So if my historical sources are telling me the truth…
…and I’m synthesizing the history properly…
…then, in fact, the entire edifice of Western civilization – all the cultural, social, and philosophical structures that define the world in which we live today – can be traced back to a stupid loophole in Roman inheritance law.
NOTE: Everything here is taken either from Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order or from a Livejournal post by the Infamous Brad that I am currently unable to find. I get credit for absolutely nothing, except noticing the connection between Section II and Section III.
I.
What do I mean by “the entire edifice of Western civilization?”
Here, I mean the vague-but-enormous memeplex that can be summed up in the word “individualism.” The thing where each person is understood to be a social unit unto himself, with his own destiny and with rights to his own person, capable of charting an independent path through life. The thing where you pick your own job and your own mate and your own friends and your own hobbies and your own ideals. The thing where “freedom” is even a meaningful concept because we conceive of humans as being potentially free of each other.
Obviously, this whole individualism thing has both a lot of sources and a lot of ramifications. But an absolutely central part of it, something without which it cannot survive or cohere, is economic individualism: the idea that an individual person can own property in his own right, with full and complete title to it, including the right to alienate (sell) it as he pleases. Without that, well, people can’t really act as free individual agents unless they’re prepared to give up all their resources, because all their resources are at least partly controlled by someone else.
[Within any kind of historical economy, anyway. Let’s leave complicated ideas about the post-scarcity future for another discussion.]
The main alternative to individualism is the tribe. Within a tribal system, an individual basically isn’t a meaningful social unit, he is a component of his kinship group. The tribe owns all the property, and you can’t sell it off, because everyone in the tribe (including all those yet to be born) have a claim on it. You have duties to the tribe, and those duties define your life, even if maybe you personally would rather do something else. You are bound to work, and marry, in a way that advances the tribe’s interests. If you have wealth or power, it is incumbent on you to use it in a way that advances the tribe’s interests. You get the idea.
This tribe thing is the default social setup for humans. It dominated most of the great premodern civilizations. In India, pretty much all of society was built around kinship groups (jatis). In the Arab world, tribal ties were always paramount – so much so that basically every successful Arab empire had to use slaves to run the government and the military, just on the grounds that foreigners without families wouldn’t funnel all the empire’s resources to their tribes. The situation in China was a little different, since the kinship groups got kicked in the teeth early by Qin Shi Huangdi’s massive centralized bureaucratic state, but they were always there and always fighting to hang onto what power they could. Etc.
But not in Western Europe. Individualism took root in Western Europe really early. You had contracts, and common law, and alienable property, going back to at least the early Middle Ages. Same goes for the primacy of the nuclear family over the extended family,
and cultural models of the non-family-defined free man. The Enlightenment was building on a very firm foundation.
When people talk about the importance of the Hajnal line, this is the thing that they’re trying to get at.
II.
Why Western Europe, and not anywhere else?
Because, right from its inception, the Roman Catholic Church – and only the Roman Catholic Church, not (for example) any of its Eastern Orthodox counterparts – engaged on a systematic campaign to destroy the family.
…I say that in in a funny way, but it’s true. There were a staggering number of major rulings issued by the early Church that amounted to “kinship groups aren’t allowed to do the things that make them function.” Most famously, cousin marriage was banned, which meant that it was extremely difficult for kinship groups to avoid diffusing into each other and that they couldn’t shore up the most important alliances across generations with family ties. Less famous but also very important was the banning of “Levirate marriage” (the marriage of a widow to her husband’s brother), which is a really useful technology if you want to keep all your tribe members within the tribe. The very fact that the Church pushed hard for the legitimacy of female-owned property was a big part of this, since it meant that kinship groups were risking losing some of their stuff whenever one of their members got married. And all sorts of rules about priestly behavior, including clerical celibacy, meant that priests couldn’t continue to serve as useful assets to their clans.
(Insofar as this stuff didn’t come from the Church directly, it mostly came from lawmaker monarchs like Charlemagne, whose agendas tended to be intertwined with the Church’s agenda.)
OK. So, uh, why was the RCC such an implacable enemy of the kinship-group system?
The short answer is “because it was closely allied with the social subclass of wealthy widows.” Widows tended to give lots and lots of money, and land, to the Church. This didn’t work so well if a widow’s stuff would all just get reappropriated by her husband’s clan. So the Church did everything it could to support a woman’s right to keep her dead husband’s property, and the women reciprocated by donating a hefty proportion of that property.
The question remains, though…why did this particular form of mutual back-scratching manifest only in Catholic territories? Why weren’t the Orthodox churches, or the various Hindu temples, doing exactly the same thing?
III.
It turns out that upper-class Roman men liked younger women. Much younger women. The average patrician wedding involved a man in his late twenties or thirties, or even forties, and a girl in her early teens.
(Brief explanation: as a rule, everywhere, aristocratic men get married when their financial and political prospects have been firmly established. Why would a bride’s family choose to roll the dice? In Rome, for various reasons, this didn’t happen until fairly late. But Roman medicine was super shitty and nutrition was poor, so it was generally desirable to marry the youngest possible woman for fertility-maximizing reasons.)
This meant that, if an upper-class Roman wife managed to avoid dying in childbirth, she was almost certain to outlive her husband by quite a lot. Aristocratic Roman society was filled with youngish widows. There was at least one in basically every patrician family.
The result: as civilizations go, Rome was slightly more concerned than average about the plight of women who’d lost their husbands. Which is important, because traditional kinship-group-based inheritance law is ridiculously terrible for widows. All the husband’s stuff gets reclaimed by the tribe, the widow is left dependent on the mercy of a family that isn’t even her family (as such things are understood), and she is very likely to die or to be functionally enslaved.
So the Romans came up with a kludge. Widows were, technically, allowed to keep their husband’s property in their own name…but there were a ton of restrictions on what they could do with that property. The idea was to keep the great estates intact until the women in question either died conveniently or found a way to get married again.
One of the very few things that propertied widows could do with their money was donate it to temples. Unimpeachably respectable, right?
…except that Rome was infested by this up-and-coming, wildly expansionist cult that was desperate for cash and upper-class recognition.
A whole bunch of the early Roman bishops got their churches off the ground essentially by serving as money-laundering operations for rich widows. The patrician women in question would “donate” vast fortunes to the Christians, with the explicit understanding that they would continue to control most of the money. Even so, the churches were getting vastly more support from this system than they were going to get anywhere else. And some of the widows in question even came to decide that they were actually pious.
So the Church fathers arrived at the conclusion that wealthy widows were their best friends. And the rest is, as they say, history.