Going metric would be nice global gesture

There are only three nations in the world that have not officially adopted the International System of Units (the metric system) as their primary measurement system: Liberia, Myanmar and the United States.

Now one can understand why America has declined to support the Kyoto Protocol, the Landmine Ban Treaty, the Arms Trade Treaty, the Cluster Bomb Treaty, the declaration to decriminalize homosexuality, and the International Criminal Court, but the innocuous metric system? How can this be?

Could it be that the idea was originally French? It was, after all, Louis XVI who first convened a group of scientists, led by Antoine Lavoisier, to develop a universal measurement system to replace the old French system of quirky lieues, lignes and vergees, which might mean one thing in Beauce and another in Provence. Despite the fact that both Louis and Lavoisier lost a few lignes at the guillotine, the metric system was adopted by the revolutionary government of France and today is officially recognized worldwide as the Systeme International d’Unites —- hence its abbreviation “SI.”

The opportunity to go metric was certainly there for America in the early 1800s. President Thomas Jefferson, an amateur scientist and mathematician, recognized the merits of metric, and there was a lot of pro-French, anti-British sentiment in the country. (Noah Webster, by the way, was busy changing the traditional British spellings of words such as labour, colour and velour.) But it didn’t happen. Although the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey used meter and kilogram standards, the rest of America stuck with its pecks, rods, gills, furlongs, hogsheads and Winchester bushels.

An opportunity was missed, but the idea of a metric America has never quite died.

The U.S. government authorized the official use of metric measures, alongside British measures, in 1866; signed the Treaty of the Meter in 1875; authorized a three-year study on the feasibility of adopting the metric system in 1968, resulting in the 1971 blockbuster “A Metric America: A Decision Whose Time Has Come”; passed the Metric Conversion Act of 1975, which established the U.S. Metric Board (disestablished in 1982) and asked the private sector to make progress toward the metric system (amended in 1988 when the private sector said no thanks); and in 1991 required all government agencies to file an annual report on their efforts to go metric. There hasn’t been much activity since then.

Of course there has been some slow progress toward metrification. Our cars have KPH as well as MPH on the speedometers (although speed limits are posted almost exclusively in MPH), most packaged goods are labeled with traditional and metric measures, and we now have 2-liter bottles of soft drinks to sate our thirst. Yet we’re still a long way from joining the rest of the world in the metric system.

There just hasn’t been the political will to embrace metrification. It’s not the sort of thing that inspires Homeric rhetoric. Moreover, like raising taxes, it may just seem un-American and, well, too dang foreign.

Ultimately, America’s coolness toward the metric system may represent an example, albeit a minor example, of American Exceptionalism —- the idea that America is qualitatively different from other nations as a result of its unique history, institutions, ideals and destiny; a go-it-alone destiny measured in dollars and democracies, not millis and micros.

Which brings us to the present, the future and the point.

America can survive and even prosper without the metric system, but not without the rest of the world.

America can also play an enormously constructive leadership role in tomorrow’s interdependent world, but it will mean eschewing exceptionalism; it will mean joining the community of nations to recognize broader global interests. Joining the International System of Units would be a small gesture in that direction; more significant, of course, would be joining the Kyoto Protocol, the Landmine Ban Treaty, the Arms Trade Treaty, the Cluster Bomb Treaty, the declaration to decriminalize homosexuality, the International Criminal Court, and other widely supported international agreements.

> Steve Elliott-Gower is director of the honors program and associate professor of political science at Georgia College & State University.