Suggested reading: "How the Irish Saved Civilization" [0]
Most cultural phenomena, be is classified as religious, philosophical, political, etc, are double-edged swords. The transition of the Western Roman empire to a succession of leaders from outside that tradition did lead to major losses in living standards of most Europeans. On the whole the root causes are certainly multi-factor such as large epidemics [1] and reflect significant susceptibilities in Roman culture. Many of the seeds for the Renaissance were held safe in the religious monasteries of the Medieval period and Cahill makes the case for the extremely remote Irish redoubts as making a critical contribution. If they made errors in which palimpsests to overwrite, well it is a pity that there wasn't a St. Linus of Torvalds there to save them with git.
That’s not that clear, at least when it came to the median European. Amongst other things demographic collapse usually results in higher living standards in agricultural societies due to there being more land per capita.
Very true in that "living standards" is very subjective. When I wrote that I was thinking of London's population loss, not achieving a similar population until the 1300s. And I was thinking of claims that European literacy rates likewise took a long time to recover.
I don't think it is right to say that population loss usually results in higher living standards due to more land per capita. For one, in a pre-industrial society agriculture is labor intensive and the amount of land that can be worked by a person does not scale with land availability. The Black Death [1] economic section works out some of the less than positive impacts.
> not achieving a similar population until the 1300s
That’s not the necessarily best metric either, though. Roman city sizes (especially Rome itself) very inflated due to centralized state redirecting a lot of tax revenue there.
However in premodern times pretty much all cities universally had negative population growth which would imply they weren’t particularly nice places to live if you had better options.
> However in premodern times pretty much all cities universally had negative population growth which would imply they weren’t particularly nice places to live if you had better options.
Your point is well taken although I must point out that for the above to be true the cities could never exist in the first place.
Depending on where you put the cut-off point of "premodern" the contact between precolumbian and European cultures in North America had some notion that people on the European side would sometimes immigrate to Indian culture but not vice versa. "The Down of Everything" by Graeber and Wengrow [0] goes into transcultural impacts at length. A more original source can be found in a letter by Ben Franklin in 1753 [1]:
When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and
habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one
Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that
this is not natural to them merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from
this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young
by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends,
and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among
the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of
life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the
first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is
no reclaiming them.
Most cultural phenomena, be is classified as religious, philosophical, political, etc, are double-edged swords. The transition of the Western Roman empire to a succession of leaders from outside that tradition did lead to major losses in living standards of most Europeans. On the whole the root causes are certainly multi-factor such as large epidemics [1] and reflect significant susceptibilities in Roman culture. Many of the seeds for the Renaissance were held safe in the religious monasteries of the Medieval period and Cahill makes the case for the extremely remote Irish redoubts as making a critical contribution. If they made errors in which palimpsests to overwrite, well it is a pity that there wasn't a St. Linus of Torvalds there to save them with git.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilizati...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonine_Plague