Is Dawkins making a joke here, or is he falling into the same fallacy he is deriding in the article. Clearly the world is not "divided" into these two camps, there is a continuum in between and the same person can also hold one view at a time, a different one later, etc.
This is contradictory. If we have some kind of mental handicap that not allows us to perceive spectra properly, it's wrong to blame Plato for this. If, however, Plato is the one who steered the whole civilization wrong, that means we are capable of doing better - we just don't do it right now. Of course, it could be that it's both but Plato and mental handicap together wouldn't allow us to realize it :) Recursion is recursive.
I think Dawkins is simply using Plato's idea as an intellectual roadsign, not assigning moral responsibility. If I refer to Karl Popper when discussing falsifiability, I might simply be providing a convenient reference to the idea, not holding Popper responsible for the idea (which he isn't).
Also, correlation is not causation. Many of these classic ideas, found in the writings of Plato, Aristotle and others, were as much responses to the prevailing ideas of the time as they were a source or inspiration for those ideas. Our modern perspective is distorted by the fact that we may have only one writer's record of the ideas of a time, which may mislead us into thinking that particular writer originated the idea instead of reporting it.
>>> Our modern perspective is distorted by the fact that we may have only one writer's record of the ideas of a time, which may mislead us into thinking that particular writer originated the idea instead of reporting it.
This very well may be true, but since we and Dawkins share this perspective, and Dawkins offers no other suggestion and no other name but Plato and does not consider the possibility that this perspective might be wrong in any way, I think the conclusion that he operates on the assumption that this perspective - attributing essentialism to Plato - is correct would not be illogical, at least when we consider this particular article.