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.
ADDENDUM:
A number of people have been asking me a question that is, uh, very on-point: if this widow-favoring dynamic originated in the days of the Roman Empire when Christianity was still a nascent cult, how could it characterize the Roman Catholic Church but not the Orthodox Church, given that the schism happened so much later?
The answer, it turns out, is kind of boring and obvious rather than wacky and fun. In fact the Rome-acquired widow-favoring thing existed in both churches. The relevant difference was a large-scale political one rather than a cultural or doctrinal one, arising in the wake of Rome’s collapse. In the West, the Church was faced with a postapocalyptic wasteland of isolated nobles and Germanic ravager tribes, it was the largest and most coherent social actor around, and so it had a relatively easy time imposing its agenda. In the East, the Church was faced with all the iron-fisted power of the Byzantine empire, which responded to its attempts to depatrimonialize the property regime with “haha lol nope.”
But the dynamic about which I was talking still seems to have been a thing.