Interesting re Sowell.
It also accords so well with the visions of Postmodernist neo-neo-Liberals/ the Left. In fact many of the Left may hate their human nature and in turn hate themselves.
I have also thought that the Left is more pessimistic and self loathing than the Right who is more optimistic and realizes man is a flawed but heroic species which the Judeo-Christian tradition embraces more than Postmodernist philosophies.
Your basic terrorist - say Mohammed Atta, Carlos the Jackal, the guy that beheaded the American in Saudi Arabia and kept the head in FREEZER. Well they are psychopaths and, if they lived in American, would have to content themselves with being serial killers.
But in the Islamic world - with its religious ideology - they are martyrs, great heroes.
My theory is that societies produce a given number of pychos. In some - like ours - they are marginalized and reduced to being the "killer on the road." In others - like Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russian and today's Islam - they find institutions and organizations where they are welcomed and allowed to practice their dark arts.
The reason I stick with good old fashioned pessimism is that in my religious pilgrimage (Fundamentalist Protestantism to Catholicism to investigation of Eastern chr*stianity to Noachism) I was greeted at each step with an allegedly more "optimistic" view of human nature than was warranted by either personal or historical experience.
Catholicism says that Protestantism is needlessly pessimistic about human nature. Eastern Orthodoxy says the same about Catholicism and Judaism/Noachism says the same about chr*stianity per se. Yet each religion has certainly been around long enough to know about human nature, has it not?
My own opinion is that the "we're more optimistic than you" line is a mistaken way of differentiating among the religions. The fact that devout Jews deal with sin by going to HaShem for forgiveness and making atonement isn't really that different from devout Catholic/Orthodox chr*stians who go to J*sus and do pennances (other than to add J*sus to the mix and insist that J*sus' "sacrifice" is what makes human effort of any effect, which to any Protestant or former Protestant is a purely theoretical difference). And as for radical Calvinistic Protestants, while their view of human nature may be truly more pessimistic than the others, even they insist on man's duty to obey a moral code, even if it has nothing to do with where one goes when he dies.
I guess what I'm saying is that the "we're optimists!" line was a real obstacle to my own religious progress and so I don't stress optimism about human nature (Judaism in fact says that man is born with his evil inclination but only receives his good one when he turns thirteen!). Certain aspects of Eastern Orthodox anthropology, for example, seem on the surface to clash with its insistent rejection of original sin. So maybe the rejection of original sin shouldn't be described as evidence of greater optimism at all, but should be explained some other way.
I don't suppose I'm making any sense. I suppose you'd have had to walked my path to understand what I'm saying here.