Old Order Thinking
Most people today are still operating in old order thinking, in an old order world. This especially applies to scholars and students of knowledge or anyone over the age of 40 by default.
The old order world is gone. Forever. It’s never coming back. Sucks. Get over it. Khalas. The faster you accept that, the better off you’ll be.
What does this mean? What is old order thinking and what is the old world?
The “old world” is not just the world without technology and connection. It’s a world that operated on the principle that technology is a tool to be used when required, with a specific parameter of utility. It’s a world that operated on principles of morality and frameworks that were status quo and accepted. It operated on very clearly defined definitions of basic everyday ideas like economics, politics, family, love, God, the soul.
OLD ORDER WORLD:
- If I work hard and keep my head down, I’ll be successful
- I’ll get married and have kids just like everyone
- Money actually means something and it will always mean something
- The family structure is still very clearly known and understood
- The systems and structures that exist and are in place are for my benefit
- Being honest, sincere, and genuine even while not having your wits about you in the typical normal fashion will bear good fruit
- Professionals like journalists, doctors, lawyers, state actors like the police and politicians are all working hard and have a fiduciary or moral duty to look out for me
You have to realize that the old order of the world operated on a person to person basis. Things took a really long time, if you wanted to learn a craft or trade like learning how to do carpentry, you had to go to someone’s house and learn with them and beg them to teach you and pay them. You had to travel far and wide to meet masters of their respective crafts. The same was the case in all trades, professions and teaching. Islamic learning also operated on a person to person basis, learning from your teacher as you sat with them and took from them as you travelled to far off lands to do this.
The exercise of acquiring information was MUCH more difficult. It required a person to really dedicate themselves to whatever it was they believed in, whether that thing was religion or learning how to make wooden furniture. You had to actually really be interested in doing what you wanted to do, there was a barrier to entry for the layperson.
This changed with the internet and technology. It’s tough to find scholars whose lectures you can’t look up and dissect now. In the 80s-90s even the most introspective religious leader would have only a handful of people to bounce ideas off, but today a class/khutbah/lecture is basically focus-grouped before people even go to give the class/lecture or talk. You can now find/pay for khutbah’s even. Meanwhile, that same scholar has to be concerned with his engagement on multiple social media accounts discussing everything from religion, to politics, to praying for his favorite NFL team to make the playoffs.
In addition there was a feeling of privacy that was always there. If you got into a fight in a restaurant in Chicago and ran away and flew back to Jersey…your employer or family or friends would have no idea that you got into a fight.
The old order ways of how we learned deep knowledge and gained information about things around us have died and given way to a new, globalized process of how we “do” almost everything, including religion. Today, anyone, believer or not, has 24 hour access to that religious ‘influencer’. You didn’t like the Jummah Khutbah? You had a problem with the misogyny and right wing sentiments of the lecture you attended on Saturday? You can tell him off on his IG or perhaps, fire off a Twitter storm before the scholar even gets home to see it.
What does it mean to have globalized engagement, globalized access to information at a moments notice? The printing press destroyed Christianity by making access to the Bible available to everyone without a pass through scholar. It is what ended up creating the Protestant movement. The internet has done away with this old order way of processing information in almost every realm of life. There was a degree of 4th wall separation that existed from the hoi polloi, the common folk, the layman, the aami. The entire world is just a review thread on Jersey Halal Spots now.
People don’t like someone like Daniel Haqiqatchou not because he’s supposedly espousing “misogynist views”, and ”right wing talking points”.
No, it’s because people like him make people uncomfortable. They blame all of the other things like misogyny, and sectarianism but in reality its the deeply rooted cognitive dissonance that they are not able to deal with. The dissonance that the world they once knew and were taught to understand no longer exists.
It’s jarring for people who are operating on the principles of the old world.
Folks like him have adapted far faster, and far quicker in response to new order changes and attacks on Islam. He is not operating from an old order mindset which involves nuanced deep critical analysis and breakdowns filled with sincere and passionate reverence. Why not? Because you’d get wiped out. You are competing with people and speaking with people who have the attention spans of a goldfish. It doesn’t matter whether he accurately critiques people. None of those things matter anymore, those rules no longer exist.
It’s bothersome to people that he operates in the new world paradigm with cut and pastes, memes, one liners, gifs, and such and most folks have ego investments and nostalgia about a deeply rooted belief system which says that you need to operate in the old order ways. Now, there is cognitive dissonance that people have with this because they think, how is it that someone like DH who’s Harvard educated is acting like this fool, this clown, and yet….people are still rallying around him and he’s created a following. We now must deride this figure and instead of looking at his new world strategies and refining them (since they clearly work), we throw the baby out with the bath water.
NEW ORDER WORLD:
- Rules and logic aren’t important, feelings and desires are
- Everything is temporary or non-existent, money, fame, politics, ideas, jokes, entertainment, and definitions can all change
- The systems are in place to benefit the people who put the systems in place, you are only a beneficiary of said systems until they no longer need you or you pose a threat
- Fundamental building blocks of society like gender, family, and morality are no longer the status quo and are vehemently rejected
- Information is no longer important. Rather, curated, collected and processed knowledge in a bite sized format is.
Because unfortunately social dynamics do not care what you think…they have changed and many folks are operating in an old world paradigm in a sea full of new world changes, rhetoric, and sophistry.
We are no longer operating in the world of Incoherence of the Philosophers where scholars wrote books back and forth, this is meme culture and like it or not, it’s here to stay. Thus our tactics and approach have to change to stand up in this new world paradigm.
Does this mean that you need to operate bereft of a moral code or ignore the guidelines put in place by Allah and his Messenger ﷺ . Absolutely not.
However, what it does mean is that you no longer can operate in a manner with the assumption that the world is still the same or that people are still the same.
The “new world order” isn’t coming. We are already in it.
Adapt.