Climbing Grades: Too Precise to Be Honest

Have you ever argued over whether a route is 5.10a or 5.10b — 6a or 6a+ in the French system? The problem, as with so many things, is capitalism. Once you try to quantify reality, the pleasure of climbing starts getting crushed under the weight of performance. So let’s try breaking a few rules.

Grade chart for new routes at Climbing District St Lazare in Paris © Vertige Media

When a boulder problem or route gets established, or when someone repeats it, climbers sometimes slip into strange little rituals. Armed with an almost occult vocabulary, they try to agree on how hard the thing actually is. One person says, “That’s 6a.” Another insists it’s more like 6a+. Then someone else, trying to keep the peace, says, “No need to fight. Let’s call it 6a/+.”

To most normal people, these debates look absurd. Inside climbing, they are everywhere. Over time, the community has made its difficulty system more and more complex. First came numbers, from 3 to 9. Then letters: a, b, c. Then plus signs. Then slashes. All in the name of precision. So we went from three levels inside a grade — 6a, 6b, 6c — to twelve: 6a, 6a/+, 6a+, 6a+/b, 6b, 6b/+, 6b+, 6b+/c, 6c, 6c/+, 6c+, 6c+/7a.

And yet this hunt for ever-finer precision seems doomed from the start, as Lucien Martinez, former editor-in-chief of Grimper and an elite climber himself, has shown. Which raises the real question: where does this obsession come from? What makes us assume that “more precise” automatically means “better”? A quick detour through the history of measurement helps answer that.

Measuring the Problem

In Essay on Approximate Knowledge, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard recalls that between 1668 and 1776, before the meter was introduced, length in France was measured against a standard “sealed into the outer wall of the Grand Châtelet, exposed to every kind of weather.” This standard, known as the toise, was made of wood. It swelled in humidity, shrank in heat, gained and lost a few tenths of a millimeter. Worn down by repeated checks against merchants’ measuring rods, it also got slightly shorter over time.

“The demand for ever-greater precision is not neutral. It comes from specific needs: the needs of capitalist economies working alongside the modern state”

By today’s standards, it was not especially precise. And yet the Toise of the Châtelet was used both in commerce and in serious scientific measurement. It even served as the model for instruments taken on expeditions to Peru and Lapland, despite the fact that everyone knew its flaws. As the astronomer Lalande noted, “the difference between two toises can reach about one-tenth of a millimeter.” Bachelard’s conclusion is striking: even the most careful scientists and experimenters of the time were satisfied with a rough determination, including in the highest levels of scientific research.

In other words, we did not abandon older measuring tools for more precise ones because science demanded it. The scientists of Newton’s and Lavoisier’s era managed perfectly well despite their instruments’ imprecision. So what drove the rise of the metric system?

The dates matter. The toise remained the reference standard until 1776, when it began to be seen as insufficiently precise. That is when the long adventure of the meter began, an effort that would culminate more than a century later, in 1889. So: 1776 to 1889. What happened during that century? Quite simply, the rise and triumph of capitalism and the modern state. More precise measurement systems were developed for that alliance: capital and the state. But what, exactly, did they need them for?

The Made-to-Measure State

The anthropologist James C. Scott explains it in Seeing Like a State: “Ultimately,” he writes, three factors made the “metric revolution” possible. First, the growth of market exchange pushed toward standardized measures. Second, popular sentiment and Enlightenment philosophy supported the idea of one standard across France. Finally, the Revolution, followed by the strengthening of the state under Napoleon, imposed the metric system in France and across the Empire. “Market exchange” and “the strengthening of the state”: that is what the invention of the meter, and the search for more precise systems of measurement, were especially for.

The historian Fabrice Argounès makes a similar point in Méridiens, mesurer, partager, dominer le monde, his history of meridians. He writes that “the history of meridians and longitudes from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century is also the history of expanding colonial empires.” European empires needed to map their sea routes more precisely in order to control their colonies. Scholarly work, at that moment, was primarily meant to serve economic and commercial needs, especially maritime ones.

“We inherit, often without noticing it, a capitalist and modernist idea: that a more precise measure is objectively better and more desirable”

Beyond those needs, capitalism also rests on the mechanization of work. Machines became more complex, and they tolerated less and less margin for error. Every gear had to be manufactured precisely enough to fit exactly where it belonged. “In modern industry, the interchangeability of parts must be total. It happens within a margin of precision on the order of the micron,” Bachelard notes.

Errors like that can stop production. They can keep goods from going out and money from coming in. So they become unacceptable. More precise measurement systems had to be developed because they were one of the conditions for accumulating capital.

Beyond the Meter

The demand for ever-greater precision is not neutral. It comes from specific needs: the needs of capitalist economies working alongside the modern state. And that is one way to read the “progress” of climbing grades: the multiplication of plus signs and slashes we started with.

To inherit this search for ever-increasing precision is also to inherit a certain ideology, one that modern measurement systems both express and carry forward. We inherit, often without noticing it, a capitalist and modernist idea: that a more precise measure is objectively better and more desirable.

Our desire to grade routes and boulders more and more precisely is simply the arrival inside climbing of an idea that already shapes the rest of our lives. We are not asking for more precise grades, adding plus signs and slashes, and keeping more fussy little accounts because of some pure, selfless love of climbing. We think a more precise grade is better because we live in a world that treats increasing precision as a synonym for progress and modernity.

You can accept that idea. You can share it. But it did not come from nowhere, and it is not self-evident. People living in societies unlike ours, without a state and without a capitalist economy, would probably not place the same value on ever-more-precise measurement. They would want differently what we want — to climb — assuming the strange idea of climbing for fun ever occurred to them at all.

That does not mean we should stop grading climbs. Grades can be useful in all kinds of ways. But we can still question this almost pathological need to quantify reality and reduce it to numbers.

First, as Lucien Martinez pointed out, because we will not gain anything from it. Second, because that need is not really ours. It belongs to an economic and administrative system built to monitor and increase the productivity of territories, labor, and trade. When we “work” a route or a boulder problem — when we project it, meaning we keep trying it over time until we finally send — we are thankfully not working in the same sense as someone sitting at a desk or stuck on an assembly line.

That concern should not be ours. Letting go of it might even be good for our mental health.

The grading systems we already have are enough. In their original form, they do something far more valuable than the numerical bookkeeping we keep asking of them.