The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, January 12, 2026

Notably: I asked Gemini to give me a dialogue between Socrates and Meno (of Meno fame, the dialogue by Plato) in light of Texas A&M’s order to a philosophy professor to refrain form teaching Plato. The order will inevitably to be reversed, if it hasn’t been already by the time this runs: it’s just too idiotic and contradictory (there’s nothing more repressive, more censorious, more hostile to academic freedom as we understand it, than Plato, a reactionary if there ever was one), though the Texas A&M policy that led to it won’t be. Here’s what Gemini gave me:

Socrates and Meno meet to discuss the implications of a state or institution removing certain philosophical works from its curriculum, specifically targeting the works of Plato himself.

Meno: Socrates, have you heard the news from the West? They say a great academy in the land of Texas has decided that your student Plato—and by extension, your own voice—is no longer fit for the ears of the youth. They are striking his name from the scrolls of required learning.

Socrates: That is curious, Meno. Tell me, do they ban him because they have found a shorter path to virtue, or because they have decided that virtue is no longer worth seeking?

Meno: They say it is a matter of “utility” and “alignment with the state’s values.” They believe his questions are distractions, or perhaps even dangerous to the settled minds of the citizens.

Socrates: Ah, then we must examine what it means to “ban” a thought. Tell me, Meno, if a physician forbids his students from looking at a map of the human heart, does the heart cease to beat within the chest?

Meno: Of course not, Socrates. The heart remains, though the student remains ignorant of its chambers.

Socrates: And if a geometer burns the diagrams of the triangle, does the sum of the internal angles of a triangle cease to be equal to two right angles?

Meno: The truth of the triangle is eternal; the paper it is drawn on is merely a convenience.

Socrates: Then we are in agreement. If Plato speaks of things that are true—of Justice, of the Soul, and of the Good—then banning the book is like a man closing his eyes to the sun because he dislikes the heat. The sun remains in the sky, does it not?

Meno: It does. But Socrates, if the youth do not read the books, they will not know how to find the sun. They will live in the cave you once described, watching shadows and believing them to be the only reality.

Socrates: You speak truly. But consider this: which is the greater threat to the state? A youth who has read Plato and asks “What is Justice?” or a state that is so fragile it fears the question?

Meno: The latter seems the more precarious, certainly.

Socrates: By banning the teaching of these ideas, the academy inadvertently teaches a lesson far more potent than any found in a Republic. They teach the students that ideas have the power to frighten those in authority. Nothing makes a young man more curious about a book than telling him it is forbidden.

Meno: So you believe the ban will fail?

Socrates: I believe that you cannot exile a thought. You can only provide it with the allure of a secret. They may take Plato out of the classroom, Meno, but they cannot take the “Why?” out of the human mind. In trying to silence the dialogue, they have simply ensured that it will happen in the shadows, where it always burns brightest.

… of intolerance it is necessary to say something, since it has been a more persistent characteristic of Europe than many people realize. The Greeks, it is true, were less addicted to this vice than their successors. Yet they put Socrates to death; and Plato, in spite of his admiration for Socrates, held that the State should teach a religion which he himself regarded as false, and that men should be persecuted for throwing doubt upon it. Confucians, Taoists, and Buddhists would not have sanctioned such a Hitlerite doctrine.

–From Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness (1935).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.