ANTI-METRICATION



Anti-metrication websites and essays:

British Weights and Measures Association:

The decimal metric system, while superficially easy, is inefficient in several respects. Metric units are artificial, arbitrary, and often too small or too large, especially for everyday purposes. By contrast, British measures embody a wisdom that is too often overlooked in the rush for supposed progress. Traditional units are related to the human scale and the mind's perceptions. They evolved out of generations of experience, and are convenient in size.

The foot of twelve inches, the gallon of eight pints, and the pound of sixteen ounces are, like the year of twelve months, easily and conveniently divided. This divisibility makes them doubly practical. As a result they are widely preferred wherever people are free to choose. Moreover, the technology that took man to the moon was based on customary units since, contrary to metric propaganda, they are fully capable of the most precise use.

Last, but not least, traditional units are part of our language. They are built into our historic buildings and live in our literature. If we abandon them, we lose a valuable heritage, handed down over centuries. Conservationists should oppose cultural vandalism. It is too late to value something when it has gone.

English Weights and Measures:

Imperial (and US customary) measurements are a codified way of measuring in the sort of scales that humans can easily grasp, but metric measurements are an artificial system, designed from the outset to destroy culture, and create an elite. If you want to measure something unimaginably small (like an atom) or unbelievably big (like a galaxy) then by all means use a metric measurement. But you want to measure an area of land? You could be metric and measure in ares, or SI and measure in square metres. In practice, the metric types use the hectare, which is neither one thing or the other. I'll stick to using acres, which have been with us for over 1300 years...

If you were starting from scratch, you would design a system of weights and measures that was useful, rather than one that was complicated for its own sake. You might decide to measure things by comparing them to things you see around you. Weights, for example, could be expressed in pebbles for small weights (say for baking ingredients), bricks for somewhat larger weights (buying groceries), the weight of a man for weighing coal, and the weight of a car for bigger things. You would not worry about how much an atom or a galaxy weighs. This is the approach taken by the Imperial/Customary systems - ounces for flour, pounds for bananas, stones for potatoes, tons and hundredweights for cars. And this process is constantly being followed by the media, as it invents new measurements that people can understand - lengths in London-buses, heights in Nelson's-columns, areas in football-pitches etc. How much of this is because Brussels stops the media (especially the Quisling BBC) from using the well-understood Imperial measures I can't say.

Arthur Marcel:

Imperial measurement scale is eminently readable. The inches are wide enough not to be crowded out by their indicating digit and the fraction scale is totally binary, meaning that there is only one subgraduation between higher order graduations, each of these being of correspondingly shorter height. There is no counting of graduations required at all. I believe that my preference for the Imperial system was not merely a case of having gotten used to it as a child, though I may have had an advantage from my spanner days when it came to remembering those 15 fractions. I no longer believe that the continued use of Imperial by many people can be compared to, say, the survival of the QWERTY keyboard or the VHS video cassette where an inferior system prevailed simply due to earlier establishment...

The Imperial system of measurement is an evolved system, as against the metric system which can be best described as revolutionary. The Imperial units were derived from commonly experienced physical objects, such as the human foot and the length of an English King's arm. Appropriate subdivisions kept unit length and number within easy human range, making them so suitable for the measurement of such common objects. The metric units, however, are reductions of astronomical size quantities, using a constant subdivision factor of ten. The length of the metre, a dimension which underpins the whole metric system, was originally (and quite erroneously, as it turned out), calculated as a fraction of the Earth's diameter. Given their respective origins, it would be a very strange coincidence indeed if metric units were superior to Imperial ones for everyday domestic measurement applications. Perhaps though, the revolutionary origins of the metric system have something to do with the wishes of those who want it introduced across the board.

Melanie Phillips:

When they were not sending enemies of the people to the guillotine, the French revolutionaries set about destroying the symbols of their country. Out went the old calendar, the old currency and the old system of weights and measures. In came a ten-day week, decimalisation and the metric system.

The French revolutionaries understood the enormous political power of the everyday. They recognised that the means by which we conduct our most basic transactions – how we measure or weigh things, what kind of money we use, how we organise the months or the days of the week – all define the values of our society.

So if those values are to be overthrown and new ones put in their place, it is crucial to impose new symbols and values – if necessary - by force majeure.

The ghosts of those French revolutionaries are now stalking the corridors of Whitehall and the Law Courts. Monday’s metric martyr judgment means that anyone who does not sell goods in metric measures (with imperial measures permitted merely as supplementary indicators until 2010) is breaking the law. And this is a law of the European Union which our Parliament has not passed but which now has precedence.

Meanwhile, our home-grown revolutionaries are doing their bit, too. The birth of Christ is being dumped as the defining measurement of the calendar. The terms Anno Domini and Before Christ are being gradually replaced in school textbooks by Christian Era and Before the Christian Era to avoid offending the sensitivities of religious minorities.

Some might think dates or weights and measures are trivial. In fact, they matter enormously. They matter because something as momentous as it is priceless is in the process of being abolished here.

Thought You Should Know:

For decades now we've been told that the metric system is the measurement system of the future and that only xenophobics are against its full implementation. Its advocates promise it will cure everything from the difficulties of manipulating fractions to improving our nation's trade deficit. In fact they have been promising this for so long it has become a mantra of the elitist media and academics. Yet, so far, it has failed on all its promises in nearly every venue where it has been forced into usage.

Many people are unaware of the behind-the-scenes efforts of the metric-Marxists to have the metric system forced into usage. Only when something happens that catches the fleeting glare of headlines is the average person even made conscious of the on going tug-of-war between Imperial and metric measurement.

Recently just such an event occurred. The $125,000,000 NASA space probe to the planet Mars became a total failure when the speeding satellite smashed directly into the red planet instead of making an observatory fly-by. Why? Because one group of scientists working for a sub-contractor made their calculations in metric notation and another group used those calculations to program the trajectory and thought the numbers were Imperial, which is the standard for the U.S. Space Program... Of course the obvious will remain unstated. If the elitists had not pressured many of the private companies working under government contracts to switch to the metric system in the first place, no such error or misunderstanding could have occurred!

Peter Hitchens:

One of the oddest and most eerily prophetic passages in 1984 finds Winston Smith, unwisely searching for a key to the lost past, entering a sordid alehouse in a proletarian quarter. There he sees an old man, a survivor of former times, trying to order a pint of beer, once the standard English measure. The barman either does not understand him or pretends not to do so. What in hell’s name is a pint? Litre and half-litre, that’s all we serve, he says.

England, likewise, has ceased to exist, and its sophisticated currency has been replaced by the standardized decimal dollars and cents of Oceania. In Brave New World, the dystopia is different in almost every way, but the drug soma is prescribed in metric grams, and England has also disappeared, this time into a globalized Fordist state, governed by ten world controllers. Mass production and advertising have brought into being the borderless, godless world dreamed of by Karl Marx, in which German and French are dead languages and Trotsky a common surname.

Both Orwell and Huxley, perhaps only half-consciously, recognized that national independence is one of the most important components of liberty and that local, particular culture was an obstacle to arbitrary power. And they were quite right. Their books were until very recently read here in Britain as enjoyable fantasies of the unthinkable...

Yet in the last few years there have been a number of events and developments in Britain that suggest... that James Madison was correct when he said, There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation.

There is now, for instance, an official campaign in Britain to use the law to abolish traditional English measures - hence the special eeriness of Orwell’s alehouse prophecy.

Roger Scruton:

Weights and measures mediate our day-to-day transactions; hence they are imprinted with our sense of membership. They are symbols of the social order and distillations of our daily habits. The old English measures once had their equivalents on the continent. But, the French believed, they were symbols of a hierarchical, backward-looking society, a society that paid more respect to custom and precedent than to progress and the future. They were muddled, improvised and full of compromises, in just the way that human life is full of compromises when insufficiently controlled. What was needed, the revolutionaries thought, was a system of measures expressive of the new social order, based on Reason, progress, discipline and the future. Since the decimal system is the basis of arithmetic, and since mathematics is the symbol of Reason and its cold imperatives, the decimal system must be imposed by force, in order to shake people free of their old attachments.

The distinction between the imperial and the metric systems corresponds to the distinction between the reasonable and the rational, between solutions achieved through custom and compromise and those imposed by a plan. Muddled though imperial measures may appear to those obsessed by mathematics, they are - unlike the metric system - self-evidently the product of life. In the ordinary, cheerful and yielding transactions between people, measurement proceeds by dividing and multiplying, not by adding. The French revolutionaries believed that by changing weights and measures, calendars and festivals, street-names and landmarks, they could more effectively undermine the old and local attachments of the French people, so as to conscript them behind their international purpose. The survival of the old weights and measures in England testifies to the underlying principle of English society - the principle that society should be governed not from above but from within; by custom, tradition and compromise, and by a habit of reasonableness of which the single most important enemy is Reason. English measures were designed for the promotion of comfortable deals and just shares, and not for the convenience of the state accountant.

Metric Martyrs Defence Fund