[ExI] anarchy

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 12:20 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 12:48 PM, William Flynn Wallace <
foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> what you suggest sounds like Italy around 1500:   clans and their
military
>> enforced things; no overarching gov.  How well did that work?
>
> For some reason I'm reminded of Orson Welles's Harry Lime speech from
> The Third Man:
>
>  ''For 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and
> bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the
> Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and 500 years of
> democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.'
>
> Yes Lime was the bad guy in the movie and he may have maligned the
> Swiss a bit, but you get the point.

Great film! But not only was Harry Lime the villain, he was using this to
rationalize his particular racket -- selling medicines that didn't work to
sick people in postwar Austria. So, he was definitely bending history to
his needs.

That said, I know. Someone's going to say he was right -- that warfare and
civil strife led to cultural ferment and progress. I would question that. I
think it was likely more political decentralization plus economic growth
plus exposure to foreign cultures through commerce. Warfare and strife were
not the causes here, but perhaps more a symptom or just a coincidence.
Well, this is debatable, but I hardly think one can go from "the Borgias,
they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed" to the Renaissance in a
simple causal argument without a lot of hand waving and questionable
assumptions.

And I'd question using Switzerland as a contrast to Renaissance Italy.
Switzerland, contrary to Lime, actually experienced much warfare and
internal strife. It's really only decades after the post-Napoleonic era
that Switzerland kind of settled down into the modern peaceful state we
see. You do know, e.g., that Swiss guards were widely used for hundreds of
years. This wasn't because all the Swiss was pacifists who danced around
the Alps yodeling and eating chocolates. :)

Finally, one hardly need mention, I trust, Swiss contributions to
technology and the sciences.

Regards,

Dan
   Please take a peek at my latest Kindle book at:
http://mybook.to/Gurlitt
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