Dystopias and Metric Measures
This article from The American Conservative has been on-line for some time, but I never got past the headline until my print edition arrived from across the Pacific a few days ago: Big Brother Watches Britain: The rights of Englishmen make way for litres and ID cards..

Realizing that the article takes on one of my most hated enemies, I decided I would be remiss not to link to it. Here's how it begins:

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England, likewise, has ceased to exist, and its sophisticated currency has been replaced by the standardized decimal dollars and cents of Oceania.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.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the British Imperial System is more human than the Metric System, that child of the French Revolution. The same can be said of the traditional Korean system of measures or of that of any other culture. Fractions, likewise, are more human, and require more intelligence, than decimal figures. Sure, the Metric System is more efficient, and may have its place in Science, but which system would the Taoist Chuang Tzu, that hater of efficiency, have preferred? Which system, I wonder, was used at Oświęcim (Auschwitz), that model of XXth Century efficiency?