A good US history professor many years ago described western philosophies with a small matrix of “realism” and “idealism” on one side, and “optimism” and “pessimism” on the other.
For example, after 1500 years of war in Europe, the Europeans are exhausted of idealism and optimism; so their philosophies are realistic and pessimistic. “Things will go on like they are today, gradually getting worse.”
The majority of Americans, however, have the realism and optimism of the frontier. “With hard work we can make our lives and those of our posterity better.”
However, mostly limited to New England, there is a strong current of just the opposite point of view: idealistic pessimism. The craving of the “New Jerusalem” where the “elect” will live and rule over others.
But here is also a great irony. Their idealism has the fundamental belief that “people are inherently good”. But from this is extrapolated that “government is inherently good as well, so the more government, the better.”
The flip side of this is “Frontier libertarianism”, that embraces the idea that “people are inherently bad, and so is any government”; at least enough so that the only agreements that exist are temporary handshake agreements between people who trust each other, up to a point.
But the founding fathers had a different idea. Believing in the social contract, but knowing that there are both good men and bad men and both, and that it can be hard to tell them apart. So they concluded *not* that people are inherently “good” or “bad”, but that they are inherently *weak*.
They knew that the ink on the constitution, and the law, would be barely dry before people would consider ways of avoiding and evading it. Which is why there are such a large number of checks and balances, of competing human interests, in our constitution.
And in this is the answer to our society, and Charles Krauthammer.
“Ultimately, a civilized society must disarm its citizenry if it is to have a modicum of domestic tranquillity of the kind enjoyed in sister democracies like Canada and Britain.”
Seen through eyes that think that people are inherently good, this would make sense, that a good government made up of good people, can take away guns that can make good people do bad things.
And it even “half” makes sense if all people are inherently bad. This is a chaos theory, that guns create chaos because bad people will inevitably misuse them.
But it makes NO sense if people are inherently weak. If they live under the social contract, enforced by all, in defense of the weak good people, and against the weak bad people, guns are an absolute necessity.
The founding fathers had the right idea.
Who is the US history professor- you are parsing, and from what University?
The founding fathers got the idea from Jesus (paraphrased by Ravi Zacharias) “All the Evil in the world comes from the heart of man.”