Plato Banned in Texas: Have We Finally Neanderthalized—Or Worse, Fallen Below the Neanderthals?

By Glênio S Guedes ( Brazilian Attorney-at-Law )

Some events behave like cultural seismographs. They don’t cause earthquakes; they register them—tiny tremors already traveling through the bedrock of intellectual life. An administrative directive instructing a university professor to remove Plato from a course at Texas A&M is one such reading. This is not a clerical hiccup or a local syllabus squabble. It is a civilizational symptom. Which raises the uncomfortable question right away: are we Neanderthalizing higher education—or, given what we now know about Neanderthals, are we doing something worse?

At first glance, the episode looks like another skirmish in the culture wars. New curricular rules, passed under political pressure, narrow how race and gender may be taught. The collateral damage, however, is telling: Platonic passages—the Ladder of Love attributed to Diotima, Aristophanes’ myth in the Symposium—were deemed too close to today’s politicized debates. The paradox is bright as a flare. Plato is not a contemporary pamphlet. He is a load-bearing pillar of Western thought. Banning him out of fear of interpretation is like teaching math by outlawing zero.

From the standpoint of ancient philosophy, this isn’t just a pedagogical mistake; it’s a performative contradiction. Philosophy begins as problem-making—reasoned confrontation among divergent views. No discomfort, no philosophy. To sanitize the classroom until it’s immune to conceptual tension is not neutrality; it’s intentional thinning. Where there is no argued dissent, there is no formation—only cognitive training wheels bolted on forever.

The thinning looks even starker when set against what contemporary science has been telling us about Neanderthals. For a long time, they served as our negative mirror: the blunt other, incapable of symbolic abstraction, fated to vanish before the superior Homo sapiens. That portrait, we now know, was less science than ideology. Archaeology has been undoing it with disquieting force.

Neanderthals practiced complex symbolic thought. They carved deliberate geometric marks, handled pigments for aesthetic ends, organized spaces by purpose, and built collectively without immediate utility. In places like Bruniquel, they selected, moved, and arranged stalagmites into rings—planning, coordinating, assigning meaning. At Des-Cubierta, the differential treatment of large animal skulls suggests ritual practice or, at minimum, a symbolic relationship with the natural world. In short: they did not merely survive; they meant.

More: genetic and anatomical evidence shows Neanderthal brains comparable in volume to ours, with subtle structural differences—not ranked inferiority. All signs point to a species capable of ambiguity, symbolism, and complexity, albeit along paths not identical to ours. The irony lands hard. Paleolithic societies sustained dense symbolic experiences; contemporary societies choose to suppress philosophical texts because debate feels risky.

This cannot be chalked up to local ideology alone. It fits a broader pattern already identified by empirical research: the gradual erosion of basic cognitive capacities in modern societies. Across countries, after decades of increase, average intelligence measures began to decline near the end of the twentieth century—the so-called reverse Flynn effect. Not a biological backslide so much as a functional one: reduced sustained attention, diminished deep reading, a shrinking abstract vocabulary, lower tolerance for complex reasoning.

In environments flooded with fragmented information, accelerated consumption, and affective polarization, ideas that require time, silence, and ambiguity start to feel dangerous. Plato isn’t banned because he’s old; he’s banned because he’s demanding. He assumes readers who can hold paradoxes, distinguish levels of argument, live with questions that don’t resolve on cue. When those capacities erode, complex thought stops being a formative challenge and becomes an institutional hazard.

Here the Texas episode shows its lineage. What’s happening there can’t be separated from the cultural legacy of the Trump era—a period marked by systematic hostility to intellectual complexity, suspicion toward universities, the conversion of public debate into slogan-sport, and the political legitimation of cognitive simplification. This isn’t mere conservatism; it’s a deliberate adaptation of politics to the audience’s average cognitive limits—limits that, instead of being raised, are reinforced.

In such a climate, the university ceases to be a critical institution and becomes a lowered mirror of society. By banning Plato to avoid interpretive friction, it abandons its central mission: forming people capable of thinking against themselves. Silence imposed in the name of neutrality doesn’t yield consensus; it breeds intellectual fragility. And an intellectually fragile democracy is easy prey for demagoguery.

Seen through the lens of recent Neanderthal discoveries, the contrast is embarrassing. They lived with symbols, rituals, non-utilitarian meanings. We, equipped with the full technological apparatus of modernity, begin eliminating complex thought because we can’t keep it aloft. “Neanderthalization” no longer fits—it slanders the Neanderthals. What we’re witnessing is worse: an infra-Neanderthal turn, where the problem isn’t a lack of tools but a refusal of logos.

Plato, wary of demagoguery and fearful of societies unable to tell opinion from reason, would recognize the symptom. What might surprise—and sadden—him is discovering that, millennia later, we’ve become less capable of thinking than those we once dismissed as primitive.