Spencer Heath Archive

Item 244

Taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath, Transcribed and typed on a notepad sheet.

Spring 1958

     As an example of how many men, proficient in scientific understanding of the natural world, can be so cynically ignorant of any like rationality in the unforced relationship among interfunctioning men and so ruthlessly persistent in infecting their natural science works with their crude social ideologies, we may cite, for example, The World of Mathematics, edited by James R. Newman.

In this scientific setting the eccentric dramatist, G.B. Shaw, is brought forward among mathematicians for his commendation of the business of insurance against risks — which turns out to be an argument and tract in advocacy of this business being taken over and made compulsory by the political state. His argument is that since those who contribute voluntarily the funds by which they are insured are benefited by so doing, their contributions would be administered as well and even more for their benefit if they were made compulsory and forcibly seized — a strange kind of logic to be incorporated in a somewhat pretentious mathematical work.