A few months ago a friend sent me the following lines by the Italian comedian Beppe Grillo: ‘For a long time Italians have been in a [political] coma. We are always in search of the lesser evil. In fact, we should construct a monument for the “lesser evil”. A huge monument in the middle of Rome’. If anyone ever asked me to build such a monument, in Rome or elsewhere, I would probably look for a high hill and place the digits 665 (like giant Hollywood letters) overlooking the city centre - a notch less than evil, a counter displaying the fact that our society has become a calculating machine.
Indeed the principle of the ‘lesser evil’ has become so prominently identified with the ethico-political foundations of liberal capitalism (and its political system that we like to call democracy) and so firmly naturalized in common speech that it seem to have become the ‘new good’. Commenting upon the comparative merits of democracy shortly after the end of World War II, Winston Churchill may have inaugurated this trend when he sardonically noted that ‘it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’.
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