Arabs ideally marry parallel cousins–father’s brother’s child, for example.They are thus highly endogamous, not just within the ethnic group but within the extended family. Setting aside the frequently perverse genetic effects, this practice makes for an overall society with a tendency to fission along the lines of male-line (patrilineal) descent. It’s hard to visualize without diagrams and stories, but trust me, it does.

If you have multiple wives, even half-brothers and their children will tend to compete, too. (think of the children of Leah and Rachel in the Joseph story in Genesis).

If you want to build a more unified society you need to discourage cousin marriage, especially the parallel variety and polygyny (plural wives). The alternative is a fundamentally fissiparous (love that word–inclined to split up) society centralized by force, which works for a while but tends to break down with the decline or death of the strong man.

Monogamy, out-marriage (exogamy) to non-cousins, and primogeniture made England, for example, a vastly different place than the Arab world.

Steve Sailer wrote a famous essay on this for The American Conservative in 2003, which was included in the book Best Science and Nature Writing by editor Steve Pinker of Harvard University. Here is a link and a long quote:

http://www.isteve.com/cousin_marriage_conundrum.htm

Muslim countries are usually known for warm, devoted extended family relationships, but also for weak patriotism. In the U.S., where individualism is so strong, many assume that “family values” and civic virtues such as sacrificing for the good of society always go together. But, in Islamic countries, loyalty to extended (as opposed to nuclear) families is often at war with loyalty to nation. Civic virtues, military effectiveness, and economic performance all suffer.

Commentator Randall Parker wrote, “Consanguinity [cousin marriage] is the biggest underappreciated factor in Western analyses of Middle Eastern politics. Most Western political theorists seem blind to the importance of pre-ideological kinship-based political bonds in large part because those bonds are not derived from abstract Western ideological models of how societies and political systems should be organized. ? Extended families that are incredibly tightly bound are really the enemy of civil society because the alliances of family override any consideration of fairness to people in the larger society. Yet, this obvious fact is missing from 99% of the discussions about what is wrong with the Middle East. How can we transform Iraq into a modern liberal democracy if every government worker sees a government job as a route to helping out his clan at the expense of other clans?”

Retired U.S. Army colonel Norvell De Atkine spent years trying to train America’s Arab allies in modern combat techniques. In an article in American Diplomacy entitled, “Why Arabs Lose Wars,” a frustrated De Atkine explained, “First, the well-known lack of trust among Arabs for anyone outside their own family adversely affects offensive operations? In a culture in which almost every sphere of human endeavor, including business and social relationships, is based on a family structure, this orientation is also present in the military, particularly in the stress of battle. “Offensive action, basically, consists of fire and maneuver,” De Atkine continued. “The maneuver element must be confident that supporting units or arms are providing covering fire. If there is a lack of trust in that support, getting troops moving forward against dug-in defenders is possible only by officers getting out front and leading, something that has not been a characteristic of Arab leadership.”

Similarly, as Francis Fukuyama described in his 1995 book “Trust: The Social Virtues & the Creation of Prosperity,” countries such as Italy with highly loyal extended families can generate dynamic family firms. Yet, their larger corporations tend to be rife with goldbricking, corruption, and nepotism, all because their employees don’t trust each other to show their highest loyalty to the firm rather than their own extended families. Arab cultures are more family-focused than even Sicily, and thus their larger economic enterprises suffer even more.

American society is so biased against inbreeding that many Americans have a hard time even conceiving of marrying a cousin. Yet, arranged matches between first cousins (especially between the children of brothers) are considered the ideal throughout much of a broad expanse from North Africa through West Asia and into Pakistan and India.

In contrast, Americans probably disapprove of what scientists call “consanguineous” mating more than any other nationality. Three huge studies in the U.S. between 1941 and 1981 found that no more than 0.2% of all American marriages were between first cousins or second cousins.

Americans have long dismissed cousin marriage as something practiced only among hillbillies. That old stereotype of inbred mountaineers waging decades long blood feuds had some truth to it. One study of 107 marriages in Beech Creek, Kentucky in 1942 found 19% were consanguineous, although the Kentuckians were more inclined toward second cousin marriages, while first cousin couples are more common than second cousins pairings in the Islamic lands.

Cousin marriage averages not much more than one percent in most European countries, and under 10% in the rest of the world outside that Morocco to Southern India corridor.

I against my brother. My brother and I against my cousin. My cousin and I against the infidel.

It’s found in the rather trashy and propagandistic Leon Uris novel, but does go way back before that.

This constant tendency to segmentation is characteristic of a lineage-based society with nonexistent or weak central government. Read old Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer.

We underrate the significance of kinship and inheritance in our own society (Adams, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Bush, not to speak of Adam Bellow, John Podhoretz, Angelina Jolie and Natalie Cole). The difference is we don’t marry our cousins quite so often and have a variety of principles other than hereditary ascription to confer status and power.

A question, though. Will Christopher and Peter team up against either a cousin or the infidels? Tune in next week . . .