Sept. 20: "Is Plato right?''

A sneak peek at my magazine column for October:



Professor Holt stood in front on his History of Western Philosophy class and posed a question that compelled the 32 students to diligently study their shoes.

It was not a philosophical question.

“How many of you read what I assigned last time?’’ he asked.

One student raised his hand. The hand belonged to the old guy who always goes to class early, sits up front, takes copious notes and never sends text messages during class. (Hate that guy!)

Dr. Holt’s eyes settled on me.

“You did?’’ he asked in a tone of wonder. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you drink beer all weekend like normal people?’’

And so it is in the world of Dr. Holt’s History of Western Philosophy class, where good is a curiosity and bad is to be expected.

For the first few weeks of class, I had pretty much made up my mind that Dr. Holt was the worst sort of teacher you could have. Now, I am convinced he is the finest kind.

He is, in some respects the caricature of the eccentric college professor. He is perpetually flustered, utterly disorganized and has an almost pathological hatred of dry-erase markers. The markers are forever running out of ink as he writes rather maniacally his Greek phrases on the big white board up front. About every five minutes, an unworthy marker goes flying across the room, followed by what can only be assumed is a string of Greek curse words.

Yet for all his imagined flaws, there is one indictment that no student will ever make against him: Dr. Dale Holt absolutely loves Philosophy.

His enthusiasm for it, his endless fascination, seems to shoot from his fingertips and the ends of his graying hair. In fact, this passion is so boundless that he often leaps from one complicated idea or theory to another, leaving a wake of ancient philosophers behind like dust from the back of a pick-up truck. We students, hardly any of us philosophy majors, struggle mightily in a futile attempt to keep up.

In short, he loves Philosophy like I love the newspaper business – even after I got kicked out of the newspaper business.

I was afraid I would fail the class. But then Dr. Holt revealed a little secret, which I was able to confirm by talking to previous students in his class: His tests are impossibly simple. He only gives two of them, a mid-term and a final.

On the class website he posted a “sample test,’’ that he says are a pretty fair representation of the real tests.

One sample question:

One of the first conceptual difficulties to be faced when studying the history of philosophy is:

A. Determining what your subject matter is: that is, answering the question, “What is philosophy?’’

B. Deciding whether to buy the book or sponge off my classmates.

C. Stockpiling enough caffeinated soft drinks to see me through the semester.

So you can see, Dr. Holt is not too hung up on tests and grades and those sorts of things.

And yet, I find that after five weeks of classes I am somehow learning more in his class than in all of my other classes, where tests and grades are serious business and the student is inclined to gorge on facts primarily for the purpose of regurgitating them at the appointed test times. I find that I am beginning to love philosophy whereas Spanish III, for example, leaves me cold and uncaring.

For the past two weeks, we’ve been studying Plato’s Republic. Maybe it is a combination of Plato’s brilliance and Dr. Holt’s enthusiasm for the subject, but whatever the reason I find that I am fascinated by it. In fact, so revealing has it been that I am embarrassed to note that my first exposure to it came at the age of 52. It’s like discovering a thing that, to your surprise, has been pretty much common knowledge to everyone else for years and years. Like Facebook, for example.

In The Republic, in case you haven’t read it or the intervening years have dulled your memory, Plato – speaking through his mentor, Socrates – seeks to define “justice’’ during an argument with his friends. Socrates’ friends, it seems to me, are almost always insufferable prigs. No wonder he wound up drinking poison. I rather imagine it would be like being trapped in a never-ending Tea Party rally.

In seeking to define justice, Plato constructs a city he calls the “just city,’’ where everyone has a well-defined role and is committed to performing the duties of that role.

The end result would be a society where each is given what is his due and each person’s work is devoted to what is best for the city as a whole.

Socrates’ friends listen to his theory carefully and it occurs to them that the “just city’’ would likely be met with some fierce opposition, for it is, in many ways, far from Utopian.

How would Socrates propose to deal with the protests that his concept would surely prompt?

Paraphrasing here, Socrates says you would pretty much have to kill anyone over the age of 8 and start all over.

Clearly, Plato was not really constructing what he considered to be a perfect society. He was merely using it as a model to define the complicated idea of justice.

But more and more I wonder if Plato’s solution – made in jest – is about the only solution we have left to fix what is wrong with our own country these days.

I don’t suppose we could really kill everyone over the age of 8, although I do have a pretty good idea of who I would start with.

But I do wonder if we have reached the point where we are so divided that we cannot grasp any real solutions.

The best example I can think of came on the night the President made his speech on the Jobs Bill.

Within five minutes of the close of his speech, I noted sadly that many of my friends on Facebook had already torn in it apart.

“It’s all about unions and redistributing the wealth,’’ one posted.

Another suggested that the job bill was merely a tool to create a socialist state.

Yet another said it was “just another bailout.’’

This seems a horribly wondrous thing to me, that common, everyday people would be able to divine and analyze the bill within mere minutes.

I asked each of those folks if they had read the bill.

Of course, they had not, mainly because there was no bill to read at that point.

Will the president’s job bill work? I have no idea. But I would like to think that all of us have suffered enough to at least approach it with an open mind.

To me, our situation is like falling off a ship far out at in the ocean. In that circumstance, you will try anything you judge might possibly float and you will keep trying things until you find something that does. I can scarcely believe that a rational person, flailing away in a vast sea, would see an object close at hand and began to theorize on that object’s ability to support his weight. I don’t think he would be too worried about the source of this object, either. No, I believe that he would approach it hopefully and put it to the test, laying aside his skepticism for the moment.

But we Americans seem to have lost that capacity. I sincerely believe we would rather drown.

I am no apologist for the President, I should point out. He seems to lack one essential quality: The ability to lead.

But I wonder, too, if anyone has that ability. I rather doubt it. The Right devours the Left and Left devours the Right. We are consuming ourselves. We are torn and bloodied and in rags, but hey, our dogma survives, unmolested and robust as ever.

Sometimes, I think it’s simply a matter that we haven’t reached the real crisis yet. Oh, I know you will hear people screaming from the rooftops that America has reached the point of desperation. And yet, just watch: As soon as a new “i-Whatever’’ comes on the market, millions of sorely-pressed Americans will stand in line for hours to throw hundreds of dollars at the cashier.

It’s one thing to theorize about going hungry. It’s quite another to actually go hungry.

Maybe that’s what it will take, ultimately. Maybe we’ll all have to suffer – really suffer – to the point where we are willing to try anything to see if it will float.

We’re not there yet.

I have a feeling we’ll get there soon enough, though.

I don’t see any other way, really, sort of an epidemic of common sense.

But as long as the question remains “Which Party is more Evil?’’ rather than “What will we do about supper?’’ we are at an impasse.

We would rather gouge each other’s eyes out than listen to what the other person has to say.

Maybe Plato was right. Maybe all that can be done is to start over.

But how?