‘abhorrent to society at large’

This month a man and a woman were jailed in Birmingham for having sex with each other. This was justified by the fact that the man and woman were also known as father and daughter, and incest is against the law in the UK. This has been the case since 1908 when, due to increasing concerns over child protection, Parliament passed the Incest Act, which for the first time stipulated incest as an offense. Incest is defined as sex, either heterosexual or homosexual, between an individual and their parent, grandparent, child, grandchild, sibling, half-sibling, uncle, aunt, nephew or niece. There is a maximum sentence of fourteen years imprisonment for the crime.

Forget your own instinctive views on incest – it is against the law to prevent birth defects. In the same way that wolves mate with packs thousands of miles away to avoid producing genetically weaker offspring, we cannot take our sisters or cousins to the prom for the same reason. But in Arizona and four other US states, cousin marriage is legal if you can provide proof of infertility or if you are too old to procreate. So why shouldn’t this be extended to siblings, aunts, uncles and so on?

In his statement to the court, judge James Burbidge denounced their relationship as “illicit”, calling it “a relationship that is regarded as abhorrent to society at large”. It’s sweet that the judge should take my feelings into account when handing down his sentences, but I do have several concerns. Perhaps you do find incest abhorrent. And not just the idea of yourself engaging in a sexual relationship with a family member, but anyone doing so. What is your specific complaint? Are you concerned about sick children being conceived? Well, what if the protagonists were, like in Arizona, infertile or too old to procreate? What of a homosexual couple? There is very little chance of conception in that case. Or do you just find the idea a bit icky?

Tolerance is a word that is often employed by those who wish to demonstrate open-mindedness. Except that tolerance isn’t what a lot of people think it is, or at least it is often misused. Tolerance isn’t accepting homosexual marriage because you agree that everyone should have the right to marry whom they love, regardless of sexual orientation. Tolerance is deeply disliking the idea of homosexuality, including the idea that gays might marry, yet supporting it anyway. Toleration is to, in the words of Robin Hanson, “tolerate things that actually bother you”. Gay marriage will become law in liberal democracies not because people are becoming more tolerant, but because they are less bothered by homosexuality. So who are we to be intolerant toward consenting sibling-sibling or father-daughter relationships? The government need not encourage it, but then again it need not encourage gay marriage. Simply not ban it.

Categories of behaviour, whether fashion, interracial marriage, homosexuality or incest are historically and culturally specific. Our ideas on these topics are grounded in early twenty-first century social positioning. The most common anthropological example of homosexuality in ancient Greece is a misnomer, due to the dangers of crude cultural relativism – practices, whether homosexual or otherwise are usually conceptualised in relation to a particular gender order. Homosexual acts were certainly not free of hierarchical constructs including class and gender: boys, women or slaves were acceptable partners for adult men in ancient Greece The point remains however that homosexual practices did not carry the same social and moral vilification that has characterised Euro-American cultures, in particular from the late nineteenth century. Acknowledgement of temporal and social contexts of social attitudes is vital. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s, declaration of homosexuality was diagnosed as a sign of mental illness. Today, secrecy is viewed as a sign of psychological trouble.

In our episteme, the term Foucault adopted to describe an epoch in which knowledge is grounded, incest, like paedophilia, remains abhorrent in all circumstances according to the law. But so was homosexuality, interracial marriage, divorce and many other elements of modern liberal life that we take for granted. This is by no means to equate the consensual sex between two related people in Birmingham with homosexual relations, nor to the devastating crime of paedophilia, but it reminds us that what is acceptable today may not be tomorrow, and what is regarded as abhorrent right now may not be so in the future. Though Arsene Wenger's transfer policy is clearly crazy in any episteme.

Absolute Impunity & Fitch

Imagine being told you have to lose weight. Of course you can’t, you are thin and beautiful, but suspend your disbelief for this short thought experiment. You are warned that without drastic action, your very life is in danger. So you do what you are told. Yet every time you forgo a biscuit, every time you disembark deliriously after an hour on the treadmill, you are injected with lard by those very people who told you to get healthy. That would be a little annoying. And that’s essentially how José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, feels.

Portugal’s credit rating was downgraded four notches in July for reasons that will not astonish anyone: high debt and low growth. Portugal received a €78bn bailout from the European Central Bank in May, due to the already high cost of borrowing it was facing. Essentially, no one would lend them money at a reasonable rate, so they had to go to the ECB. Subsequently Moody’s, the credit rating agency, promptly downgraded Portugal anyway. The downgrade is a result of Moody’s belief that Portuguese debt is more risky because a default is more likely. Yet in downgrading their credit rating, thereby making Portugal’s cost of borrowing even higher, they make a default much more probable. It is a painfully depressing self-fulfilling prophecy.

There are three main credit rating agencies, each with names more ominous than the last. Fitch, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. Rating agencies are the people who calculate the risk involved in financial transactions, and help set the price of German debt much lower than say that of Argentina. So who is the European Union to judge and complain? After all, the rating agencies are experts, and the Eurozone is simply broke and bitter about it. The problem begins, as so many seem to do these days, with the financial crisis that began in 2007, and which people optimistically thought had ended in 2009.

The crisis itself began when hundreds of billions of dollars of US mortgage debt was rated as triple-A, the safest possible, but turned out to be worthless. Who rated these junk securities as triple-A? You guessed it, Fitch, Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s. A combination of conflicts of interest, and some cases where the rating agencies didn’t understand the securities they were rating, led to financial ruin. The US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission called the rating agencies “essential cogs in the wheels of financial destruction”. Many parties were responsible for the financial crisis – banks, rating agencies, governments and consumers. The impunity enjoyed by banks and bankers is notorious. Less well known is that of the rating agencies.

Standard & Poor’s demanded $4trn in cuts by the US government to keep their triple A status, and they haven’t got it. But say what you want about members of Congress (and I would be perfectly content with the US political system being downgraded to junk status), they do enjoy democratic legitimacy. If Standard & Poor's decides to downgrade US debt, it will be a fine example of the supremacy of financial leaders over the political. But who regulates the regulators? EU leaders want to set up their own, more dovish rating agency, but that will not solve the problem.

I leave you with this thought: the World Bank has hired as its new Treasurer Madelyn Antoncic, who is described on the organisation’s website as an "experienced senior executive from the financial industry who has been active in the regulatory and policy debate". Experience she gained as Chief Risk Officer from 2002-2007 at Lehman Brothers. You cannot conceive of the sheer tonnage of canned tuna in my immediate possession.