Letter to the Editor | US should say no to the Metric system

I must admit, when I read Evan Casper-Futterman’s article, “Assessing weight (in pounds) of empire” (9.22.06 issue of The Miscellany News), I had an immediate reaction. I've long supported metrification simply because the Metric system is a better system— the English system is old-fashioned and convoluted, while the Metric system is hip, modern, and logical. And while bitching about the confusion of the metric system is certainly a nice default conversation topic while abroad, you learn the length of a kilometer very quickly. It’s not hard. We could switch, we really could.

But as I read the article, Casper-Futterman illuminated all the political and social ramifications of America’s choice to stick with the English system. Even if we wanted to metrify, political pressure prevents us from taking immediate action. If we decided not to “stay the course” of the past 200 years, surely our enemies would interpret this as a sign of weakness.

This is no time to re-evaluate the very fabric of society! Besides, our alliance with Liberia and Myanmar, the “Axis of Furlongs” as it’s commonly known, is essential to our foreign policy, not to mention how hard it is to find anyone else to sell us oil by the hogshead.
This is clearly the wrong time, with so much political instabiliy. Just the other day, I read in The New York Times that Uzbekistan is the new Mongolia. But when the United States regains its political standing, and is once again the “new Mongolia” of the world, maybe we will have the political clout to do what Casper-Futterman must have ultimately had in mind—abolishing measurement.

Just think of the benefits of casting off the oppression of the measurement system! The days when “a person could understand how the world in which he or she existed was connected and functioned” will return to us at last, after decades of disconnection under modernity. Our “ease of use” society surely runs counter to our human nature of boundless effort towards nothing of importance, even to the American dream of hard work until death. We’ll put an end to “mental sloth” when we go to the store to purchase “some” rice—is it a small “some,” or a large “some?” Will “some” rice be enough to feed “some” people, or just a “couple” people? Oh, the philosophical questions we’ve never contemplated under measurement!

Let’s leave this era as a historical record, the era where we figured everything out, and start a new era of Humanity. At this point, we are just as Casper-Futterman says “surrendering the things that make us human to the will and work of experts and machines.” Hey, experts and machines, flip off! We don’t want your kind here anymore.
—Martin Silbiger '07