Change is good: It’s the 21st century after all!

WE HEAR THIS a lot don’t we? It’s the 21st century so open your arms wide for all waves of change. I admit it sounds exciting and kind of liberating. Everything should change, for the sake of change. This basically means don’t resist any change because according to this logic, who in their right mind prefers the “old” to the “new”. To the 21st century mind this is heresy pure and simple. But can this thinking bear scrutiny?
These are not mere philosophical musings, in our times this is highly relevant. With the “benevolent” winds of the Arab Spring — a term that has become quite dubious by now, more and more people are infatuated with change.
Journalists, politicians, and religious leaders all pepper their discourse with this beloved word. The dominant implication is that change is necessarily and absolutely good and desirable. It might be useful though to question this assumption, not to necessarily debunk it completely, but rather to understand its limitations and flaws in the hope that we would reach a better and more nuanced understanding of what change is, what it should be, and what it shouldn’t be.
It is important to note that preoccupation with change in our part of the world is indeed warranted, since our status quo is mostly unacceptable on many fronts. In this vein, it would be interesting to know why we, as Muslims and Arabs, believe our situation is unacceptable.
Is it unacceptable because it is incongruent with our Islamic understanding of how we should be as societies and individuals? Or is it unacceptable in comparison with the dominant Western status quo? The answers to such questions would clearly make a difference in our perception of the type of change needed.
Nonetheless, it is obvious that in our Muslim world many things need to be changed for the better — emphasis on the word better here. The fact is we tend to discuss change as an inherently good thing, which is peculiar, since even everyday experiences clearly show that change can indeed be bad as well as good.
It is merely a force with a choice and direction, its value determined by the validity and goodness of both.
Isn’t disease change after all? It is a new state the body finds itself in, but you won’t find anyone who claims that this new condition is better than the old healthy one, just by virtue of its novelty. On the other hand, changing a person’s convictions from paganism to monotheism is — to the Abrahamic religions at least — a good and essential change.
So this is not an attack on “change” per se. It is an invitation to critically think about change and probe its necessity. What exactly do we intend to change and why? Is there a clear and better alternative? What are the benefits and drawbacks, and which outweighs the other? In whose interests is it? Can we be sure the claimed benefits will actually come about? Have we carefully considered its unintended consequences? This approach might seem like common sense to some, however we often detect in writings and dialogue the idea that change automatically means “progress”, that progress is automatically good, and that the new is always better than what it replaces. So when someone pulls out the old “It’s the 21st century” adage, they think they are providing us with a compelling reason to discard the old or traditional, as if the validity of something is measured merely by it’s newness and not by it’s truthfulness, virtue, or other important factors.
But let’s go ahead and be a bit “heretical” here — according to the modern creed. What if there were things that should never be changed, things that could be changed sometimes depending on the context, and things that should certainly be changed? What if change was not an end in itself, but a means to various ends, which means that if those desired ends are already manifest no change is needed?
In other words, there aren’t any simple answers and solutions along the lines of “change is good” and “old is bad”. Such an approach just might get us somewhere worth going to.

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