Every so often, I’ll come across a reference to boiling frogs. It feels like I see them more often lately, which is perhaps unsurprising as Twitter appears to be the latest pot that’s quickly being brought to boil.
Sometimes the reference will explain it as an urban legend, and it goes something like this: if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will recognize the danger and leap out. But if you put one in a pot of water that’s normal temperature, and then slowly raise it to boiling, the frog won’t register the change and will eventually perish.
The point, of course, is that we’re often unaware of incremental change, and will put up with inhospitable conditions and/or attitudes if we’re exposed to them gradually rather than all at once. And when we’re talking about qualitative phenomena, like rights, freedoms, or liberties, it’s not as though we have a simple metric to measure how free we are in a particular circumstance. Our frog in a pot is a handy metaphor for something that’s difficult to articulate otherwise. (And if it helps even a single person understand what we’re doing to our planet, all the better.)
The interesting thing about the boiling frog metaphor is that it’s less an urban legend than an outright falsehood. And there are a handful of places online that will tell you this. James Fallow’s piece in the Atlantic from 15 years ago makes me smile, if only because he quotes the Curator of Reptiles and Amphibians at the National Museum of Natural History, who describes the story/legend quite succinctly as “bullshit.”
If you dig a little deeper, there’s this weird history of 19th century naturalists performing these experiments on frogs and arguing over the rate at which the pot should be heated to validate the results. Mostly, I’m kind of sad on behalf of the frogs, who had the misfortune of being amphibian and relatively easy to catch. But I’m also pretty curious about the work of Friedrich Goltz, whose frogs assisted him as he was “doing experiments searching for the location of the soul,” according to Wikipedia.
But I suppose that’s beside the point. The story itself may be bullshit, but the apologue/analogy is a useful one, whether we’re talking about climate, the monopolization of our economy’s various markets, the erosion of personal freedom or privacy, the adjunctification of higher education, the elite capture of our government, et al. I’ve been browsing some of the year-end lists lately, and thinking about how I’d characterize things these days. I’m only one frog, but it feels like there are a lot of pots these days either boiling or awfully close to it.
And for my own purposes, I’ve been thinking a lot about democracy and discourse, and how it is we’ve gotten to the place we’re at. I firmly believe that what’s being described these days as polarization is actually something that’s been happening for most of my life, and that it’s only just now that we’re starting to feel like it’s getting hot in here. That’s part of what I want to write about.