Robert Tavernor Smoot’s Ear: The Measure of Humanity

According to Robert Tavernor, a flaw that plagues contemporary life is the lack of belief in the idea expressed in these words of Protagoras, the pre-Socratic philosopher and original Sophist, of whose work only a few fragments, such as the one quoted above, survive. The humanistic culture of which he was a participant in founding no longer survives in a vital way in the modern world. Yet Protagoras is one of the few significant figures relevant to the history of Western measuring systems whose thought has not been brought to bear on the topic in this fascinating, and, ultimately, moving book by Robert Tavernor. Conspicuous by their absence, perhaps the familiarity of Protagoras’s words argued for their exclusion from this closely argued book, whose goal is to take one of the most prosaic and familiar of all modern human tools, the metric system of measurement, and suggest the depth of meaning that lies dormant in treating this subject solely in an instrumental fashion, as an aspect of technological advancement. His title clearly echoes the famous aphorism while suggesting a sly inversion of its meaning. Yet it may be Protagoras’s reputation as the precursor of relativism that places him outside of Tavernor’s concerns, for in the history of measurement precision of mutually agreed upon standards has perforce always been the goal, and any confusion on this issue would be counterproductive.