to be a manufacturing and a commercial power, and she
will not recede from her resolution.”
But, let us pause. We have still not really proven that
there is a causal connection between universal education
in mathematics and the improvement of democracy. To be
honest, I don’t think we can. One may use one’s judgement
as to whether it is likely or not, fall back onto the
old presumption that the exact similarity of their moral
structures is just an accident. To prove, scientifically, that
two factors are linked causally, we should need to change
one factor, and to show that other changes follow both
consistently and as predicted. Clearly to do this convincingly
would require an experiment on the scale of Europe.
It would need to last for several generations, and it would
need to produce a clear range of related and consistent results,
all showing that democratic behaviour does change
in parallel with mathematical training. If they changed in
the same way, we might be able to believe that they are
linked. This huge experiment is impossible. But we can
examine instead a later historical coincidence, which in
effect is precisely the experiment we envisaged. A new
style of mathematics was taught in Europe, and political
ideals did change in the same way. We can ignore one
coincidence. But two?
2.3 The historical evidence
Democracy is a human activity. It has extremes. Singleminded
democracies are entirely possible. For example, in
a 17th century New England Puritan community a man’s
wife told the elders of their church that he talked in his
sleep. When angry, she added, he threw peas about the
house. He was found guilty of witchcraft, and was hanged.
Such communities generally do act swiftly to remove differences
and silence dissent. This is very efficient. But ultimately
such communities find it difficult to change from
one course of action to another, simply because other options
are so rarely considered.
The other extreme must be democracies in which there
are almost as many options as people. The difficulty here
is to learn how to manage this variety. But a democracy
which does learn will have a great reserve of options in
response to change. This is slower, and seemingly less
efficient, but in the long term history has shown that it is
more efficient than depending on only one man – or one
idea; on putting all of society’s eggs in one basket.
And yet how, exactly, does mathematics teaching help
produce this kind of individual and social pluralism? How
can it produce variety and flexibility, respect for dissent,
and, most important of all, respect for dissenters? Using
mathematics as a model for society seems to be moving in
the wrong direction. Many people seem to think that this
must be the road to extreme authoritarianism: to dictators
and tyranny, to death camps, gulags, and killing fields.
And they are not wrong. These are precisely the lessons
of history. Throughout Europe in the 19th century, and
well into the 20th, mathematics was taught with increasing
confidence as a one-option science. The expectation
was that it would soon be the first science of mankind
to be “completed”. By the early 20th century it was being
taught both explicitly and implicitly in every school
and university, just as in previous centuries it had been