We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
By Musa al-Gharbi.
Princeton University Press, 2024.
Hardcover, 432 pages, $35.
Reviewed by Gene Callahan.
I would like to alert University Bookman readers to an excellent and important book that has just been published: Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke.
The central thesis of the book is not original to al-Gharbi. It is that the main ingredient of wokeness is performance, not substance. (For instance, John Gray and I both agreed on this point in my interview with him in Modern Age.) Our elites are happy to do things like change the name of problematic situations rather than substantially address the problems. An example: lately, it has become de rigueur to refer to “unhoused people” instead of “homeless people.” I imagine going down to the cardboard boxes under the I-77 overpass near where I live in Columbia, SC, and announcing to the people living in them: “I feel your plight, and I have improved your lives: you are no longer ‘homeless’!” Imagine if they anxiously ask me where their new houses are, and I tell them: “No, no, you have misunderstood: you are no longer ‘homeless,’ you are now ‘unhoused’!” If they were to beat me in response, who could blame them?
The main excellence of al-Gharbi’s book lies not in the originality of this central insight but in how the author has meticulously, systematically, and extensively documented its truth. And a secondary excellence is that he shows that a “Great Awokening,” which is what he calls our present madness, has occurred three times previously among American elites. The first Great Awokening kicked off in the 1920s, the second in the 1960s, the third in the 1980s, and this, the fourth, launched around 2011. (It would’ve been interesting if he had looked back into the 19th century’s religious awakenings to compare them to the great awokenings. But writing this book was already a massive undertaking, so it would be unfair to ask more of the author.)
Al-Gharbi notes that the Great Awokening of the 1920s was “far more intense than any that followed.” Nevertheless it was similar to its successors in many ways, for instance, in being driven largely by well-to-do professionals. Sometimes called the “managerial class,” or “the laptop class,” al-Gharbi refers to this group as “symbolic capitalists,” as their work largely involves manipulating symbols and their capital itself is often symbolic: it is typically status they are most concerned about accumulating. (Not to say they don’t want money, but they will spend a great deal of it to enhance their reputation.) In addition, none of the awokenings did very much actually to improve the position of the truly disadvantaged. To illustrate this, he quotes George Orwell from the time of the first Great Awokening: “The typical Socialist[s]… while theoretically pining for a classless society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige… to them, the whole Socialist movement is no more than a kind of exciting heresy-hunt…” looking for “right-wing deviationist[s].”
As with subsequent awokenings, the first one was sparked by anxiety among the greatly increased number of university students. As the Great Depression deepened, they began to doubt that the elite position they thought they deserved would actually be there for them. While they rhetorically backed “Negro,” feminist, and similar causes, their actual demands were for more security for themselves. They came to support FDR because “contrary to their radical rhetoric, they wanted relatively high-status jobs and socioeconomically comfortable lives far more than they wanted to actually overthrow the existing order. And the Roosevelt administration provided what they wanted.”
The vast programs undertaken by the New Deal provided anxious students with large numbers of comfortable, well-paid positions, leading them to become “the establishment” that the students of the 1960s revolted against. And the ’60s Great Awokening was also prompted by students’ heightened anxiety about their future, due to a weakening economy and the threat of being drafted to fight in Vietnam. As al-Gharbi notes, it was only when the exemption from the draft for college graduates was eliminated that the student anti-war protest movement gained steam. The Vietnam War became far more morally objectionable to students once they were at risk of having to fight it: “middle-class students became ‘radical’ precisely when their plans to leave the fighting in Vietnam to minorities and the poor by enrolling in college… began to fall through.” And Richard Nixon correctly saw that ending the draft would starve the student protest movement of fuel.
The third and the current “Great Awokenings” have followed similar patterns: when aspiring elites find their path to elite status threatened, they begin to rail against the current order. Each of the “Great Awokenings” thus have a common cause: elite overproduction, a situation in which there are more people who feel entitled to elite positions than there are such positions available.
From this enlightening historical narrative, al-Gharbi explores the details of our current Great Awokening. I will mention here a few of his empirical assertions without defending them, because he has defended them quite adequately in the 45 pages of citations at the end of his book. So if you want evidence for these facts, please buy the book.
The first of these facts is that the deep blue cities in blue states, the cities in which symbolic capitalists are most concentrated, also have the highest income inequality and the most segregation in the nation. I saw the latter myself when I moved from brownstone Brooklyn to Columbia and immediately realized that this South Carolina city is far more racially integrated than Brooklyn. So the very places that are the most “woke” also have the worst relative poverty and are most divided by race.
Furthermore, while woke symbolic capitalists make a great fuss about “giving voice” to the downtrodden and excluded, the only minority voices they actually hear are “consecrated minorities” who are often symbolic capitalists themselves, and, at the very least, agree with symbolic capitalists’ views on social issues. No attention is paid to what the modal black or Hispanic person thinks about “wokeness.” Furthermore, if a once “consecrated” minority person begins to question the beliefs of symbolic capitalists, the symbolic capitalists do not re-examine their own beliefs to determine if perhaps they got the interests of the minority group wrong; instead, they abandon the former model minority and find a new voice from that group who will tell them what they want to hear, and consecrate that person. This exile happened to, for instance, Dave Chappelle, when he started saying things that symbolic capitalists didn’t like.
Al-Gharbi also points out that it is the most privileged whites, the symbolic capitalists, who are most anxious to accuse others of not “checking their privilege,” and to point the finger at the least privileged white people—the rural poor and working-class whites—as being “the problem.” What’s more, educating people about “white privilege” only leads privileged whites to hold poor whites in greater contempt rather than leading them to surrender their own highly privileged positions.
Indeed, confessions of privilege seldom result in the actual surrender of privilege. Consider all of the universities that have put up a sign saying: “This campus is built on stolen Native American land.” Has a single one of them ever proposed actually giving the “stolen land” back? On this point, al-Gharbi tells a great story of two robbers, neither of whom plan to give their stolen loot back to their victims, but one of whom keeps bemoaning how terrible it is that his victims have lost all of their possessions and crying out that someone should help them. Surely both thieves are immoral, but the second one is massively annoying on top of it.
Addressing Critical Race Theory (CRT), al-Gharbi points out that the most elite schools have pushed it the hardest. And he argues that this is no accident: “these modes of talking and thinking are recognized as a means of elite signaling.” In other words, when Phillips Academy, Choate, Groton, or Hotchkiss teach CRT in their classrooms, they are not tearing down class privilege, but reinforcing it. As he puts it, “the ideas and frameworks associated with what opponents label ‘CRT’ are demonstrably not the language of the disadvantaged and the dispossessed.” And this is not because the people who do adopt these ideas have a greater insight into the plight of “the disadvantaged and the dispossessed” than do those people themselves: “many of [white liberals’] preferred approaches to ‘anti-racism’ are not just demonstrably ineffective, but outright counterproductive.”
Al-Gharbi next turns his attention to “cancel culture”: “defenders of what has come to be referred to as ‘cancel culture’ often attempt to portray the phenomena as folks from less advantaged backgrounds holding the ‘privileged’ to account. In fact, the people engaged in these practices are typically themselves elites or aspiring elites… while there are many cases of elites ‘canceling’ working class people, there are not many cases of non-elites successfully canceling elites.” For instance, since lower-class minorities are significantly more likely than elites to hold to traditional religious values, to make holding those values a punishable offense in the workplace seriously disadvantages lower-class minorities compared to the elites who are supposedly doing this enforcement in the name of “diversity.”
A similar story applies to fashionable group terms like “Latinx.” Elites use this to refer to people of Hispanic origin, as though they were somehow “honoring” them by doing so, but only 3% of Hispanics use the term, and a vast majority of them outright reject it.
How do we handle the inconvenient fact that the vast bulk of the “BIPOCs” being championed by the woke have little interest in their agenda and theories, mostly finding them, in so far as they are even aware of them, fairly ridiculous? That’s easy: minorities who dissent from elite opinions on what represents “racial justice” are dismissed as being not really minorities at all, as evidenced by Joe Biden’s remark that any black person who would vote for Donald Trump “ain’t really black.” Elites are all in favor of empowering people from minority groups, but only so long as those people adhere to the elite party line. What woke elites really are always “centering” is themselves.
And some of the most cherished tropes of the woke elite turn out to be similarly self-serving. For instance, al-Gharbi points out that invocations of America’s “fundamentally racist” nature, a nature that supposedly makes incremental reform pointless, actually excuses those invoking it from doing anything at all about our current situation.
In his conclusion, al-Gharbi is at pains to point out that he is not accusing symbolic capitalists of insincerity in their advocacy for social justice. But is he justified in excusing them? Are these people really “true believers?” I have no doubt that they have convinced themselves that they are, to a great extent so that they can hold onto their power and prestige with a clear conscience. But isn’t this more a case, as Aquinas would have it, of a corruption of the intellect through sin? Isn’t it similar to a Lothario who convinces himself that women really like being seduced and then emotionally rejected so that he can justify behaving that way?
Let’s say I tell you I have a “sincere” commitment to sobriety. But every single night you find me out in a bar. At some point, wouldn’t you say that, however often I assert how sincere my commitment is, my actions show that it really isn’t that sincere? We even have cliches to describe these situations: such people are not “putting their money where their mouth is.” To be fair, al-Gharbi does say that while symbolic capitalists are sincere about their belief in social justice, it is simply far less important to them than their own status. But I do wonder if this is a distinction without a difference.
Another difficulty I have with the book is that, on occasion, al-Gharbi seems to employ the very empty gestures that he so ably criticizes. For instance, throughout the book, ‘black’ is spelled with a capital B when referring to black people. Isn’t this as useless as changing “homeless” to “unhoused” as a “reform” to help the people in question? But perhaps here it’s just the case that al-Gharbi’s publisher forced this convention on him.
I also wonder whether the emphasis on race that pops up here and there throughout the book actually takes away from its excellent class analysis. Al-Gharbi occasionally invokes “racialized inequalities,” but he never offers a rigorous definition of what he means by this term. Certainly, blacks have lower family wealth than whites in the U.S., are less likely to earn university degrees, and so on. But is this due to current racism, or is it perhaps the leftover effect of past racism? (Or are there yet other causes involved?)
Gregory Clark’s work The Son Also Rises demonstrates that, in every society he studied, elite status persists across many generations. For instance, the family of Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, apparently has been upper crust since the Domesday Book of 1086. So, could these racial discrepancies between blacks and whites perhaps not be fully explained by the fact that 200 years ago, 100% of elite families in the U.S. were white, and 0% were black? And since elite status tends to persist over many generations, it is no surprise that today, a much larger proportion of the elite are white than are black. Why call the discrepancies we see today “white supremacy,” rather than “elite supremacy”?
Al-Gharbi also periodically uses the slur terms “homophobe” and “transphobe.” These are not serious elements of social analysis and do not belong in a book of this quality. We can find objections to homosexuality in the words of Buddha, Plato, St. Paul, Mohammed, Aquinas, and many other serious thinkers: it is absurd to chalk these cases up to a common phobia they all had. What’s more, the people who use these terms do not actually treat their targets as having a phobia: We do not morally condemn claustrophobics, but the people who use “homophobic” and “transphobic” certainly do mean to condemn those they label. These terms are attempts to have one’s cake and eat it too. We do not need to seriously consider any of the aforementioned thinkers’ opinions on homosexuality; no, they were suffering from a phobia. But at the same time, we can still morally condemn them because somehow this phobia is not a mental affliction they suffer from but a deliberate choice on their part.
My last complaint is that there is occasionally an air of utopianism lingering around the book. Sometimes al-Gharbi seems to imply that we could, and should, do away with social hierarchies altogether. But human nature is such that there will always be social hierarchies, and attempting to eliminate them only results in a vicious struggle for who will be at the top of the new hierarchy that will surely form. Here, as well in his discussion of scapegoating, I think al-Gharbi could have benefited from more familiarity with the work of René Girard, whom he does reference once.
While these are not minor complaints, they do not negate the overall excellence of this work. Al-Gharbi has taken an existing thesis—that elites are embracing an ideology that helps them to feel virtuous in lieu of taking concrete actions that would actually improve conditions for the worst off—and fleshed it out, showing that the current wave of its happening is only the latest in a series of similar events. He also backs up his case with a dazzling amount of evidence. I have little doubt that this is the most important non-fiction book of the year, and maybe longer.
Gene Callahan is the author of Economics for Real People and Oakeshott on Rome and America, and co-editor of the books Tradition vs. Rationalism, Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, and Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism Revisited. He has a PhD in political theory from Cardiff University, and teaches at NYU.
Support the University Bookman
The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated!
