This discussion, which appeared for a couple of days on PF, was lost during a technical hiccup of some sort last year, never to appear again. Now I'm posting it here...

There's a famous scene in The Third Man. Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, has become rich just after the Second World War by stealing scarce penicillin from hospitals, diluting it, and selling it on the black market for high prices, resulting in the deaths of innocent people. One of the characters at one point says this about Lime's actions:

These were murders. Men with gangrened legs, women in childbirth. And there were children too. They used some of this diluted penicillin against meningitis. The lucky children died. The unlucky ones went off their heads. You can see them now in the mental ward. That was the racket Harry Lime organized.

Later, in the famous scene where Lime is confronted, he says this in his defence:

Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for thirty 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, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Lime is a suitably villainous villain, but doesn't he have a point? Leaving aside his crimes and whether his speech goes any way towards mitigating them or exculpating himself (it doesn't), there does seem to be a problem here. At least, I have a problem thinking about it clearly. On the one hand I abhor warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed (more than that: I believe that humanity can progress beyond them); but on the other hand I celebrate the history of great civilizations such as Renaissance Italy, and recognize that world-changing ideas and works of art – the ideas and works of art that excite us – are often born of societies in transition, riven by war and riddled with cruelty and oppression. Obversely, I confess to an occasional feeling of disdain when I compare these cultures with those that were unremarkable and conservative, even if they were also peaceful. I'm not sure, but I don't think this can be reduced to the same sort of inclinations that lead us to prefer watching movies about Roman gladiators to those about harmonious Icelandic sheep farming communities.

What do you think? How do I make sense of this?