Long Live The Mile
On the Evils of the Metric System (and Europe)
I don’t like the metric system.
In part this is simply because I'm an American, born with an intrinsic (and justified) sense of superiority over anything "European." America (both the continent and the U.S.A.), for all its flaws, is simply a better place. Everything others cite as a negative about the place I call home I happily count as a blessing, albeit maybe one wrapped in a disguise. See, America is the land of the passionate. A place of higher highs and lower lows than most anywhere else in the world. I find it endearing in its insanity and extravagance. Where else will you find peaceful suburban streets where nothing ever happens comfortably nestled mere miles away from regular homicidal gun violence? How many other countries can boast basement dwelling shut-ins becoming overnight crypto billionaires? How many other places can go to war in the middle east for twenty years, lose, and then come home and pretend it never happened? Not many. Not many at all.
America is the land of the cool people. The land of blue collar hillbillies with four car garages. The land that invented "Bucket" as a serving size of food. It’s a place of extremes and extremists, and there’s something beautiful about that. Yeah, sure, we might give an orange narcissistic reality T.V. star the keys to the nuclear bombs. Why not? And, after that, maybe a guy who a lot of people believe has dementia. Go for it. America. I grew up with the daily rat-a-tat-tat of semi-automatic weapons in the distance, a local shooting range just over the way from my house. Where else in the world can you get that? Hmm? I mean, apart from the Middle East or some place in sub-Saharan Africa? And yet, I had a perfectly safe and peaceful childhood. Idyllic almost. That’s the part sub-Saharan Africa can’t give you. Do you see what I’m getting at? Fifty-states, each coming up with their own laws, often contradicting one another. It’s glorious. On one side we have Canada, afraid of its citizens owning too-long kitchen knives, on the other side Mexico, where drug cartels chainsaw people’s heads off. A hyper religious continent that nonetheless somehow manages to funnel a legion of women into amateur online pornography. A place that led a War on Drugs while getting its populace addicted to prescription-based opiates. What I'm saying is that sometimes it's the contrast that makes a thing beautiful. Lighter lights and darker darks. Passion. Fire. Go big or go home. Bet the farm and lose it all. Shoot first, make up answers later. Europe can't stomach that sort of thing.
It's an old place.
Nothing ever happens there.
All that alone should be sufficient reason to reject things like centimeters and centigrades, yet many Americans have nonetheless fallen for the propaganda that the metric system is somehow more sophisticated, smarter, or "scientific." For a lot of people raised in U.S. public schools, knowing how far a kilometer is seems to them to be one step short of being fluent in French or knowing how to prepare a perfect Italian risotto. We've been given the impression that the units we use, the "imperial" system of feet and inches and all that, is holding us down. That it's irrational, antiquated, and arbitrary. 5280 feet in a mile!?! How absurd. As the old Simpsons joke used to go, "My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it." The Europeans, we are told, are better. Puttering around on their mopeds, saying "ciao", and measuring things in kilograms.
Lies. Damned lies.
But…
Perhaps I'm getting off track.
Fun (and necessary) as it is to rag on Europe and engage in the game of performative cultural chauvinism, there are actually really good reasons to not use the metric system. You know, beyond the fact that most of its adherents still wear socks with sandals.
Foremost amongst them being that the metric system is actually evil.
I know, I know. What an insane thing to say. A system of measurement? Evil? Trust me I know how implausible it sounds. To clarify, I don't mean that the metric system is like, genocide and baby murder evil. No. It's more like... anti biological? Against Nature maybe? More that sort of evil. Evil by virtue of being unnatural.
Okay. I'll try to make sense now.
Look. The other day I was arguing about this very thing with a fellow (European of course, German), and he made a statement along the lines of "Well, all systems of measurement are arbitrary anyway. Why not use the one that divides most easily? The one that's base ten?" And I granted him that that would be an excellent argument. If of course any of it were true.
You see, contrary to what you've been told, the Imperial System is definitely not arbitrary. Not in the slightest. You know, I mean, the base unit is literally called a foot. As in, based on the human foot. You couldn't conceive of a less arbitrary unit of measurement if you tried. It's a biological unit of measurement. A Natural one.
It's a foot.
The whole system is like this. It’s based on biology.
A foot is a foot. A yard is about how far you step when walking at a normal speed. A pace is two steps, or one revolution in the cycle of walking (left foot, right foot, back to left again). A mile is a thousand of those. If you’re anywhere in the range of the average height of an adult human, and you walk a thousand paces, you will have gone about one mile. Give or take. Likewise and the inch is roughly the distance from the tip of the pinky finger to the first knuckle and the acre is the area of land that one man could work in one day. If you were doing a job for someone, clearing brush or planting crops say, and they told you they had four acres, you would know right away that it would take you four days to complete alone, or one day if you ask three friends to help. A cup is about the volume of an actual cup (although admittedly recent years have seen portion sizes balloon), and a teaspoon is about the size of a spoon for tea. One degree of Fahrenheit is about the smallest change in temperature that a person can reasonably discern, scaled such that 100 means it’s pretty hot and 0 means it’s pretty cold. So forth. So on.
The metric system is arbitrary. Profoundly so. The history of the meter itself is all over the place, once being defined as in terms of the distance from the equator to the north pole, then wavelengths of krypton, then as “the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 seconds.
You know. Cause that’s something people can relate to.
By contrast Imperial measurements are not arbitrary. Not in the slightest. They are based on the biological human organism, its proportions, its senses, the size of the tools it can use. It is a system with deeply ancient roots which carries with it profound religious connotations. "As above, so below" type stuff. A system developed in a time when people truly believed that "Man is the measure of all things."
Ancient systems of measure reflect ancient systems of belief, which is probably the main reason the Atheistic West is so eager to abandon them. It's not a coincidence that in Europe, where religion is dead, men carry meter sticks and in America, where almost half the populace believes in Christ's imminent return, we pump our gas in gallons. The ancients really did believe that men and women were made in the image of God and, therefore, believed that they themselves were the standard against which all else should be measured. You see it everywhere in what they left behind. Our bodily proportions, even down to thinks like the ratio between the circumference of our heads and the distance between our eyes, were woven into the fabric of their lives. They erected their temples and cathedrals according to these measures, developing a whole science of “sacred geometry” around them. Proportions they believed naturally gave a space a kind of biological grace and beauty that points to Heaven. Arches. Rounded columns. Domes. The body curves, so the spaces we inhabit should curve too. And not only space but time as well. Just as the body operated with the seasons and upon circadian rhythms, so too should the temple catch the first rays of light coming from the east or offer a full view of the Harvest Moon through a vaulted ceiling. How unlike all this to the modern boxes we build full of right angles. Spaces built for capitalism and nothing more.
The metric system at its heart is a rejection of all this. A rejection of the basic religious axiom that Man is the center of the universe. It is in fact not only a rejection but an embrace of its opposite. An embrace of the idea that we do not matter at all. That the cosmos would fare just fine without us. It is a rejection of life, with all of its messiness and non-uniformity, and emblematic of the desire to systematize the world. One and the same as the desire to make it dead. Non-biological. The French Revolution, that bloody affair through which the metric system was born, brought nothing less than that, the wholesale slaughter of thousands in an attempt to deify Reason. We may be thankful that all their sins were not achieved. Meters and kilograms are bad enough but had the Revolutionaries had their way we would be suffering much more today. Oh yes. They tried to remove the rounded and rough edges out of everything, even time, attempting to force a system of 10 hour days with 100 minute hours and 100 seconds minutes. "10 months a year!" They shouted. "And 10 days a week!" It was actually the animals who saved us from that Hell. They revolted. Martyrs for the cause of biology. The livestock did not function on such a timetable and began to drop dead from the stress. Their souls, if animals have them, are in Heaven now. Baptized by blood.
See, Animals don't come in base ten.
Neither do plants.
Neither do we.
And much as we like to pretend otherwise, the sun, moon, and earth are regular in the way they want to be, they're not regular in the way we'd like to force them. The length of an hour, a proper hour as defined by the sun on a local sundial, varies throughout the year. The moon rises every week, yes, but never in exactly the same place. The earth is the same, every day, yet always different, changing with its seasons. The stars of the zodiac rotate overhead, keeping a time all their own.
The actual world is fuzzy. Nature is fuzzy. It cannot be systematized or forced to fit neatly into a graduated cylinder. Once upon a time we respected that and the systems we used to measure that world were themselves fuzzy to match. Not arbitrary mind you, but fuzzy. Irregular. Like the branch of a tree. Moreover they were units of measure for real, working people. People who had to walk places. Who had to eyeball distances. Who had to muddle through with "good enough". The Imperial System, despite its name, is not a set of units for academics in an ivory tower, divorced from the real world. It’s a set of units for people getting things done. Done in the absence of “perfection.” You know, eyeballing 0.3 of something is hard, but you can always eyeball half, which is why the inch is measured by increasing halves (1/2, 1/4, 1/8), because real people have to do real things, like, you know, estimate. Likewise base 12 is easier for head math than base 10, as it has more dividers. Only 2 and 5 go evenly into 10. Anything else and you're going to have to start holding decimals in your brain. 12 by contrast is divided neatly by 2, 3, 4, and 6, so thirds and quarters are easier to compute without resource to a calculator. As it happens, the objections of my European friend were false on every level! Metric is in objective fact not the one that divides most easily, and of the two is the only one which can be said to be truly arbitrary.
I can't blame him for being wrong though.
He's European.
Being wrong is kinda their thing.
Amen brother. As a carpenter I can tell you that when it comes to dividing 10 inches in half we know without thinking the answer is 5". Divide again and you have 2-1/2", again 1-1/4", again 1/2+1/8 which is just 5/8", again is 5/16", again is 5/32". All these are clearly marked on a tape measure and some steel rules graduate down to 64ths. Metric man divides 10 cm by half to get 5 cm but then it starts to become less accurate with 2.5 cm, 1.25 cm and then 0.625 and again 0.3125. Try finding that on a tape measure. Metric may be useful in extremely large measurements (astronomy) or extremely small measurements used in science, but for the built environment, that which we see and feel with our hands and our eyes, the height of our chairs, the proportions of our rooms and windows and doors, eating utensils, and all of architecture, imperial is the obvious winner. In Mexico you can still find masons who build arches using nothing but the rim of their hat to guide the curvature of the bricks.
I always appreciate your perspective, Yoshi! I've never considered the non-human implications of the metric system. Now I have a legitimate reason to reject it, rather than my historical unsubstantiated crabbiness... :-) Thanks for the highly entertaining, informative essay. I laughed out loud a LOT, particularly at your assessment of America. Good stuff.