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September 2006— Bring Me A Ruler Please
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"Man is the measure of all things".
So said Protagoras more than 2400 years ago. Exactly what
he meant has been debated ever since. Perhaps it was no more
than the incomparability of sense impressions; is the green
I see the same as the green you see? Or perhaps he meant that
what cannot be measured by human beings does not exist, is
not a thing at all. If the latter interpretation is correct
many modern thinkers would agree with him. What can safely
be said is that today, in the full tide of an ever more science-
and technology-based society, human beings are measuring all
things, and ourselves not least among them.
Measurement is the use of standard units to compare objects
or concepts of the same class: first of all time, weight,
and length or distance. Its earliest beginnings can perhaps
be traced to the manufacture of the first tools. Hunters used
spears to kill their prey at a relatively safe distance. Too
short or too light would not do the job; too heavy, or too
long could not be thrown a useful distance or accurately.There
was a "correct" length and weight for spears, passed
on from generation to generation. We cannot know when weights
and lengths were first conceived abstractly in standard units.
For measuring time, of course, the units came ready-made:
the alternation of day and night through the rotation of the
earth, the phases of the moon and the annual course of the
sun are still the basis of time measurement today. But for
weight and length units certainly came no later than the building
of the first cities, since we find standard weights for scales
(shaped, no one knows why, like ducks) in the ruins of Sumer.
Even without the Mesopotamian ducks we could have assumed
that standard units arrived with the first complex societies,
since the one cannot function without the other. Architecture,
land surveying, trading, taxation, organized warfare - none
of them could have progressed very far without recognized
systems for measuring time, distance and weights.The enforcement
of such systems is one of the oldest functions of the state.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the pyramids of Egypt
is not their enormous size but their geometrical perfection.The
base of the Great Pyramid, 751 feet square, is less than 0.1%
out of true, an achievement so remarkable that some have ascribed
it to visitors from space. It was in fact done with infinite
care and repeated measurements, using ropes and an official
standard unit, the famous Egyptian royal cubit of 52.35 centimetres.The
cubit, originally the distance from the elbow to the fingertips,
had a long and distinguished career before it. Noah, the Bible
tells us, used it to design the ark and King Solomon used
it for his temple. Slightly different versions were used all
over the Middle East and the Islamic world (including the
once-Islamic Iberian countries) until recent times.
The origins of standard units for measuring an abstract concept,
economic value, also lie somewhere before the arrival of written
records. Since it was important that the units not merely
measure value but also store it and serve as a medium of exchange,
they themselves were not abstract at all but usually lightweight,
easily comparable items of some intrinsic worth. Africans
used cowrie shells and the Aztecs and Maya used cocoa beans.The
Greeks of the Archaic period, roughly 800 to 500 BC, used
small metal spits - souvlaki skewers.The drachma, still the
name of the Greek monetary unit today, literally means "fistful"
- a fist full of metal spits, obols. Cattle, widely used for
important payments from East Africa today to ancient Ireland,
might seem to be an exception to the lightweight rule but
they have the advantage that they transport themselves - and
produce value as well as store it. The state was curiously
late arriving in this potentially profitable field. The first
coins were metal slugs whose standard weight was guaranteed
by the stamped name and image of the issuing authority - a
system still with us in form, though not in substance.Once
governments realized that fiscal crises could be overcome
by devaluing their own coins, the currency became an ever
more useful tool of statesmanship.
Measurement was soon too successful for its own good. Measurement
implies comparison, but different systems of measurement soon
became deeply embedded in individual cultures. Merely to list
all the units humans have devised would require a far longer
letter than this one. An organization called English Weights
and Measures lists acres, bushels, chains, chalders, chaldrons,
crowns, customary measures, drachms, drams, farthings, fathoms,
feet, florins, foolscap, furlongs, gallons, gills, grains,
groats, guineas, hundredweights, lasts, leagues, miles, minims,
nails, ounces, pecks, pennyweights, pints, poles, perchs,
pounds, quarts, quarters, rods, roods, sacks, scruples, stones,
tods, tons, troy ounces, wire gauges, weys and yards - and
this is an incomplete list from a single country. For most
of recorded history all attempts to facilitate comparisons
by using a single system were at best partial successes, usually
brought about by overwhelming military power. A Roman milepost
indicates the same distance in Wales or in Lebanon, but such
uniformity was not to be seen again until modern times.
Modern times for measurement arrived when the leadership
of revolutionary France considered the existence of several
different systems within the borders of their country. Instead
of trying to harmonize them, or to impose one at the expense
of the others, they - guided by the great chemist Lavoisier
- decided to adopt an entirely new system that would be easy
to learn, easy to use and - because it would be based on universal
natural standards with no cultural baggage - would be universally
acceptable.Thus the unit of distance would be a metre, which
would be one-thousandth of a kilometre, which would be one
ten-thousandth of the distance from the Equator to the Poles.
This was the metric system, today called the SI after the
French initials of its current official name, the Système
International d'Unités.
A truly great achievement, the metric system has in part
lived up to its creators' expectations. It is one of the foundations
of the modern world. But the revolutionaries were decidedly
optimistic, or perhaps naïve, in thinking that its simplicity
and rationality would make it universally welcome. On the
contrary, it has been often seen as an instrument of French,
European or Western cultural aggression, the adjective depending
on the critic's standpoint. The organization English Weight
and Measures, mentioned above, exists to protect the country's
traditional units against the alien forces of metrication,
and wherever possible to restore them to use.
More than two hundred years after its invention, the supremely
rational metric system is in partial use everywhere but in
complete use only in a handful of countries. Brazilians continue
to weigh meat by the ancient Arabic arroba. The English continue
to express their body weight in stones, to the bemusement
of foreigners and colonials. Tin is measured in Malay piculs,
originally the load one man could carry, and a picul is one
hundred catties, a measure in daily use today in the markets
of Hong Kong.The Japanese still measure the area of their
homes by tatamis, the traditional floor mats.
Again, the list could be extended indefinitely. But the great
holdout against metrication is of course the United States.That
country is a party to the various international metric agreements
(the first, the so-called Convention of the Metre, was as
long ago as 1875).The system is widely used for scientific,
medical and commercial purposes.Metric weights or volumes
appear on packaged foods. In 1988 the federal government required
federal departments to achieve metrication by 1992 and set
up a program to encourage companies and institutions to make
the change. Nonetheless, as any short visit to the USA will
confirm, "US customary measures" - a variant on
the British Imperial system, of all things - are the only
system familiar to the vast majority of Americans. The official
reason is the cost of making the change. This would certainly
be great, but given Americans' impressive record of achieving
whatever they collectively decide to achieve, it is hard not
to think that the main reason is political. There are no votes
in metrication, and experience in other countries suggests
that there would be plenty of votes against it. Thus the first
country to rebel against British rule is now the last country
to use what is essentially the British system. And it does
so in majestic isolation. Liberia and Myanmar, long cited
as fellow holdouts, have now adopted the metric system.
***
Metrication has been an immense boon to the precise measurement
of the world around us. Here the last three hundred years
have seen great gains. Parallax - the apparent shift in the
position of an object due to the movement of the observer
- was first used to calculate the distance of the stars in
1838. A related method, triangulation, made it possible to
calculate the height of the highest mountains. (In 1807 the
early British surveyors in India tentatively calculated the
height of the Himalayas as over 26,000 feet - a result that
was ridiculed as a gross exaggeration. In fact there are eight
peaks over 28,000.) The invention of the microscope led in
due course to the creation of systems for measuring things
that are far too small for the human eye to see. The need
for ever greater precision in engineering (badly measured
steam engines tend to blow up) made it necessary to measure
ever smaller distances in materials, especially metals - "tolerances"
in technical language.
Today computers handle that task and many others, since the
human senses have been left far behind. Measurement has been
extended to the unimaginably large and the unimaginably small
alike. Not by any means inconceivable - scientists after all
conceive these things every day - but unimaginable because
they are so utterly removed from our daily experience.Most
of us have heard of nano-seconds (one billionth of a second),
but how many know that nano-anythings are far longer or larger
than their minute cousins, the yocto or one-septillionth family?
The achievement is magnificent but like much of science, bad
for the human ego. Our familiar world of feet and metres is
simply one whistle-stop on a very long line from the infinitesimally
small to the infinitely large.
The triumphs of the physical sciences have spawned attempts
to extend its techniques to other fields. Especially in the
social sciences - a significant name in itself - measurement
has been increasingly extended to abstract concepts. School
and university grades are given by performance in competitive
examinations - at least in the humane disciplines a highly
subjective process, as anyone who has done it knows, but one
essential to the working of the academic and bureaucratic
machinery. Even more ambitious is the measurement of human
intelligence.This has become a major industry in itself, despite
the absence of an accepted definition of intelligence, of
agreement on whether it is a single or multiple attribute,
or even on how far intelligence is inborn and unchanging through
life.This fuzziness is a little disturbing, since it is easy
to imagine intelligence testing being abused to create a society
of alphas and betas like that of Huxley's Brave New World.
Professionals in the fields of education and psychology tend
to resent these doubts of the laity, and may well be right
to do so, but there is an undeniable difference between the
measurement of intelligence and the measurement of, say, the
distance to the moon.The shelves groan under works about the
nature and methods of intelligence testing, but no one writes
books to prove that lasers are an accurate way to measure
distance.This does not prove that intelligence testing is
meaningless, simply that the results are likely to vary significantly
with the mix of methods used on any one individual.In the
physical sciences, in contrast, the ability to replicate results
exactly (when physically possible) is universally accepted
as the ideal test of the validity of a theory or method.
Intelligence testing is also an example of another widespread
trend in measurement; obtaining a single overall number as
a function of other numbers. An individual is tested for mathematical,
linguistic and spatial skills, among others, and the results
are combined to produce a figure for intelligence in general.
Such overall numbers are widespread in our society.We live
in a world where the apparently "hard" information
expressed by numbers and measurements is highly valued, often
for its own sake. Surprising numbers of people know the batting
averages of long-dead baseball players. Consequently the apparent
objectivity of overall numbers can give them great influence.
Universities are rated by deriving a single score from twenty
or more relatively "hard" numbers such as class
size and library holdings. Dog shows score pedigreed dogs
in much the same way.The Dow Jones Index is derived from the
share price of leading publicly traded firms. Much more ambitiously,
the United Nations has taken to ranking its members by their
"quality of life", based on various levels of social
well-being which themselves may often be overall figures.
Overall numbers are another list that could be extended indefinitely.The
objectivity of such scores and ratings is only apparent, however,
because they are at best derivative and at worst a sophisticated
form of propaganda, one that illustrates Disraeli's comment
about "lies, dammed lies, and statistics". The overall
figure is the result of human decisions on selecting and weighting
the underlying figures, decisions that may be far from objective.This
is obviously the case in "quality of life" measurements,
since there is no consensus on what constitutes the good life.
All the same such ratings are a godsend to the media, being
the stuff of headlines on a slow news day, and can be used
effectively by the academic administrators, corporate executives
and politicians who have been blessed with top scores.They
also appeal to something deep in human nature: we may accept
equality (however defined) as a social goal, but it is much
more fun to read about hierarchies.Overall figures will certainly
be with us for some time to come, but while they can be useful
tools they should never be confused with the measurable realities
that in principle at least should underlie them. In more ways
than one, they are a long way from those long-ago Egyptians
with their ropes and cubits.
***
Early in the twentieth century the American psychologist
Edward Lee Thorndike, a faculty member at Harvard, wrote,
"Whatever exists at all exists in some amount".
Clearly, any thing that exists in some amount can be measured.
It follows that anything that cannot be measured does not
exist at all. We are back to one possible interpretation of
Protagoras: only what human beings can measure is real.
Thorndike practiced what he preached.One of the founders
of what became the behaviourist school of psychology, he made
his name by observing how fast cats learned to escape from
the "puzzle boxes" he had designed.Today his dictum
is the guiding assumption of many, perhaps most scientists.For
some it assumes the proportions of a creed.This is not surprising.
Measurement works.Without it we could not have built the modern
world, by all historical standards so immensely productive
of goods, services and ideas.With its aid, we understand the
workings of the physical universe better than we ever have
before - and we can dimly grasp how much we have yet to learn.
And if we have increasing doubts about the consequences of
our way of life for this earth and the species with which
we share it, measurement helps to give us an idea of the damage
we are doing and of what we might do to remedy it. By any
measure - so to speak! - measurement is here to stay.
Still, we have doubts. In the 1989 movie The Dead Poets Society,
a teacher of English literature, played by Robin Williams,
ridicules the idea that poems can be graded on a scale of
merit. Poetry can be good or bad, but it cannot be measured
as if it were so much salami.This belief is part of a wider
attitude to life on the teacher's part, which the film portrays
as profoundly disruptive of established structures of authority.
Measurement, it is suggested, is one more instrument of power
in a repressive society. This is clearly an exaggeration,
even a caricature, yet most of us can find some sympathy for
Williams' standpoint. Poetry is not measurable and neither,
we like to think, are the human beings who write and read
it.Thorndike's puzzle boxes may have told him something about
cats but it makes us uncomfortable to think they might work
on us. It is noticeable that in our measurement-based society
we are still intensely conscious of the ethical and aesthetic
values that exist outside the measurable world. We may even
be more aware of these intangibles than ever before, precisely
because the physical and social scientists have built around
us a world that is essentially a gigantic machine, its parts
known with ever greater exactness. Measurement, we feel, may
enable us to know the world, often to exploit it, sometimes
even to control it, but in the last analysis it continues
to be the immeasurable that gives meaning to human life.
***
Published by RBC Financial Group. All editions from the RBC
Letter collection are available on our web site at www.rbc.com/responsibility/letter.
Our e-mail address is: rbcletter@rbc.com.
Publié aussi en francais.
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