Hard work

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>>Are post-Soviet Russian doctors growing potatoes for survival better
>>doctors now than they used to be, because they are now intimately
>>acquainted with the sort of "manual labor" that must have been
>>foreign to them in the Soviet past?
>
>At the risk of sounding like a Maosit crazy, let me tell a story 
>about a guy I knew in my dept at Cambridge, Hist & Phil of Science. 
>He was a historian of maths, Chinese, and had been sent to 
>Cambs--this was in 1980--as sort of an apology for having had life 
>life and career ruined in the Cultural Revolution, where he had been 
>sent to the countryside. This man was as apolitical as you could be; 
>he was really only interested in mathematics. He was not, in 
>particular, a Communist or a member, even for show, of the Chinese 
>CP. I attempted to commiserate with him, but failed.
>
>"It was really a very good thing," he told me. "We intellectuals had 
>no idea how the people live. We would not have had any idea if they 
>had not sent us." Turned out, he was sent to a remote village where 
>he spent a half year getting in the way of the farmers, for whom he 
>was just a useless mouth to feed and no help at all in the fields. 
>Then it turned out that, as the farmers were illiterate and and 
>innumerate, they could not correctly calculate how to divide to the 
>seed or determine the volume of watwer necessary for irrigation or 
>that sort of thing. Well of course, he could do this, and taught 
>them, and after a while he became a part of the village. When the CR 
>was over, they gave him a  big send off with a thank you, gifts; the 
>works. He was a hit.
>
>"Of course they were very harsh," he said, meaning the Red Guards 
>and the Communists, "very incorrect, and I would not want those days 
>back. But I think it was a good thing that I was sent to the 
>countryside. I was able to be of use to the people and to learn how 
>they lived." Naturally his experience was better than many people's 
>in those days.
>
>So, anyway; I am not sure how this bears on the joining of mental 
>and manual labor. My friend was a failure as manual laborer. (though 
>it wasn't exactly that; the thing was; he didn't know how to farm; 
>he lacked the skill.) But he helped the farmers be better farmers 
>with the application of his mental labor. So draw what moral you 
>will from the story.
>
>--jks

That's a nice story, actually.  The moral that I would draw from it 
is that your friend -- the historian of mathematics -- helped farmers 
_not_ by becoming a farmer _but_ by applying his knowledge to 
practice & sharing it with them.  The farmers, in turn, appreciated 
him _not_ as a farmer _but_ as an intellectual whose knowledge & 
teaching skills were of great help to them.

Yoshie