Reference reading
Rigidity
Requiring the evidence to follow the familiar route after relevant conditions have changed.
Habitual unwillingness to revise a view or method when relevant reasons call for reconsideration.
Imagine this: A campaign keeps following the old canvassing route after the entrances it relied on have moved.
How the pattern works
A canvassing plan can embody genuine experience. Its old route may once have been efficient, inclusive and well understood. Rigidity gives that history authority over the present question: where are the entrances now? The problem is habitual refusal to reconsider a view or method when relevant reasons call for it.
Political commitments need continuity, so reconsideration can feel suspicious. A changed tactic is called retreat; a revised estimate becomes disloyalty. Yet principles and instruments answer different questions. The commitment to hear residents can remain while the meeting time, consultation method or policy mechanism changes. Treating every inherited means as part of the sacred end makes practical learning appear morally forbidden.
What it costs public life
People must fit changed circumstances into an arrangement that no longer reaches them. Effort is spent defending the route rather than examining what it accomplishes. Those pointing toward the new entrance can be treated as obstacles to the purpose they are trying to help the group pursue.
A distinction worth keeping
Persistence, settled ethical limits and refusing an unjust compromise are not Rigidity. Neither is disagreement with a proposed revision. Reasons can support keeping the existing method. Dogmatism is a belief-focused expression of the same canonical disposition. Fanaticism grants a cause permission to override moral limits; a fanatic may change tactics readily. Complacency may see no need to inspect, while rigidity actively refuses warranted change.
What a useful response can change
State which purpose the current position or procedure serves. Then ask whether the objection challenges that purpose or offers a better way to carry it out.
Examine a concrete changed condition rather than demanding a general declaration of flexibility. An accessible meeting location or a corrected assumption gives the discussion something definite to decide.
Explain a justified revision in terms supporters can follow. Accountable change names the reason and what remains committed; it need not pretend that every earlier decision was foolish or that every novelty is improvement.
Questions for reflection
- Am I defending the purpose or the route that once served it?
- What relevant reason would warrant keeping the present method?
Other perspectives
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, First Series · Read the source
Emerson describes the pressure to preserve one’s past words because others use them to judge character. Political accountability matters, yet a justified revision need not be a betrayal of principle.
However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.
John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source
Mill asks even a true opinion to remain alive through discussion. The route can be defended for reasons, but mere possession of an old conviction does not remove the need for examination.