Former U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson aptly characterized the two minds of modernity: liberalism and statism, in an excellent artice on the Virginia Tech killings, reprinted on National Review Online.

Discussing the Virginia Tech authorities’ opposition to a proposal to remove the campus exception to the state’s concealed carry laws—which would have allowed qualified adult citizens to carry firearms on campus, and which could certainly have prevented many of the deaths in the VT killer’s rampage—Thompson writes:

The logic behind this attitude baffles me, but I suspect it has to do with a basic difference in worldviews. Some people think that power should exist only at the top, and everybody else should rely on "the authorities" for protection.

Exactly. These are the two mentalities of modernity: statism and classical liberalism, respectively.