"If people were meant to fly, they'd have wings." "Women voting? Nonsense – voting is men's business." "I've never worn a seat belt in my life – I'm not going to start wearing one now."
the attitude common to these three statements is resistance to change. Any change, however, slight, represents a break in routine, threatens our established habits, challenges the familiar. It demands that we reconsider older responses.
Just as we prefer patterns of acting that we know, so we prefer ideas that are not strange or foreign sounding, ideas we're comfortable with. When Galileo said, "The earth moves around the sun," people were upset, partly because a thousand sunrises and sunsets told them the sun did the moving, but also partly because they simply had never before heard of the earth's moving. The new idea threatened their fixed belief that the earth was the center of the solar system. They had that idea neatly packaged in their minds. It was a basic part of their understanding of the universe; it was intertwined with their religion. And now this upstart Galileo was demanding no less than that they untie the package, reopen the issue.
When the astronauts first landed on the moon, at least one elderly man expressed total disbelief. "It's a trick thought up by the TV people," he said. "It's impossible for man to reach the moon."
INSECURITY AND FEAR
Why do we resist change? Mainly because the new and unfamiliar challenge our "mine is better" thinking and threaten our sense of security. In many of us that sense is very fragile. Insecurity is the reason some people will go to elaborate lengths to explain away new ideas they cannot cope with. For example, the child whose father is in jail and whose mother steals to support him may believe "all cops are bad." Once that idea becomes fixed he may cling to it. As a result, even years later he may reject the police officer who offers him genuine concern and friendship.[ Thomas A. Harris, I'm OK – You're OK: A Practical Guide to Transactional Analysis (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p.36]
Another reason people resist change is that they're afraid of the unknown. In some ways this fear may be caused by insecurity; in others it may itself cause insecurity. "Who knows what will happen if…?" they wonder, and they are inclined to suspect the worst. Fired by hat suspicion, they fight the new idea. This kind of fearful reaction is everywhere in evidence – in education and government, in religion, in law, science, and medicine.
As late as 1948, California law prohibited the marriage of an Oriental man and a Caucasian woman. Many people are still mumbling vague warnings about the unspeakable dangers that the racial integration of schools will bring. And a sizeable number of Americans react to the gay liberation movement somewhat like this: "If we allow them to parade their perversion in public, our young people will be corrupted and our value system destroyed."
We might be inclined to think that the problem is peculiar to the United States, but examples of fear-inspired behavior fill the history books. After all, what drove the early settlers of North America from their European homelands was one form or another of intolerance for different ideas and beliefs. Torturing and killing heretics and witches was an established practice at innumerable times and places.
FEAR AND TRADITION
It is probably because of the interaction between insecurity and fear that people hold tradition in such high regard. Many traditions, of course, are worthwhile. They help keep intact the valuable lessons of the past. In many cases, they assist us in defining our loyalties and indeed, our own identities. However, like most good thing, respect for tradition can be shortsighted and unwise. This is the case whenever clinging to tradition represents not careful judgment that something deserves preservation but rather some internal panic. "Anything is worth clinging to, so long as we cling" is not a reasonable attitude.
Surely some such panic was partly responsible for the centuries long prohibition of dissection of the dead. Despite the entreaties of medical people, who wished only to learn the secrets of the human body for the fight against disease, religious and secular authorities refused to allow autopsies. Why? Because being unheard of, the practice was considered outrageous, sacrilegious. Similarly the furor that arose over Darwin's theory of evolution in the nineteenth century was fired by the fear that the theory would undermine belief in God and the Christian religion. The beliefs that Adam and Even were actual people and that the earth was only five thousand years old were time honored. Any suggestion that the book of Genesis might be interpreted symbolically rather than literally seemed to challenge nothing less than the entire Christian perspective on life.
So great were the shock and fear that greeted Darwin's theory, in fact, that almost three quarters of a century after it was first advance, a teacher named Scopes in a small Tennessee town could be brought to trial for teaching evolution in his biology class. His trial pitted two famous American against each other – the prosecutor, a gifted orator, William Jennings Bryan; the defender, a brilliant lawyer, Clarence Darrow. When their historic confrontation was over, Scopes paid merely a token fine, and the teaching of the theory of evolution was vindicated. Soon after that, the law he had been tried under was repealed.
Yet the resistance to change did not pass to easily. Half a century later a poll of high school students in the same Tennessee town revealed that 75 percent of them still interpreted the biblical story of creation literally, and many townspeople believed Darwin's theory causes "corruption, lust, immorality, greed… drug addiction, war, and atrocious acts of genocide."[ "Darwin Doubted in Scopes's Town, New York Times, October 1, 1972, p.24.]
To this day, despite their previous failure, supporters of "creation science" around the country are working to get equal time for their view in the nation's classrooms.
The task of guarding the established ways of viewing things has always been regarded by many as a sacred task. This is true even in primitive cultures. For example, the Trobriand Islanders considered sexual success a praiseworthy accomplishment. The man who was unusually successful with women was much admired and honored. Yet it was assumed that such success would be achieved only by the favored social class. If a common islander became too successful, he was resented. As one observer, Robert K. Merton, suggested, this reaction was not due to any conspiracy on the part of the Trobriand chiefs: "It is merely that the chiefs had been indoctrinated with an appreciation of the proper order of things, and saw it as their heavy burden to enforced the mediocrity of others."[ "The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy," The Antioch Review, 1948, pp. 193-210]
Of course, it isn't always panic that makes us cling to established patterns. The man in Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall" kept repairing the wall between his land and his neighbor's not because there was still any good purpose in doing so but only because his father had done so before him. Consider this case of uncritical dependence on past ways. A girl was told by her mother, "Never put a hat on a table or a coat on a bed." She accepted the direction and followed it faithfully for years. One day, many years later, she repeated the direction to her own teenage daughter, and the daughter asked, "Why?" The woman realized that she had never been curious enough to ask her own mother. Her curiosity at long last aroused, she asked her mother (by then in her eighties). The mother replied, "Because when I was a little girl some neighbor children were infested with lice and my mother explained I should never put a hat on a table or a coat on a bed." Thus the woman had spent her entire adult life following a rule she had been taught without once wondering about its purpose or validity.[ Thomas A. Harris, I'm OK – You're OK: A Practical Guide to Transactional Analysis (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp.22-23.]
At times a tradition may seem relatively unimportant and yet in a subtle way hold tremendous significance for people. In the late 1960s, for instance, the tendency of many young people to think and act and dress differently from their parents drew surprisingly angry responses from many adults. To them it represented much more than an assertion of young people's independence. In some vague way it threatened the idea of order itself, for the parent-child relationship represented only one aspect of a whole network of higher-lower relationships: God-human, leader-follower, master-servant, employer-employee, rich-poor, teacher-student. To challenge one was to challenge all. And to challenge all was to attack the very fabric of civilized society. Given this perspective, the rabid rejection of hippies and communes and peace signs was understandable. To the traditionalist, long hair and bare feet were not just matters of appearance; they were symbols of anarchy.
Despite such resistance to change, however, many new ideas do manage to take hold. We might think that when they do, those who had fought so hard for them would remember the resistance they had to overcome in others. Ironically, they often forget very quickly. In fact, they sometimes display the same fear and insecurity they so deplored in others. An example occurred in psychiatry. Sigmund Freud and his followers were ostracized and bitterly attacked for suggesting that sexuality was an important factor in the development of personality. The hostility toward Freud was so strong, in fact, that his masterwork, The Interpretation of Dreams, was ignored when it was first published in 1900. it took eight years to sell 600 copies of the book.[ "Anna Freud, Psychoanalyst, Dies at 86," New York Times, October 10, 1982, p. 46.]
Yet when Freud's ideas became accepted, he and his followers showed no greater tolerance – they ostracized and attacked those who challenged any part of his theory. Karen Horney, for example, challenged Freud's view of women as being driven by "penis envy." She also believed that neurosis is caused not only by frustrated sexual drives but also by various cultural conflicts and that people's behavior is not determined by instinctual drives but can in many instances be self-directed and modified. For these theories (today widely accepted,) she was rewarded with rebuke and ostracism by the Freudian dogmatists.[ Rona and Laurence Cherry, "The Horney Heresy," New York Times, Magazine, August 26, 1973, pp.12ff.]
OVERCOMING RESISTANCE TO CHANGE
It is important to overcome resistance to change for two reasons. The first is that all creative ideas are by definition new and unexpected departures from the usual and the accepted. Resisting change therefore means opposing creativity and the progress it brings about. The second reason is that resistance to change blocks the impartial judgment essential for critical thinking. Here are three tips for overcoming your resistance to change:
1.Expect yourself to react negatively to new ideas. In addition, expect your reaction to be especially strong when the new idea challenges a belief or approach you have become attached to. 2.Refuse to let your initial negative (or, for that matter, positive) reaction to be the measure of the new idea. Force yourself to set aside that reaction long enough to appraise the idea fairly. 3.Judge the idea on the basis of your critical appraisal and not your initial reaction. If there are good and sufficient reasons for rejecting the idea, by all means do so. However, be honest with yourself. If your "reasons" are only excuses in disguise, acknowledge (at least to yourself) that you are too prejudiced to judge the idea fairly.
APPLICATIONS
1.To what extent do you tend to resist change? The ideas listed below will give you an opportunity to reach a tentative conclusion. Read each one, react to it, and observe your reaction. If you notice yourself resisting it at all, examine the reaction more closely and determine what parts of the chapter shed light on your resistance: a.A federal law should be passed requiring women to retain their maiden names when they marry (that is, forbidding them from adopting their husbands' names). b.All high school and college varsity sports should be eliminated, all varsity sports budgets should be used for the expansion of intramural sports programs. c.The office of the presidency of the United States should be changed from a on-person position to a three-member board. d.Cemeteries should open their gates to leisure-time activities for the living. Appropriate activities would include cycling, jogging, fishing, nature hiking, and (space permitting) team sports. e.The environment (rivers, trees, land, and so on) should be granted legal rights similar to those guaranteed to people.[ This idea has actually been advanced by Christopher Stone, Professor of Law at USC, in his book Should Trees Have Standing? Published by William Kaufmann Co., Los Altos, California. He argues that such rights would make it easier to take legal action against destroyers of the ecology.] f.Federal and state penitentiaries should allow inmates to leave prison during daytime hours to hold jobs or attend college classes. (The only ones denied this privilege should be psychopaths.) g.Colleges should not admit any student who has been out of high school for less than three years. h.To encourage a better turnout at the polls for elections, lotteries should be held. (Voters would send in a ballot stub as proof that they voted. Prizes would be donated by companies.)[ This approach was used in the 1982 California primary and reported in "Game Show Prizes Entice CA Voters," The (Oneonta) Star, June 4, 1982, p.1.] i.Retired people should be used as teachers' aides even if they lack college degrees.[ This idea was tested by an education researcher, Eileen Bayer. It proved successful. (Fred M. Hechinger, "Grandpa Goes to Kindergarten," New York Times, October 29, 1972, Sec.4, p.11.] j.Everyone should be issued and required to carry a national identity card, identifying him or her as a U.S. citizen.[ The Reagan Administration discussed this plan and indicated it was not opposed to it. (U.S. Considering National ID Cards," The (Oneonta) Star, May 21, 1982, p.1.)] k.Churches and synagogues should remove all restrictions on women's participation in liturgical and counseling services, thus permitting women to serve as priests, ministers, and rabbis. l.Colleges should charge juniors and seniors higher tuition than that charged to freshmen and sophomores. 2.Test the reactions of three other people to one or more of the ideas in the previous application. Be selective, choosing people you believe may be shocked by the ideas. Observe their reactions. Have them explain their positions. Decide to what extent, if any, they seem to be resistant to change. (Keep in mind that it is possible for people to disagree with the idea not because they resist a change but because they see real weaknesses in it. 3.Read the following dialogue carefully. Note any instances of resistance to change. Decide which view is more reasonable. (Be sure you avoid resisting change yourself and judge the issue fair-mindedly.)
Background Note: In past decades college officials debated whether to censor student newspapers that published stories containing four-letter words and explicit sexual references. The debate continues, but the issue has changed. Some student papers are publishing articles that make fun of blacks, women, and homosexuals. And others are urging students to paint [ Karla Valance, "This Time, the Rebel's on the Right," Christian Science Monitor, January 27, 1983, p.B1. Also: George Basler, "Student Paper urges Theft and Graffiti," Binghamton Press, January 25, 1983, p.1F.]graffiti on campus buildings and take up shoplifting to combat conformity.
Ernest: Such articles may be childish and tasteless, but that's no reason to censor them. Georgina: Are you kidding? Minorities pay good money to go to college. And on most campuses, I'm sure, their student activity fee pays for the student newspaper. Where's the fairness in charging them for articles that insult them or that encourage lawbreaking, which ultimately costs them as taxpayers? Ernest: Why is everything a money issue with you? So a buck or so from every student's activity fee goes to the newspaper. Big deal. That doesn't give every student the right to play fascist and set editorial policy. The articles are written in a spirit of fun or for chock value. Censorship is not the answer. If a pesky fly buzzes around your head, you don't fire an elephant gun at it. Well, may be you do, but no sensible person does.
4.Bill Beausay, a sports psychologist, suggests that sports be rated much as films are – X, R, or G, depending on the amount of danger and/or violence in them. He urges that children not be allowed to take part in any X-rated sport at an early age. Such sports include motorcycle and auto racing, hockey, football, boxing, and horse racing.[ harry Atkins, "Football, Hockey Are X-Rated," Binghamton Press, December 19, 1982, p.60.] Decide whether his suggestion has merit. Be sure to avoid resistance to change. 5.Decide whether you accept or reject the following arguments. Be careful to avoid both "mine is better" thinking and resistance to change, and judge the issues impartially. You may wish to research the issues further before judging. a.Beer and wine commercials should be banned form television because they glamorize drinking, leading people to associate it with love and friendship and happiness. Such associations are every bit as misleading as those used to sell cigarettes. Alcohol commercials surely are a contributing factoring the current increase in alcohol abuse by adults and children. b.Beauty pageants today give somewhat more attention to talent than pageants did in the past. But the underlying message is the same "Beauty in a woman is strictly a surface matter. Only those with ample bosoms, pretty faces, and trim figures need apply." These pageants make a mockery of the truth that inner beauty, character, is the real measure of a woman (or of a man). 6.Group discussion exercise: Discuss with two or three classmates one of the issues you examined in application 5. Be careful that you views are not affected by resistance to change. Be prepared to present your group's view to the class.