Sow Your Fallow Ground begins the discussion of how you choose what action to take for social justice. You must be the judge of why to take action, but the reasons to do so are fully explained in the Bible. The reason we have the power to choose is our ability to imagine the future effects of immediate choices; still, we often neglect that God-given ability. Sow Your Fallow Ground is about communication in light of the science of human action-the communication that separates humankind from lesser life forms. These concepts merge easily with the authentic Bible, in spite of the belief by many that the Bible and natural science are mutually exclusive. The science of praxeology, which is the common name for human action, teaches us how we make hundreds of choices every day. How we make those choices is a "value-free" science; still, without some kind of rudder, compass, or guiding star, we drift into every kind of faulty behavior from unhealthy addictions to economic booms, busts, and wars. There is a very important connection between the infallible Bible, human action science (neither humanism nor psychology), and economics as a single subject. Like the biblical Trinity or a three-legged stool, they are different aspects of the same thing-the choices we make.
Sow Your Fallow Ground
By Charles SimmsTrafford Publishing
Copyright © 2012 Charles Simms
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4269-9669-6Contents
About the cover design................................viiDedication............................................ixIn Appreciation.......................................xiPreface...............................................xiii1 Beginnings..........................................12 The Fallow Ground...................................113 Potential Sowers....................................194 Fallow Farm & Rookie Farmer.........................275 Law of Imagination..................................336 Law of Association..................................437 The Law of Choice...................................498 Law of Marginal Utility.............................579 Law of Originary Interest...........................6910 How We Learn.......................................7511 Fertile Seeds......................................8712 PurposeorMission Statement.........................95A I, Pencil...........................................99B First Thanksgiving Proclamation.....................107C Tax and Spend Poll..................................109D Song of a Thousand Years............................111
Chapter One
Beginnings
On the first day of the fall semester at Centerville High School, the science teacher, Mr. Simpkins, called the roll, filled out the seating chart by student preference, then folded his hands and smiled. After a short time one boy raised his hand and asked, "What Is this class about?"
With a quick glance at the seating chart Mr. Simpkins replied, "Thank you for asking—Robert, that's what science is really about. What causes this disease? How can we create more energy? What makes the seasons change? What are the demographics of Centerville? Why do we have hurricanes? How can we increase food production? Or how can we reduce garbage?
"There are over sixty active fields of science and this lab has some information or equipment for less than a third of them and references to some of the others. You are free to explore any field you wish by yourself or in teams of two and include any data you have found elsewhere. There are also about a dozen emerging science fields that are sometimes implied in an established science and you may explore one of those.
"There will be a science fair at the end of the semester when each student or team will submit a paper or project about what they learned because, except for the three R's, in science and in life, we all choose what to learn. That's what makes each of us unique and how the world of knowledge unfolds. Finally, you will be graded on how clearly you explain or demonstrate your findings because science must be shared with the public in order to be useful. If two or more want to study the same science, they should study different aspects to avoid competition in grading."
Mr. Simpkins was referring to the natural sciences and the customary scientific method although this book will suggest one use for the theoretical science of praxeology, with the common name of human action. Praxeology comes from Medieval Latin or Greek meaning established practice or custom. What's also interesting, a Greek sculptor named Praxiteles in the 4th century B.C. is famous for the reality of his statues of people. But the modern science of human action grew out of research in the field of economics, in other words what we do rather than what we look like or how we're made.
Economics is not a dry subject. It is not a dismal subject. It is not about statistics. It is about human life. It is about the ideas that motivate human beings. It is about how men act from birth until death. It is about the most important and interesting drama of all—human action. (Emphasis in original)
Someone said that God hid the secret of mankind inside man because that's the last place we'd look and human action certainly explains a lot about us. Like the Bible, human Action is very much about the causes and effects of human choices, whether good, just ok, or awful. For contrast, the natural sciences look for the cause of an observable fact or event whereas human action science looks for the effect of our God-given, uniquely human, free will.
You don't need to know how a rake is made in order to rake the lawn but maybe a little bit about how human action was made will help use this different kind of tool. Human action as a science emerged from "Austrian" economics after the 1871 publication of Principles of Economics by Carl Menger. Menger introduced the subjective, as opposed to objective, marginal utility theory. The beginnings of that idea were found at The School of Salamanca in Spain in the last half of the sixteenth century in their descriptions of human action. For example Diego de Covarrubias wrote, "The value of an article does not depend on its essential nature but on the estimation of men, even if that estimation be foolish."
Interest in economics seems to fade in the seventeenth century and then slowly awaken in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It came of age in the twentieth century with the publication by Ludwig von Mises of his magnum opus, Human Action, in 1949. From 1902 to 1969 Mises wrote over thirty books and more than 200 articles showing the fallacies of autocratic economic control so clearly that he had to escape from Nazi Germany without his private papers. They were later discovered in Moscow and are now, I believe, in the Hillsdale College library.
I am not aware that human action is taught anywhere unless perhaps as a sub-topic in a course on economics at a mere handful of colleges, although it broke into print over sixty years ago. I am not an economist so the references are the sources for further study. If you are interested in the science more than the suggested uses in this book, please get a copy of Mises Made Easier, A Glossary for Ludwig von Mises' Human Action, Prepared by Percy L. Greaves, Jr., Free Market Books, 1974.
So how does an ordinary tool designer qualify to write about a theoretical new science? Well, if we look up some unusual words and add some scattered history, it's not all that difficult and could be an elective high school course. I became fascinated with it and since we learn by experience this book is feeding my personal curiosity.
When I was eleven, I helped, or mostly watched, my dad build a house and three ideas stuck in my mind. First, when squaring the foundation, Dad taught me that any triangle with sides in the ratios of three, four, and five would always be a right triangle. So we measured six feet on one side, eight feet on the other, and I held the end of the tape while Dad adjusted the angle so the diagonal was ten feet. I thought that was a good rule to remember and, sure enough, a dozen years later I aced a mean math test as an Army Air Corps Cadet at Tulsa University by remembering that simplified Pythagorean theorem.
Second, when I hit my thumb trying to drive a nail, I threw the hammer, and Dad quietly said, "Never get angry at an inanimate object." It wasn't the hammer that caused the problem but too often people blame the object, like guns for example, instead of the operator, or look for a scapegoat instead of a solution.
Third, when cutting the studs for the whole house, Dad made one stud he labeled "pat" for pattern and used it to measure and cut all the rest. Why then does our Constitution bend with the political wind until the original principle is unrecognizable by an average citizen? A principle can only be found, not made and a small leak can sink a large ship.
I guess I took a liking to intangible ideas that have tangible effects. These can include such things as honesty or dishonesty, trust or distrust, justice or injustice, love or hate, and true or false, as well as my three lessons about geometry, temperament, and standards.
What does that have to do with human action you may ask? With children in school my wife, Liz, was active in PTA and her chapter wanted to run one of their members for School Board. Liz and the husband of the candidate were nominated as campaign cochairmen. Not knowing anything about politics, they read a book that said if you did a, b, and c, you'd win. So they did a, b, and c, and, Surprise! Their candidate won and it was fun to win.
When I transferred as a tool designer from Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank California 350 miles north to Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale, California, Liz was invited to join a Republican Women's Club and I tried political action around the edges, but for me it was slippery mud wrestling compared to tooling principles and I wasn't good at it.
An educator once said that children learn half of all they will ever know by the age of five because everything is new to them. Th at may be an exaggeration but, by that definition, when I transferred to Sunnyvale, I became like a kid again. In Santa Clara County in the early sixties everything was new to me, the gorgeous orchards in bloom, the weather, a new house to landscape inside and out, the space race, even the 1960's Cultural Revolution, and in my job as a tool designer there were new kinds of tooling.
A friend hijacked me from tooling to the Corona program to study the effects of radiation and weightlessness on living organisms like seeds, insects, and chicken embryos in an airtight canister for a three-day orbit around the Earth. We also demonstrated two systems to keep a mouse alive in that canister although a mouse never went for a ride. The main effort of our department was to build a life support system to keep a young chimpanzee healthy and happy in a simulated space vacuum and that required a lot of technology new to me.
I was on the board of a local chapter of The American Society of Tool and Manufacturing Engineers (ASTME) when all the local chapters of various engineering societies co-sponsored Wernher von Braun as guest speaker. He was the German rocket scientist America inherited after WW-ll, and rocket science was the hottest new technology. The County fairgrounds event served the largest sit down dinner, with cold salads and hot entrees, ever served in the county at that time.
The engineering chapters also co-sponsored an all-day Saturday seminar at San Jose State University about electric cars. I wrote Process Planning for Outer Space for the February, 1962, issue of the ASTME Magazine, went to tool shows, seminars, read a wide variety of books, and took any classes that might be remotely useful.
One 1963 evening class offered by the company was Value Engineering. It was about creative problem solving and it still comes in handy even just around the house. The text was Applied Imagination by Alex F. Osborn and now there is a Creative Education Foundation and Creative Problem Solving Institute web site, www.cef-cpsi.org, with a whole library of related books and articles. Creative problem solving turns problems into puzzles and grows your imagination. It's yeasty. (Matthew 13:33, KJV)
My next door neighbor had been telling me that we need to do something about Communism. With my every waking moment learning interesting new things and Communism half a world away, I was too busy. The very day the Corona program was finalized my neighbor invited me to another neighbor's house to hear a taped speech about the "problem" of Communism. Ok, I was out of problems at work, time to tackle the next one. I actually took a pad and pencil with me to write out the solution to this new problem. Hmmm, I needed to read more about it except that one book led to another about my mud wrestling political handicap.
Back in tooling in 1965 one day my Department Manager asked me to find out what was holding up a rejected drill jig in the tool shop that was urgently needed in production. The jig was a little larger than a card table and slightly convex with a bar across the middle like a big belt buckle. The rejection form, written by a night shift tool inspector, said one drill bushing was worn and must be replaced. However, the jig was symmetrical and the bad bushing could be one on either side. There were three options. 1. Wait until the night shift tool inspector could re-inspect the jig. 2. Have a day shift tool inspector inspect the jig. Both time consuming under the time pressure. 3. Just replace both bushings, a quick easy job.
As I started to leave to find the tool and die Supervisor, two men showed up, one from scheduling and another from production. I briefly explained the problem and they promptly got into a shouting match like two little boys about which bushing should be replaced.
"Is too."
"Is not."
I was dumfounded. How in the world did a simple mechanical problem turn into a, who-could-shout-loudest, like who-could-spend-most, political issue?
I don't remember the outcome because the next day I had what became a watershed experience. As I was passing the company library on another errand I wondered if there was a book that might explain yesterday's childish argument. I backtracked a few steps, went in and scanned the stacks rather quickly, skipping technical subjects for business and psychological subjects.
In the last section of the last stack I found a thin book titled The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science. My curiosity took a detour. The bedrock under the south cable support tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance, is a hundred feet under water and forty feet below the ocean floor, unlike the Leaning Tower of Pisa. What could be the "ultimate foundation" under economics? On page two I found this statement, "Knowledge starts from the clear distinction between A and non-A." Then the author made a sharp distinction between natural (man made) theology and revealed theology and defined mankind like this: "Man acts because he is dissatisfied with the state of affairs as it prevails in the absence of his intervention." That was about ideas not things like drill jigs. Maybe it has something to do with my original question and I checked it out.
That book (1962, 133 pages) led to Human Action (1949, 885 pages) and Theory and History (1957, 379 pages), and a dozen others by or about the same author, Ludwig von Mises. They were so fascinating I sometimes sat up until 2:00 am reading although I had to be at work at 7:00. I'd found the mother lode and it took a lot of digging to mine the gold of permanent human action principles like the axioms of geometry for tools.
Mr. Mises has no peers in the field of economics. However he made some references to Biblical ideas and some to atheistic or agnostic ideas, maybe because human action laws are true for all religions and worldviews. In any case I have not found any evidence that the actual principles of human action contradict Biblical principles.
The Scriptures contain, independently of of a Divine origin, more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, purer morality, more important history, and finer strains of both poetry and eloquence than could be collected within the same compass from all books that were ever composed in any age or in any idiom.
This book is about communication in light of the science of human action or what makes an "unbridgeable gulf" between humankind and all lesser life forms. I hope to show that it merges easily with the authentic Bible in spite of the belief by many that the Bible and natural science are mutually exclusive. (Some Bibles have been revised to promote a near sighted dogma rather than ultimate doctrine.) "Starting from the limitations of his human nature, man's discursive reasoning can never circumscribe and define the essence of omnipotence." Whether I succeed or not depends on both of us. I will try to draw a clear and correct picture of this theoretical science by using contrast, cause-effect scenarios, and analogies in showing how to use it and you must try to squint your minds eye to "see what is not seen." (2 Corinthians 4:18, KJV)
The title of this book is suggested by the Bible:
"For thus saith the Lord to the men of Judah and Jerusalem, break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns." (and) "Behold, a sower went forth to sow; And when he sowed, some seeds fell ... among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them: But other fell into good ground and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. (Jeremiah 4:3 & Matthew 13:3,4,7,8 KJV)
Fallow means ground left unseeded during a growing season, normally more fertile, and also, according to Webster's 1996 New Collegiate Dictionary, to minds left untutored. Thus there appears to be a tutoring opportunity in the light of Biblical scripture and the laws of human action. Although here are three caution signs we should keep in mind.
• "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God?" Jesus, (Matthew 4:4, NKJ) • Men must be taught as though you taught them not; and things unknown proposed as things forgot. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) • "The mind is slow to unlearn what it has been long in learning." Seneca (4 BC-AD 65)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sow Your Fallow Groundby Charles Simms Copyright © 2012 by Charles Simms. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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