Yes, really.

The debate over Fahrenheit or Celsius rages on and on; the only part we can all agree on is that, if it were legal, Fahrenheit would be better in Scrabble (23 point minimum without blanks, versus 9). So also runs the question of feet or meters, gallons or liters (or litres), inches or centimeters, miles or kilometers. Some people have very, very strong opinions on the matter. But we need to see the problem outside of the typical modernist terms it is presented in; even the most trivial-seeming question must be rescued from that doldrum.

Now, the metric system is unequivocally better for science, if your goal is ease of conversion and calculation. It’s built on the standard base 10 system most human math runs with, and it does its best to avoid awkward fractions in the conversion. I won’t argue that; there’s a reason most of my science learning turned over to metric whenever math needed to be done on the measurement.

But this single superiority does not make ‘metric’ best across the board. Scientific facility is nice, but it’s not the be-and-end-all. Similarly, even if you’re convinced by the argument that some imperial measurement is more useful because of its correspondence to the human scale, or that a 12-part divisibility is practically useful in certain applications, that’s not an automatic win for imperial. I may think the inclusion of a three-factor divisibility in imperial volume measurements is very useful, but the metric-measurement user can just point out the superior precision of using grams to measure by weight (because who measures by ‘grains’?).

We need to ask what we want out of our measurement system. Rationalist empiricism and modernism make ‘science’ the measure of truth, and in that context, the metric system’s scientific usefulness makes it an obvious winner. But a Christian should not bow to the modernist worldview; his epistemology is not ‘science’ but Scripture and reason, things areas more textual than numeric. In such a context, metric no longer becomes automatically, for it no longer dominates man’s basic epistemology, his religious hermeneutic.

So far as I can see, the metric system has one undoubted superiority. Some claim it is less useful for various human-scale purposes, whether temperature or human height. I doubt that, with some ingenuity, a metric solution to all these problems can be found, allowing it to reach effective parity. So, that’s all, right? I’m going to switch to metric, or at least advocate for it, right?

No.

Setting aside the impracticality of switching to metric all on my lonesome, I’m not a detached rational-actor Human Individual™ with no history. I’ve grown up with the imperial system. I have an intuitive understanding of what its scale means. How long is a foot, an inch? How much is a tablespoon, a teaspoon, a gallon? How long is a yard, a fathom, a mile? I have a sense for these built by familiarity. My history is with imperial, and that means metric, while it may be technically more effective in a vacuum, is factually less useful for me.

Further, even if I could snap instantly into that level of understanding for metric, I still wouldn’t. I can use metric for science, where it is suited, but for daily life, in areas where metric is not a distinctly better tool, I prefer imperial. In part, that’s because I prefer imperial’s history. It’s a measurement system built by accreted custom, rather than by rationalist construction, an ethos much better for society.

More importantly, however, imperial is my cultural history. I value it as a connection to my past and my people. I therefore use it where it is equal to metric- daily life- and use metric as a tool according to circumstance. That connection to my heritage is by far more important to me than that I use a system optimized for what I’m not using it for.

God bless.