This discussion reminds me of my favorite line from the great movie "The Third Man," of 1949, starring Orson Welles as Harry Lime: "In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."