"Open" and "Closed-Minded" Movements

Featured in this essay has been a group with whom most readers could readily identify: the civil rights protesters. Yet it is important to emphasize that social movements come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and that some are downright ugly and more than a bit scary by most Western standards. Vladimir Lenin led a social movement; so did Adolph Hitler.

Religious cults are social movements; so is the right-wing militia movement. Depending on the examples one picks, then, it is easy enough to glorify social movements or to condemn them roundly. One's political sympathies will inevitably play a role in that as well.

Still, if there is one yardstick around which rhetoricians can unite in their judgment of social movements, it is open- versus closed-mindedness. Closed-minded movement organizations exhibit absolutistic, totalistic, dogmatic thinking. Their ideological claims are offered as revealed truths and are thus presented impersonally and authoritatively. Rather than questioning these "truths," members are expected to swallow them whole and to compensate for gaps in their leaders' logic by supplying missing premises. Groups such as these are insular, xenophobic, and frequently paranoid. The world external to the movement is seen as sinister and threatening. Members, too, are seen as sinners or as prone to ideological backsliding, but there is the promise for members of redemption and salvation through acts of contrition and purification.

Clearly, not all movement groups exhibit these characteristics, not even those we might be tempted to regard as radical or extreme. Whenever we are tempted to condemn all radicals or extremists it is well to remember who made the American Revolution. Moderates, they were not!