Assessing weight (in pounds) of empire

Evan Casper-Futterman Guest Writer

I am generally an ardent critic of the United States government, especially when it relates to issues of international cooperation or shared purpose between countries. Why does the United States feel compelled to defend its sovereignty against the goals and ambitions of all humanity, as embodied in the Kyoto protocol, the International Criminal Court, or the United Nations Convention on the rights of the child—signed by all UN members except for the United States and Somalia? Yet on one critical point I applaud the United States for its continued obstinacy, and indeed wish that our quests for imperial dominion would extend to the sphere of units of weights and measures.

In this realm, the world has made the unfortunate decision to adopt the Metric system, beginning in 1791 with our revolutionary brethren, the French. According to the U.S. Metric Association, as of 2005 only three countries had “not completed the changeover” to the metric system: the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar.

The intensification of global trade and communication has made the logic of an international system of units and measurements widely accepted. To be clear, I don’t intend to argue against an international system of weights and measures—my distrust of modernity can extend only so far. It would be too sad to watch millions of dollars of space-travel equipment crash into other planets because of confusion in a unit of measure. Nevertheless, even if we agree that uniformity is beneficial, the choice still has to be made.

Big choices involve ideologies: a set of values that would motivate a person, a group of people or country to choose one over the other. The Metric system is one such choice. Reflecting the dominant ideals of the scientific revolution, it embodies the idea that humans can manipulate our complex surroundings to fit what are, in my opinion, relatively insignificant creative and computational capacities. The quantities of its base-ten denominations are clearly more amenable to a laboratory than they are to life on our still less-than-fully-sterilized planet.

The anti-Metrication movement can claim its righteousness in its anti-authoritarian grounding. As an extremist tendency of the state, authoritarianism seeks to make its inhabitants and all things easily legible—that is, observable and controllable, and subjected to its will (see James Scott’s Seeing like a State). Because the Metric system carries this legacy of government compulsion enabled by scientific precision, and relates neither to natural evolution nor long-standing human scales and experience, it can be seen as an unwelcome imposition of power.

Closely tied to these is the importance of tradition for something as simple and culturally bound as measurement. There were days when one could calculate the extent of his or her land without the use of any instrument beyond his or her own body. These were not inherently better times, but they were days when a person could understand how the world in which he or she existed was connected and functioned. When the units for measuring produce—pecks, bushels, hogsheads—were as odd and mottled as the fruits and vegetables themselves.

Remembering odd names and less-than-optimal numbers and conversions keeps us honest and prevents mental sloth. They remind us that this world was not created for our exclusive use, and does not favor round numbers, easy conversions or solutions. Neither was it created for our complete comprehension. In our Metric future, our increasing desire for “ease of use” and efficiency will lead us to continue tricking ourselves into surrendering the things that make us human to the will and work of experts and machines. We will wander further into the fantasy that although we may have once come from the earth, we no longer need it and we do not plan to return to it.