John walks across bridge, sees Tom about to jump off. "Don't do it", says John, "Jesus loves you. Do you believe in Jesus?" "Yes." "Are you a Protestant or a Catholic?" "Protestant." "Same here! What denomination?" "Baptist." "Me too!. Northern or Southern?" "Northern." "Me as well! Northern Conservative or Northern Liberal?" "Northern Conservative." "Wow! Northern Conservative Great Lakes Region or Northern Conservative Eastern Region?" "Northern Conservative Eastern Region." "Die, you heretic!" And John pushes Tom off the bridge.
The central virtue of Columbia sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke consists in its documented argument for what has been intuitively clear for some time: that influential elites who support the various causes generally going under the heading “woke” evince little practical interest in making life better for anyone else, authentic-sounding protestations to the contrary. Rather, to let al-Gharbi speak for himself:
attitudes and dispositions associated with "wokeness" are primarily embraced by symbolic capitalists. Wokeness does not seem to be associated with egalitarian behaviors in any meaningful sense. Instead, "social justice" discourse seems to be mobilized by contemporary elites to help legitimize and obscure inequalities, to signal and reinforce their elite status, or to tear down rivals—often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized, and disadvantaged in society. (296)
Note that “woke” here indicates an “attitude,” a “disposition.” In our performative times, an attitude beats an argument any day, and speaking to this point al-Gharbi provides a nice list of such attitudes which generally cluster together to form early twenty-first century wokeness. The list is too detailed to quote in full, but briefly summarized, wokeness emphasizes allyship with preferred groups: like Sartrean-type communist fellow travelers, you get the social cachet while minimizing—though perhaps not eliminating—any potential Gulags in your future. You also get “aesthetic embrace of diversity and inclusion,” emphasis on concepts such as privilege, bias (probably unconscious), granular concern with disparities of all kinds, as long as those disparities reflect unfavorably on preselected privileged groups, and finally, in a beautiful phrase that wins this year’s prize for understatement: “an approach to identity that is, for lack of a better term, somewhat mystical.” On this last point, for example, al-Gharbi notes the “mystical” truth that “race is held to be biologically unreal but is nonetheless something that people are not permitted to change” (32, emphasis in original). Christian says to Atheist: the Trinity is mystery. Woke elites: Hold my beer.
This is probably as good a definition of “woke” as we’re going to get; at some point, to lightly paraphrase Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964): You know it when you see it.
Some of al-Gharbi’s other key concepts, however, are susceptible of more precise definition: first and foremost, “symbolic capitalists.” This is the elite class, culturally and economically:
professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction (as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to physical goods and services). For instance, people who work in fields like education, science, tech, finance, media law, consulting, administration, and public policy are overwhelmingly symbolic capitalists. If you're reading this book, there's a strong chance you're a symbolic capitalist. I am, myself, a symbolic capitalist. (26)
Al-Gharbi borrows the phrase from Pierre Bourdieu’s 1979 book Distinction. Of particular importance here is the notion that power relations in a given society have a great deal to do with who has more symbolic capital (be that cultural, academic, or political) and who has less. Wokeness, al-Gharbi contends, “has become a key source of cultural capital among contemporary elites—especially among symbolic capitalists.” (26) And so, the argument goes, who gets to be woke and who doesn’t is a key determinant of who gets to enter or remain in the cultural aristocracy, with all the nontrivial rights, economic benefits, and privileges thereunto pertaining.
So much for the characters inhabiting We Have Never Been Woke. What’s the plot? In brief, al-Gharbi’s story is that at several times, going back to the late 1910’s, the United States has experienced a “Great Awokening.” These are generally the product of what the author calls “elite overproduction,” another of his key concepts. Drawing on scholar Peter Turchin, al-Gharbi argues that we have an overproduction of elites when we have more people who want and feel they deserve high status and high compensation than the economy can absorb. Granting the cachet of being seen to sympathize with the underdog, this leads such persons to ally with the marginalized long enough to batter their way into the higher cultural/academic/political ranks, at which point, new elites generally go native. “At the end of the day, elites just want to be elites” (99). What all this means for al-Gharbi’s story, then, is that Great Awokenings in general and ours in particular, are actually the result of internal status disputes between and among elites. Put rather more crudely: if the number of potential Diversity Deans is less than the number of PhD’s in Grievance Studies, then the pressure to out-radical each other will correspondingly increase, as our elite aspirants reverse the intent of the famous French Revolution cartoon and use concern for the less fortunate as a righteous stepping stone to glory and wealth.
This, I would argue, gets us to the most important insight of al-Gharbi’s book. It’s not so much that the loose cluster of positions and postures that comprises wokeness can and sometimes does conflict with valuing place, limits, or liberty, central concerns of those of us at FPR. Rather, woke attacks on any values at all—deeply held or performative, regardless—are a byproduct of elite attacks on each other in the victim-est competition to make Herbert Spencer drill for oil in his grave. Thus, the consequent phenomenon of people of “privileged” background masquerading as Native Americans, African Americans, or if you prefer a Life of Brian-esque congeries of the preferentially afflicted: “black lesbian feminist socialists” (116). We aren’t really talking about conflicting virtues here, according to al-Gharbi: we’re talking about a good old- fashioned materialist utililitarianism where the felicific calculus requires submission to a kind of zero-sum social darwinist struggle to reach the top of the cultural food chain. One is tempted to “upcycle” (and cleverly pad my symbolic capital reserves by performance of that word) a line from Kissinger and lament that it’s a pity they can’t all lose. Reminding myself that schadenfreude should be enjoyed sparingly if at all, I do shake my head at the old-Bolshevik-during-the-Purges knife edge on which our symbolic capitalist elites apparently walk, if al-Gharbi is to be believed. Thus the joke in the epigraph. If nothing else, this book should cure you of a desire for Success.
One can only admire al-Gharbi’s fearlessness—he argues that there’s an oft-overlooked gender dynamic in play in elite overproduction: as women have long outnumbered men among college grads, this means that “the elites being overproduced are increasingly women.” Further, “…the people occupying these new ‘diversity and inclusion’-oriented positions are overwhelmingly women. These positions are serving as new sinecures almost entirely for female aspirants—providing well-paying and relatively prestigious work for women who might otherwise be excluded from the symbolic professions” (108). This brings me to a few concluding descriptive observations, before offering any theses as to what we should make of all this. Al-Gharbi is careful to qualify that his account does not require our elite symbolic capitalists to be universally cynical. He notes in a number of places that woke beliefs may be and often are, sincerely held. His general argument, however, suggests that when you subtract elite deeds from elite words, the remainder is a hypocrisy that’s the tribute that virtue pays to vice. While much of the book is taken up with the gap between elite words and deeds (e.g. 131-146), al-Gharbi mostly explains this by arguing that ideals (some worthy, some not, one supposes) tend to get shunted off with a kind of invisible hand-ish argument that working to better one’s own “underprivileged” lot in life is bound to redound to the benefit of others, even when that result is not the intention of anyone in particular (117; he quotes the relevant passage from Adam Smith’s Weath of Nations). This is how, probably to his credit, al-Gharbi puts the best possible face on a reality that is variously amusing, infuriating, and even occasionally relieving: it is likely (though I doubt al-Gharbi would agree) that what’s left of Western Civilization would be in even worse shape than it is now, were not the revolutionary energies of the woke ennervated by the pull of hypocrisy and self-justification (see 287-295).
By the end of the book, it is hard to think of a faux-sacred cow al-Gharbi has failed to expose as appealing to self-interest. Feminism, enironmentalism, LGBTQ matters, diversity departments in corporations: the list goes on. In each case al-Gharbi concludes that there are compelling practical reasons for our elites to publicly support these causes with words and equally compelling reasons not to support them with deeds, as in his trenchant observation that identifying as something other than heterosexual
do[es] work for the growing numbers of elites who identify as queer, bisexual, or nonbinary but who partner overwhelmingly or even exclusively with people of the opposite biological sex....The share of Americans under thirty who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer is now nearly twice the share of Americans who report having actually engaged in nonstraight sexual encounters—and the gap has continued to grow....The growing divergence between sexual orientations and behaviors seems to be particularly pronounced among highly educated and left-identifying young women. (233)
For a Columbia University sociologist, this strikes me as something like throwing down the gauntlet.
So what to make of al-Gharbi’s book? First, I really can’t decide whether he himself is sincere or whether he’s gaslighting me. In one interesting section among many, he forthrightly details how his own somewhat unique background has contributed to his ability to get a hearing for the arguments he wants to advance (see here for some more detailed biographical info on the author). He discusses how he framed his background and perspective, at the beginning of the book, and consequently how
[e]mphasizing my Blackness and the influence of Black scholarship on this text also helped neutralize in advance certain forms of tedious criticism or suspicion that a non-Black author might have had to contend with. That is, I began this book by leveraging totemic capital in order to push readers to listen to me in a different way than they otherwise might. (261)
One wants to see this as a needed dose of objectivity, and I hope that’s exactly what it is. Prudence, however, prompts me to wait a few years to see if al-Gharbi succumbs to the pull of elite status-seeking that his own book does so much to expose. If he doesn’t, one wonders how long he’ll last in the elite ranks of the academy. On the other hand, there seems to me a nontrivial chance that al-Gharbi’s own thesis will get coopted into the service of the power dynamics he discusses in the book. John McWhorter once told an amusing story about attending a conference where guilty white liberals were being harangued about their privilege. He looked at one of his fellow attendees and said: “Do you realize that that man hates you? Do you think you deserve it?” I can equally well imagine al-Gharbi getting invited to high-powered conferences to lecture our elite symbolic capitalists about their hypocrisy, showing the power of his thesis thereby. That the rights to this book had to be auctioned off to the highest bidder is eyebrow-raising—that it is his doctoral thesis makes it even more so. In academic publishing this happens about as often as…hang on, I think I just saw a pig fly past my office window. Only time will tell, I suppose, whether al-Gharbi has found a place to stand both inside and outside the cultural elite, or whether this book will serve as his masterpiece ticket of entrance into the guild, while the rest of us return to being the rubes we are, less the sticker price of the book.
So the core of We Have Never Been Woke is persuasive, and it’s hard not to see his thesis in operation in all kinds of fields, once you look at the world his way. I’ll cite two unexpected and very recent examples. Only recently, I received in my email inbox an interview with the Slavic studies scholar Ewa Domanska, whose zeal to be seen on the side of the righteous as regards the Ukraine war leads her to argue—with a “come on, people!” tone—that Russian literature is really nothing to write home about, if you discount Dostoevskii and Tolstoi. While this is a bit like saying that the ocean is pretty dry as long as you ignore all the water, the professional rewards for performing such terms as “decolonization” are such that nobody is going to check to see if she’s signed up to help liberate the Donbass. More philosophically, I happen to be reading political theorist Michael J. Thompson’s recent book Twilight of the Self, in which he argues that the contemporary self is in imminent danger of becoming just one more late-capitalist commodity among others. Such a thesis seems very much commensurate with al-Gharbi’s view that the woke self is a symbolic capitalist one and is easily modified so that one’s particular brand of cultural cachet remains a hot commodity. It is no small praise of a book, then, to say that it offers a number of “aha!” moments.
However, I do want to offer a closing critique, something akin to what made me uneasy about Batya Ungar-Sargon’s Bad News. In fact, one might view al-Gharbi as offering a much more detailed, wide-ranging, and academically rigorous version of that book. I thought that Ungar-Sargon’s argument didn’t address the possibility that there might actually be right and wrong answers to the questions that divide us, even if the temperature of those questions is artificially stoked by people whose self-interest includes doing so. We Have Never Been Woke, I think, is deserving of much the same “I’ve got to raise my kids in this world, and so these aren’t just academic questions” sort of critique. (If I’m wrong, I’d welcome the author’s correction; he strikes me as the kind of guy I’d want to have a beer with.) Al-Gharbi seems to think that the main thing to be said about transgenderism is that elites use their identification with it as a totem of their righteousness. A problem? Sure. The most important thing to be said about it? Not by a long shot.
So the considerable merit of al-Gharbi’s book is in its fearless commitment to detailing who benefits from wokeness. Its main drawback, I think, lies in its periodic avoidance of the reality that, at least in many cases, the causes championed by woke elites are seriously detrimental to human flourishing and would be even if their champions were so selfless as to pursue them for no personal gain whatsoever. Al-Gharbi even quotes Catholic scholar Rene Girard to the effect that “all discourses on exclusion, discrimination, racism, etc. will remain superficial as long as they don’t address the religious foundations of the problems that besiege our society” (44; quote is from Girard’s I see Satan Fall Like Lightning). That al-Gharbi is honest enough to quote Girard like this suggests to me that he sees the problem here. He tells us that at one point, he did consider a career as a Catholic priest, before an intervening bout of atheism and a final landing on Islam. So if there’s an intentional omission here, I assume that that was a tactical decision. Suggesting that God, whom al-Gharbi [safely?] mentions in the acknowledgments, might have something to say about our problems is probably a bridge too far, even for an Ivy League professor with the right kind of street cred (out of raceclassandgender, two out of three ain’t bad).
So for me, al-Gharbi has provided another interesting diagnostic analysis of the “how we got this way” type. As for what we can do about it, well, that’s probably too much to expect from sociology or any other academic discipline. If we’re looking for a handy, blunt-instrument, vulgar populist sort of answer to that, then: “Don’t trust anybody who makes over $150,000” might be a good start. On al-Gharbi’s own account, you’ll likely be right more often than not.
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