with a complete reorientation of personal existence toward the transcendent world of Forms, that is, those immutable and universal ideal truths that provide the concepts, order, and evaluative norms we need to make sense of our lives. Plato thinks that the Form of the Good is very significant here, for it tends to illuminate our way of life with rational and spiritual norms that guide and enlighten our daily practical decisions. For Plato then knowledge of the Forms, as the enduring foundations of a healthy civilization, would help us subdue immorality and truly accede to the good life. He believes that by developing a healthy understanding of the Good, we also learn to love and imitate It, for the elements of clarity, moral tranquility, justice, and efficiency it contributes to our lives are more spiritually and psychologically beneficial than the elements of pain, fear, frustration, and lack that accompany life molded by the logic of pleasure. So likewise America must look to her founding practical and spiritual ideals to heal itself from its current crisis of self-confidence. She must reiterate its vision of human betterment on the basis of freedom, moral clarity, and cultural self-affirmation as a highest expression of the human condition.
As a society, Plato would suggest, we may achieve such a work of cultural renewal if we make it our duty to reiterate the values of hard work, moderation, industriousness, and self-government that had defined the lives of most people in the colonial settler communities that founded this nation four hundred years ago. These values were grounded on the assumption, popular in our recent past, that individual Americans owe their dignity, as solid members of a progressive society, to their ability to