Cultural innovations were boosted under the pressure of epidemic outbreaks in European History

Abstract

Outbreaks of epidemics are human ecological disasters and have caused huge losses of human life and social disturbances in human history. But their impact on human culture has never been systematically and quantitatively studied. This study hypothesizes that such gigantic human ecological pressure would have created a great need for cultural innovations. By quantitatively examining and modeling the process using the time-series of cultural innovations and human ecological–socioeconomic proxies in European history (1000–1900 CE) based on the basic principles of causal inference, the paper demonstrates that infectious disease epidemics and socioeconomic stress stimulated the flourishment of thinkers and philosophical thoughts across different philosophies in truth, knowledge, and ethics, and promoted scientific discovery/technological innovations in a macro scale. Based on the results of Poisson regression and analysis of marginal effects, when the epidemics increased by 1, the average number of philosophical thinkers increased by 0.85, and their average impact score increased by 4.04. When the Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased by 0.1, the average number of philosophical thinkers increased by 8.9, and the average impact score increased by 29.79. The results of linear regression further show that when the epidemics increased by 1, the average scientific discoveries and technological innovations (SDTI) increased by 0.128 units; when CPI increased by 10%, the average SDTI increased by 0.15 units. Infectious disease epidemics have generally played an important role in generating cultural dynamics during the study period. The results imply that the recurrent outbreaks of the COVID-19 pandemic would likely lead to another thriving phase of cultural innovations.