Our 'Plato problem'

This brilliant article by Louis René Beres took my breath away. It's a perfect companion piece to my previous post ("No, stupidity isn't a party issue, it's ours").

Some excerpts:

In Plato’s Republic, a canonic centerpiece of all Western thought, we first read of the “philosopher king,” a visionary leader who would impressively combine deep learning with effective governance. Today, almost 2400 years later, such leadership is nowhere to be found ... Here in the United States, we seemingly remain content with criteria of presidential selection that emphasize anything but cultivated insights or real wisdom. ... Stubbornly, we the people are willing to reduce all serious political judgments to a crass assortment of numbing clichés and visceral ideologies.

In American politics, no one any longer expects what Ralph Waldo Emerson had once called “high thinking.” ... In our national politics of veneered truths, whenever a candidate’s spoken words seethe with vacant allusions and blatant equivocations, the crowd nods approvingly, and leaps with satisfaction.

Many of our national heroes were once created by commendable achievement. Today, the successful politician is fashioned by a system that is refractory to all wisdom, a system that is sustained by banality, empty chatter, and half knowledge.

When will we learn to look behind the news, to acknowledge that our fragile political world has been constructed upon ashes? The answer: Not until we learn to take ourselves seriously as persons; not until we begin to read and think with sincerity; not until we stop amusing ourselves to death; not until we seek rapport with genuine feeling; and not until we rediscover the dignified grace of real learning.

Beres concludes: "Plato’s 'philosopher king' may not be a practicable standard for American electoral politics, but it surely can’t hurt to keep such a potentially enviable measure somewhere in mind. At a minimum, such a recollection could remind us of how far we have already strayed." Indeed.