marriage, so strict that it extended even to the seventh degree – ie sixth cousins. This was probably the most consequential law in history, and liberalism, democracy and all those other good things would have impossible without it.

The Western Church’s aversion to cousin marriage goes as far back as late antiquity, with St Augustine of Hippo advocating out-marriage which ‘bind social life more effectively by involving a greater number of people in them’. In Summa Theologica St Thomas Aquinas objected to cousin marriages on the grounds that they ‘prevent people widening their circle of friends’. He wrote: ‘When a man takes a wife from another family he is joined in special friendship with her relations; they are to him as his own.’

There were theological reasons for the law, but its social impact on European society was dramatic, breaking up the clans that naturally form when people marry relatives and so changing the way western Europeans treat strangers - an idea popularised by Joseph Henrich’s Weirdest People in the World (although cousin marriage has been a popular subject in certain circles of Twitter for well over a decade, most of all thanks to the anonymous HBD Chick account). The impact of the Church’s ban is still visible today, in countries which are more likely to have functioning democracies, lower levels of corruption and more prosocial attitudes to strangers. The pattern is most visible in Italy, where the South fell outside of the Western Church’s orbit for many centuries, and is still beset by graft and organised crime; even maps showing the extent to which people cheat at exams follow the same totally predictable pattern as all other maps of Italy.

Since out-breeding is associated with modernity and WEIRD traits, it might seem paradoxical that Protestantism reintroduced cousin marriage into western Europe, when historically Protestant countries are the WEIRDest of all. But because the Catholic Church had crushed the power of clans forever, the occasional marriage to a cousin was never going to threaten their return. It would instead be one of those quirky, eccentric things that quirky, eccentric people were allowed to do in very outbred societies.

England is perhaps the least clannish society of all, and evidence of nuclear families here goes deep into the medieval period. This partly explains why English life often feels unfriendly, lacking the warmth of the Mediterranean extended family’s embrace. Like most northwest Europeans, English people are quite apathetic to relatives and often barely see them, while non-familial organisations are far more important. The upside is that non-clannish societies tend to have far more clubs, institutions and other organisations that are collectively called ‘civil society’, without which democracy is unable to function.

Yet cousin marriage is once again common in England, to such an extent that Conservative MP Richard Holden this week introduced legislation to the House of Commons that would ban the practice. One of the criticisms that has been made is that it is ‘medieval’, although the opposite is true; whereas Innocent III would have thought Holden’s proposal doesn’t go far enough, The Book of Common Prayer’s Table of Kindred and Affinity shows it to be perfectly acceptable.

If Britain does outlaw cousin marriage, it will follow the path of Sweden, which announced a ban on the practice this year. Norway has already gone ahead, and Denmark may follow. Swedish politicians have argued that many cousin marriages are coerced, that there are health problems attached, but also that there are social implications – including the growth of organised crime networks bonded by clan loyalties.

It is true that inbreeding is linked to birth defects and higher mortality, and in a recent paper on cousin marriage, academic Patrick Nash made the case for banning the practice. He pointed out that ‘the child of an unrelated couple has a 2–3 per cent risk of inheriting a serious genetic disorder and the child of one-time first cousins a 4–6 per cent risk — the risk approximately doubles and is roughly equal to the risk faced by children of older mothers aged over 34 years.’ However, the risks ‘faced by cousin-parents from endogamous communities with multi-generational cousin-parents of their own’ was greater than 10 per cent - so the problem is not just people marrying a cousin, but repeated cousin marriage over several generations.

The children of cousin marriage are far more at risk of recessive disorders such as cerebral palsy, cystic fibrosis, beta thalassaemia and Tay-Sachs, but also certain types of cancers, mood disorders, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s, higher infant mortality, depressed IQ and a three-year reduction in life expectancy. ‘In short,’ Nash concludes: ‘the adverse biological consequences of cousin marriage are legion, severe, and long-lasting.’

Yet cousin marriage is practised across the Middle East and South Asia, and among British Pakistanis by between 40 and 60 per cent of couples, although in some biraderis (clans) this reaches 90 per cent.

Nash noted that ‘BBC Two’s Newsnight found that while British Pakistanis accounted for 3.4 per cent of all births nationwide in 2005, their children accounted for 30 per cent of recessive gene disorders. Further, consanguineous marriage has been cited as a significant cause of: 20 per cent of infant deaths in Birmingham; 20 per cent of child deaths in the east London borough of Redbridge; and 53 per cent of all South Asian infant deaths from genetic disorders in Bradford.’

So why is it so popular? Clannism has huge advantages in many ways. The biraderis, as Chris Bayliss noted in a recent piece, provide ‘social and financial assistance in times of hardship; a sense of psychological belonging and well-being, and a framework of mutual obligation. Each individual biraderi group fits into a larger structure, essentially tying each individual into a strict hierarchy within the entire ethnic group, under the leadership of “elders” drawn from the most senior men in each sub-group.

‘This type of structure is not at all uncommon across South Asia, however among the Mirpuris, supplanted in the unforgiving and remote mountain valleys of Kashmir and often surrounded by potentially hostile outside groups, what began as a useful extended family system became a critical means of group survival, creating a particularly tightly-knit social structure. Perhaps only Pashtun kinship networks are more rigid.’

The clan provides protection, but even in less unforgiving terrains it offers financial support and the ability to pool resources. Nash notes that ‘consanguineous diasporas’ are able ‘to establish themselves across the West through informal institutions such as kameti (British Pakistani savings clubs used to purchase property for immigrating family members) and hawala (inexpensive transnational remittance transfer networks based on close-kin trust).’