The New Normal Is the Point

We often refer to the strange act of boiling frogs to describe how to change something slowly. The idea referenced is that you can boil a frog as long as you do it slowly rather than all at once. Like many things I learned as a kid, this one doesn't hold up. Real frogs become increasingly agitated as the water heats, and they will indeed jump out if they can.

Which means humans invented a metaphor about frog stupidity to explain human stupidity, and the frogs would like a word. Not to mention the absurdity of all of those scientists torturing frogs to try and settle this.

The data show that the only frogs that stayed in the water were those whose brains had been removed. The frog that stays and boils is the frog who no longer can think. Which I guess means the metaphor isn't dead; it's actually worse than we thought. It turns out the variable isn't temperature; it's our ability to think.

I reference this peculiar history with our amphibious friends to illustrate one of evil's favorite strategies. It often works through boredom. Evil doesn't need your full endorsement. Sometimes it just needs you to stop thinking.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. Her articles eventually became the book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann's job was to organize logistics for the Nazis. He organized trains, schedules, and deportation timetables. He was essentially a transportation administrator for genocide and was executed after his trial in 1962.

It's fascinating to read Arendt's description of the man:

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.

She didn't see a cartoon villain twirling his mustache. She saw a man who had stopped thinking, an administrator so buried in schedules and timetables that the people on the trains had stopped registering as people.

Some have contested that reading. The historian Bettina Stangneth went back through a set of interviews Eichmann gave in Argentina years before his capture, when he believed he was among sympathizers and had no court to perform for. The man on those recordings doesn't sound like someone who had stopped thinking. He sounds like a true believer who knew exactly what he was building and was proud of the work. Stangneth's version of Eichmann thought it all the way through and did it anyway.

So which one was he? The man who stopped noticing what he was doing, or the man who noticed it all and chose it? We still can't say for certain. The same trains, the same paperwork, the same terrifyingly normal face, and the people who have studied him most closely walk away disagreeing. Evil doesn't leave a clean confession about how it got in. While it's easy to point the finger at men like Eichmann through our comfortable historical distance, the same reality is much closer than we might realize.

This week ICE arrested more than 2,000 people a day nationwide over five days. This represents a sharp increase in enforcement, and yet I suspect this might be the first you've heard about it. That's because it didn't arrive with the same bravado as it did earlier in places like Minnesota. Instead, as one source referred to it, this is part of a "new normal." In addition, we are also seeing more examples of ICE agents disregarding federal court orders to take the law into their own hands.

The numbers go up while the spectacle goes down. We were busy celebrating America's birthday while all of this was taking place. Previously, when ICE arrests were loud, we were paying attention and being loud back. But record arrests, administered quietly, may be the boiled-frog experiment run on an entire nation, and the question for you and me is whether we still have our brain intact.

Keeping your brain intact gets you as far as seeing what is happening. It does not get you all the way to doing something about it. The boiled frog stops noticing, and that is one way to lose. The other way belongs to the people who notice everything, see it clearly, and look away anyway, because looking is cheaper than acting. Evil will take either one.

Pontius Pilate is the patron saint of the second kind. When Jesus was arrested, He fell under the jurisdiction of this Roman Governor. It doesn't take long for Pilate to find himself at odds with the crowd on what to do with Him.

When they saw him, the leading priests and Temple guards began shouting, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” “Take him yourselves and crucify him,” Pilate said. “I find him not guilty.” The Jewish leaders replied, “By our law he ought to die because he called himself the Son of God.” When Pilate heard this, he was more frightened than ever. (John 19:6-8)

This is the cowardly way of the world. We try to absolve ourselves of the guilt of our own actions because we lack the courage to do otherwise. Notice Pilate tries to defend his actions with Jesus while also enabling the crowd to kill Him. He even makes one more attempt before he realizes that it will cost him personally if he doesn't go along with it.

Then Pilate tried to release him, but the Jewish leaders shouted, “If you release this man, you are no ‘friend of Caesar.’ Anyone who declares himself a king is a rebel against Caesar.” (John 19:12)

The crowd wins. Pilate pretends to keep his innocence, all while empowering the crowd to kill Jesus. As the theologian William Cavanaugh has argued, “A true social order is based not on defeat of enemies but on identification with victims through participation in Christ's reconciling sacrifice.” But as Pilate knew, identification with victims tends to cost us something that we'd rather not pay. That is the second way to lose. You see the bill, and you decide it costs too much.

Our bill looks different than his. It's the friend who goes quiet on you. The family relationships that get weird. The church that decides you've gotten political. The job that would rather you not. The challenge for us is to turn and face the current head on.

If you're tired, that tracks. We were never built to hold this much at full volume, and a good deal of what reaches you is engineered to keep the volume up. Being worn out by the noise is a sane response. But if the spectacle was manipulating you then, the silence is manipulating you now.

Fatigue is a feeling. Ten thousand people in five days is a fact.

But staying awake was only ever the smaller of the two tests. The brainless frog fails by never noticing. Pilate failed wide awake, the verdict already in his mouth, because acting would have cost him more than he was willing to lose.

So what price are we willing to pay, now that we've noticed?

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Photo by Laura Seaman on Unsplash