Inconsistency is part of every ideological position, and should be. OTOH, one should modify one's position if supporting it causes one to be compelled to support untenable ideological stances. One can always deny having changed positions. In the present environment, one can even hold an untenable position and claim that one is being misunderstood, et al.
'Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds', Emerson said. Wilde seconded him. Both claimed that stance, but were misunderstood.
I disagree. Consistency is the holy grail of the seeker of truth.
Inconsistency is a weed in the garden, or perhaps a creeping vine strangling the flowers, and it's sources and roots are to be regularly rid from the space with doubt and the understanding that consistency is attainable even if it may never actually be attained.
Real inconsistency is either contradiction, and mere
apparent inconsistency belies poor understanding of the subject, the former necessarily implying the ability to falsify any truth or prove as true any falsehood.
Inconsistency allows any system of thought in which it is tolerated on the long term to descend into proving
any statement of the system.
And even the apparent inconsistency makes for a failure of understanding that, in a similar way, will allow a bug to exist in the semantic structure that yields much the same result.
Such should, as a result, never sit well.
This is not to say that
inconsistency must always be immediately addressed. Indeed usually it cannot, else it would have been earlier. It is foolish to uproot some thing in one's worldview because it is a little weedy if by in large the landscape is healthier for it than without it at the moment.
Often, one can focus on the contradictions, cognitive dissonances, that spin out of the inconsistency first, to accept that the obvious and problematic contradiction is an artifact of the former, but eventually one must address the underlying failure of understanding.
Then, I am biased. Inconsistency for me means the system will not function, the sensor will not read, the circuit will not tell the truth I wish to find out about. You can write a book where things are inconsistent, sure, but if you make a
functional universe with an inconsistency, you better watch out what happens when that "inconsistency" gets dereferenced, and the system starts executing out of the BSS section.
Inconsistency is perhaps a hobgoblin of the small minded writer, it is equally the very real lich standing in the path of the higher mind, as well, the mind which would not contemplate gods but rather BE a god.