By Crispin Sartwell
Consider the case of British butcher Keane Fletcher, as set out in the New York Times (7/20/2000). The European Union mandates the metric system. Fletcher, unmoved, continues to sell meat in pounds and ounces from his shop in Rotherham, Yorkshire. The local government responds by declaring that his scales, one of which he inherited from his grandfather, will be confiscated.
Fletcher's reply:"Make sure you send big men, because as sure as there are eggs on that counter, I'll break their jaws."
I do not endorse violence to achieve political ends. But if breaking jaws doesn't work, I say we blow something up.
It strikes me that the European Union has no more business telling Keane Fletcher what to do with his meat than he does telling them what to do with theirs. That this is not obvious to everyone explains the otherwise bizarre continued existence of the political state.
Sometimes governments arrest dissidents and lob them into the Gulag. Sometimes they monitor your phone calls and firebomb your compound. But most of the time they just irritate you in a thousand trivial, idiotic ways.
One thing I'll say for Americans: We never did buy the metric system. Congress, I believe, passed a bill, after which the occasional sign figured speed limits in kph, and one began acquiring Mountain Dew in liters. But for the most part, one just lolled about, fondling one's yard stick. It was morning again in America.
Every system of measurement is essentially arbitrary. There is nothing any more rational or less sheer a stipulation about the centimeter than the inch. However, the internal relations of measurements in the metric system are mathematically pristine in a way that English and American measurements are not, giving the metric system a kind of delusory claim to science.
The metric system lives in a kind of false consciousness: it denies its own arbitrary irrationality. But far worse, it weighs and measures and divides everything around it in such a way as to try to eliminate the arbitrary irrationality of the world.
Reality's resistance to any system, its excess to any measure, is what makes it beautiful and dangerous and lovable. So the irremediable quirkiness of the arrangement of ounces into gallons or yards into miles is in fact its very felicity.
The metric system was invented in the 18th century and was inflicted by statute on early 19th century France. Non-metric systems of weights and measures grew by historical accretion over many centuries and have a kind of organic allure. Both systems are old, though most of the non-metric measures are older. But the point isn't age, it's that the metric system is imposed from above while the non-metric systems well up from below.
The difference between the English and the metric systems is analogous to the difference between London and the Cabrini-Green housing project. One takes shape in millions of choices by people about how they themselves will live. The other takes shape because some dime-store Stalin has an unutterably comprehensive plan to tell them how.
The metric system, in other words, is a kind of metaphysical bureaucracy, a regulatory agency that wants to measure and rule the world, a Department of Motor Vehicles for the cosmos. It comes as no surprise that a huge, stupid, well-meaning bureaucracy like the EU would try to tell Keane Fletcher and his customers how to measure meat. Nor that, to the bureaucrats, Fletcher's response is anachronistic and irrational.
But irrational anachronism is all we've got left. Cultures consist entirely of small idiosyncracies that seem trivial when considered in isolation: little quirks of language, dress, decoration, relationship, clothing, music, measurement. When the EUs of the world start destroying these idiosyncracies, they start destroying people's cultures. Thankfully, we still live, though barely, in a world where 20 grains is a scruple and three scruples is a dram.
It is advisable to retain in one's mind the truth that, like Mr. Fletcher, the EU is just people. Now from an examination of history it emerges that some people like to take other people's goods and tell them what to do. Since Plato, philosophers have pondered the question of why it's alright for some of these people ("the government") to do that to other people ("you"). That is, for thousands of years, philosophers have argued about the source of the legitimacy of state power.
Thinkers once thought that it was God who appointed the DMV to license drivers or the Department of Education to administer standardized tests. Then thinkers thought it was a social contract (Locke) or the demands of sheer reason (Kant).
I have made a 25-year study of these theories, accumulating various degrees along the way. And I am back to tell you that they're obviously fallacious. The awful wonderful truth is that every attempt to rationalize state power is a flimsy tissue of self-serving lies. There's no reason in the world that these people should be able to license you, disarm you, count you, tax you, annoy you, or mess with your meat.
Or look at it this way: If we do not immediately disband the federal government, we face the fearsome prospect that Al Gore will be on television every day for the next four years. We owe it to our children and our children's children to prevent that.
And so, fellow syndicalists, let us not scruple to hoist a dram to the butcher of Rotherham, and to anarchy. To anarchy!
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