Consistency as a Minor Virtue

By Roger Rosenblatt

The fact that the Democrats taped their televised response to President Reagan's State of the Union message several days before the message was delivered suggests that inconsistency has not been one of the President's problems. As it turned out, Reagan, while not changing his tune in the speech, did play it in a lower register; but little he said could be called inconsistent with previous pronouncements. Indeed, the President has succeeded remarkably in projecting the image of the absolutely predictable man, firm to the point of adamancy, a hard, if amiable, Mount Rushmore head beset with frantic, cajoling advisers, crawling in the ears, tugging at the hair, cooing, shoving, grunting, pleading, praying for a budge. But budge he does rarely, and then most reluctantly. He changes positions, but never his mind.

Still, consistency can be a bona fide virtue, if a small one. Consistency in public life. Consistency in private. The consistency of principle, of philosophy, habit, appearance, of behavior toward subordinates, lovers and friends. To know where a leader stands is a major test of his leadership. That, and to measure where someone stands against the spot he swore to stand on, so as to determine if the person is dependable, reliable. Banks and dogs share this virtue.

Such a character was Captain Mac Whirr of Joseph Conrad's short story Typhoon, a man whose physiognomy was "the exact counterpart of his mind: it had no pronounced characteristics whatever; it was simply ordinary, irresponsive, and unruffled." Mac Whirr, said Conrad, had "just enough imagination to carry him through each successive day." Yet that meager imagination became the hero of the tale, for when a monstrous storm arose at sea, and the good captain was advised by all the voices of reason to sail around and behind the trouble, he of the consistent mind responded, "A gale is a gale, and a full-powered steamship has got to face it." That he did. The ship was knocked to pieces, but it did get through.

In a sense, Conrad was saying that the hard noses of the world account for its stabilities, and quite often this is true. Certainly, if one were to name a single quality common to world leaders nowadays, that quality would be consistency. Reagan, Thatcher, Begin, Andropov, the Pope; all different, all stubborn, all operating on presumptions and premises that almost never bend or vary. Bernard Berenson observed, "Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago." But if consistency were not judged virtuous to some degree, it would hardly be in popular demand, nor would politicians be so passionate to exhibit it.

The fact is, however, that as well as we think of the steady, settled mind, we neither wholeheartedly trust, approve of or admire it, nor do we wish it for ourselves. In late 16th century England, a literary genre developed called the comedy of humors, which was at base the comedy of consistent thought and action. A humor, as Elizabethan playwrights defined it, was an exaggerated human trait, a leaning of disposition so severe as to create a caricature. Thus a character in a comedy of humors would be called Squire Downright, and only downright would he act. In 1900, Henri Bergson proposed an elaborate theory of laughter based on just such a condition. Bergson held that we expect all things human, or connected to the human, to be pliant and fluid. Therefore any demonstration of human inflexibility is potentially funny.

Consistency is also always potentially dull, even when the consistency demonstrated happens to be excellence. John Havlicek, never former basketball star of the Boston Celtics, almost never made a mistake on the court. He used the backboard with astounding precision, and stood exactly where he was supposed to on every fast break. Yet Havlicek was a far less satisfying player to watch than Philadelphia's Julius Erving, who continually sur prises spectators and defenses with moves no one (including him self) is possibly anticipate. One might argue that Erving is consistently amazing, but the reason he so grasps a crowd's imagination, the reason thousands of people roar whenever Erving sim ply lays a hand on the ball, is that the man seems the epitome of the unpredictable, the thoroughly free and spontaneous soul.

Then, too, consistency may be dangerous and destructive. Marianne Moore wrote a poem, "The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing," in which she compared the iridescence of the human mind with the "glaze on a katydid-wing," to emphasize its perpetual variety and mutability. "It's not a Herod's oath that cannot change," she concluded, invoking a most terrible example in the figure of Herod, who would not prof it from experience, who would not alter his position even when heaven screamed at him to do so.

Which is, of course, the central objection to consistency, beyond its comedy, dullness or danger. The consistent mind mocks and distorts life itself, blasphemes and perverts everything in a uni verse that insists on motion. "Myself I may contradict," Montaigne conceded. "The truth I do not."

Whatever we understand as the truth is predicated on surprise and uncertainty, on premises altered, grounds shifted, on opinions made vulnerable to circumstance. When caught in a reversal of a former idea, John F. Kennedy used to counter, "I don't think that way any more." Every morning we peer at a reflection and behold the same face and the different face, the familiar and startling us.

The point is that as admirable as consistency may sometimes be, it is not the truth, and in a way it violates truth by holding the mind in a vise. Consistent people are often said to be most in control of their lives, but rather than possessing consistencies, it is their consistencies that possess them; and they probably are less in control of themselves than more erratic and volatile spirits. To maintain an unshakable view Thus the face of contrary evidence is to maintain a fiction. Thus a consistency need not be specifically "foolish," as Emerson declared, to be diminishing. Any consistency opposed to experience is bound to be foolish in the long run, and to make a liar of its practitioner, however noble his intentions.

This said, one must still allow for that rarest kind of consistency that is neither funny, dull, hazardous nor stifling. Call this the sublime consistency, which, instead of delimiting the truth enhances it -- the consistency of an Ella Fitzgerald, Fred Astaire, Alec Guinness or Isaac Stern. But then, life itself has been inconsistent in producing such consistent pleasures. And once in a while, a consistency comes forward that is both sublime and foolish, that of Don Quixote, for instance, who mounted his premise and stayed the course, eventually proving less mad than inspired.

So it may be too that Reagan's consistency will turn out like Quixote's, or that he will simply be lucky, like Captain MacWhirr. Every American, particularly those out of work, hopes this is the case. In the meantime, it may be comforting to recognize that the country has a man in the White House who knows where he stands. But it would also be reassuring if he more often recognized that he is standing on a world that moves.

-- By Roger Rosenblatt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.