Just plucked Allan Bloom’s 1968 translation of The Republic off the shelf and read his introduction, where he explains that he has attempted a meticulous word for word translation of Plato’s text, without inclusion of modern words, which he believes can only be deviant from any meaning that Plato intended.

His prime example of this is that he does not replace Plato’s notion of “the beautiful and the good,” with something like “morality and values” or “discussing moral values,” or other such phrases popular in late 60s academia. Plato said “beauty” and he said “good,” and we should try to understand his meaning, Bloom argues.

Citing Nietzsche, Bloom argues that an attempt to do otherwise would turn our understanding of the Greek canon into a kind of archeological field where we have pre-populated the dig with artifacts of our own choosing.

What Bloom believes is controversial in 2020, but it strikes me as powerful: A careful reader with good intentions can understand the mind of somebody from a long ago culture with distinct social and economic conditions, even through the medium of a translator, if they commit themselves to the intellectual project.

There’s a lot that stands in the way of this kind of reading — the reader’s prejudices, the inability of the translator to overcome their own cultural biases and background no matter how hard they try, the inevitable gaps in our understanding about who Plato is, how he lived and what influenced him, would broadly define the chasm we must cross.

Bloom thinks it can be done and I think he has to be right, otherwise true scholarship and creative works that transcend autobiography would be impossible. This kind of careful, honest reading is a path towards empathy and a re-affirmation of the old, seemingly now abandoned belief that the old liberal arts education can serve as a pillar for the establishment of an open and civil society.

For some, this will seem a quaint notion at best and offensive at worst. People claiming objective and open study of canonical texts have intentionally or not, excluded entire cultures, diminished the roles of women and have called on the wisdom of ancients to justify the unjustifiable. For too many people, “civil society” has failed to function either civilly or socially.

But there are stakes here for human freedom. As Bloom points out, in The Republic described by Plato, society is protected by those who fight the wars. “There are no guardians above the guardians; the only guardian of the guardians is a proper education,” Bloom writes. Beyond just the guardians, Plato’s audience was a societal elite who would make decisions for everybody else. If you accept that such an elite cannot be eliminated, that it will always exist and propagate itself in one way or another, then the only way to control these people would be to educate them about the beautiful and the good and to hope that education will temper and inform their decision-making.

I wonder if our current crop of elites in the United States has been properly educated? It seems our President’s notion of “the beautiful and the good,” is banal, gaudy and self-interested but that its alternative is technocratic to a fault.

Deep reading with an open mind, along with the belief that we can understand the minds of others, seems more necessary now than ever.