Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Last week on the program, during my conversation with Lauren Hall, I mentioned that I'd be speaking this week with a writer that she invoked in making her arguments. That writer is Musa al-Gharbi and his new book is titled, “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.” Mr. al-Gharbi is a professor at Stony Brook University's School of Communication and Journalism. Professor al-Gharbi, welcome to the program and congratulations on the book. It's making quite a splash.
Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah, it's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
GR: I appreciate you making the time, I know you've been really busy with this. So let me just start with a term clarification and we'll go from there. So, “woke” obviously has become a contentious term. How are you using that?
MaG: Yeah. So one way I don't use it in the book is as a pejorative. So I don't use woke as a way of denoting anything bad. In fact, one of the things I do in the book is I usually put the term, I often put the term, “woke” in quotation marks to signal the point that it's a contentious term. I don't define the term in the book. I think that it's kind of an error that people often make, or they think that you need a crisp analytic definition in order to talk about something sensibly. So, for instance, in my interpersonal communication class, a thing that I do often is I'll have my students define apple. I'll say provide for me, please, the necessary and sufficient conditions for apple that include 100% of apples, exclude everything else, and that's not toxicological. So you can't say like, it's the genus x, the species y because that's just saying an apple is an apple. So we'll spend like 20 minutes in class with 30 people because like 30 intelligent people who know English and know what apples are, and we'll spend 20 minutes in class and it turns out it's actually really hard to define apple. Now that doesn't mean they don't know what apples are, that if I go tell them, hey, grab me an apple, they're going to hand me a fish or they're going to give me a chair. And so there's just this error that often happens in the discourse where people want some kind of clean, crisp analytic definition and then they haggle about the analytic definition instead of the actual thing they want to talk about. And if you don't provide an analytic definition, they go, aha, therefore you don't know what you're talking about, you're not referring to anything, it's just a moral panic. And that's a ridiculous way to understand language. That's just not the way language works, in my opinion. So in the book, I don't do that game. What I do instead is I provide a history of the term, “woke” and some of the different ways that people have come to use it, the trajectory of the term over time, and show how you can actually get a lot of insight into what people mean about woke and a lot of the contestation around the term woke by looking at a predecessor term, “political correctness,” which was a term that was previously used to mark out basically the same set of phenomena. And then I provide some examples of views and dispositions and things like this that, when people talk about when people evoke the term woke, whether you're on the left or the right, there are a few things that people across the political and ideological spectrum would agree. Like if you reject this thing, you're certainly not woke and if you embrace this thing, you might be. So, for instance, the idea of trans-inclusive feminism. So if you reject feminism, you're definitely not woke. If you have a conception of feminism that excludes trans people that does not recognize trans women as women, you're not going to be considered either. So J.K. Rowling is an example of someone who self-identifies as a feminist but has a trans-exclusionary understanding of feminism. No one goes, oh, wow, J.K. Rowling is so woke. And so there's a bunch of these kinds of things that I walk through just to provide texture, I don't think they provide a definition. I don't think you need a definition, but just to provide some texture for what people seem to be talking about when they talk about, “wokeness.”
GR: Okay, great. I appreciate the point you're making there, but I did want to ask you a question where you do use the term and it's the title of one of your chapters. You write about great “awokenings” and by the way, I thought that was a great play on words, very clever. But as a way to sort of get at what there is and you mentioned political correctness. What are some of the most important maybe one or two sort of, “awokening” moments that you've discussed?
MaG: Yes. So in a nutshell, a great awokening is a period of rapid change in how a knowledge economy professionals talk and think about social justice. So looking at a lot of empirical measures, you can see that after 2010 there was this big shift. The kinds of research and reporting we put out changed a lot. It grew more political, more focused on race, gender and sexuality. Entertainment outputs, if you look at the way we answer questions in polls and surveys, if you look at political protest activity or things like this, you can see that something changed after 2010. And I show in the book that in the 20th century, so in the previous century there are three previous periods of awokening. There was one in the 1920s to early 30s, one in the mid 60s through mid 70s, one in the late 80s and early 90s, that was the last time we had the blow-ups around PC culture and so on, and then the one that started after 2010. And I show that by comparing and contrasting these cases, we can get leverage on questions like, well, why did these periods of awokening happen at all, why do they end? Do they change anything, do they influence each other? And so that's the project of chapter two of the book.
GR: And so you write about then and you mentioned this already, but the heart of it is sort of breaking down this symbolic economy and this notion of symbolic capitalist, you mentioned the knowledge economy before. So just briefly, who are these people that are symbolic capitalists? What are some of the groups, academics obviously being one of them?
MaG: Yeah. So the “we” in “We Have Never Been Woke” is this constellation of folks I call symbolic capitalists. So a nutshell version, symbolic capitalists are people who make a living based on what they know, who they know and how they're known. So there are people who are not providing physical goods and services to people, but instead, they manipulate symbols and data and ideas and so on. So think people who work in the media, who work in arts and entertainment, people who work in finance or consulting or administration and H.R., people who work in education and things like this. So again, people who are who are not providing physical goods and services to people are symbolic capitalists, typically.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Musa al-Gharbi. He's a professor of communication and journalism at Stony Brook University, and we're discussing his new book titled, “We Have Never Been Woke.” So I want to get into some of your arguments now about these folks and one of the pieces that struck me as particularly powerful and that resonated is the critique that instead of revealing and laying bare the social processes and economic processes that produce and reinforce elites in elitism, a lot of the work of these symbolic capitalists actually obscures it. It makes it harder for the general public to understand. And that at the heart of it, this separation from the average person is part of the status. It's part of what makes these folks valuable. I'd just be interested to hear you discuss that piece a little bit.
MaG: Yeah. I mean, so one of the things that's interesting, if you look at the views and dispositions that people usually associate with wokeness, they're often in the name of the marginalized and the disadvantaged. So things like, a lot of the ways that we talk and think about race or gender or sexuality and so on. But what's striking is, in practice, these are not the ways that working-class people talk and think about the social world, these are not the languages of the trailer park or the global south or the hollowed-out suburb or anything like that. In fact, what I show in the book is that people who are from less advantaged backgrounds, less educated backgrounds, people who are immigrants and non-whites and religious minorities and so on, they're actually the slice of America that's least likely to subscribe to these views and to talk and think in these ways. And in fact, what you can see looking at the 2024 election, for instance, is if you look at which sectors of society have been moving towards the Democrats and which have been moving towards the Republicans. As the Democratic Party has been reoriented around symbolic capitalists and shifted a lot after 2010 because we shifted a lot. Highly educated, relatively affluent white people have shifted more towards Democrats. Meanwhile, racial and ethnic minorities, religious people, lower-income people, working-class people, less educated people have been shifting towards the Republican Party, which is to say the very people that we think of ourselves as allies to and advocates for, they're the people who have been driving the backlash against people like us.
GR: Yeah, I want to come back to that a little bit later in the conversation, but I would think that this book is going to figure in some of the conversations that are happening and will happen within the Democratic Party and thinking of this. But let me just push along this path here for another question or two. So would it be too much to say then, based on what you just said, that in terms of moving the needle on social justice concerns in a(n) actually meaningful way, that these folks claim to be animated by, that we claim to be animated by, that they're largely talking to themselves and justifying their status? I mean, is that too strong, is that too harsh?
MaG: No. In fact, I have a section in the book called, “Tempest in a Teacup,” which is in chapter four where I stress this point, actually. When you look at a whole bunch of data, we are increasingly talking to ourselves. So institutions, like media institutions like The New York Times are reaching an increasingly narrow slice of society. We're pretty much only, in journalism, we're increasingly writing just for other highly educated, relatively affluent, urban and suburban whites, basically. And you can see this kind of consolidation, this narrowing, this growing parochialism in a lot of symbolic economy institutions, in fact. And as a consequence of that, you see a growing disconnect in a lot of other sectors of this country, a perception that's growing for a lot of people in society that these institutions, symbolic economy institutions, don't represent people like them, that they don't have a voice or a stake in it, that the people who run these institutions don't respect them, don't care about their values and their interests and their priorities and so on. And this perception is not entirely inaccurate. But it is very damaging for the work that we do and for the legitimacy of us and our outputs and our institutions and so on.
GR: Why do you think, and I want to pursue this in a couple of different ways, but why do you think this group, the "we," I guess you and me are part of this group in a way, are resistant to this self-awareness?
MaG: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the issues is actually that we are, that the symbolic professions tend to select for people who are highly educated and cognitively sophisticated and so on. And you might think, well, oh, okay, well, there's all these really smart and well-educated people, so they must be really cued to the facts and be willing to change their minds and think objectively and so on. But as I showed in an article recently in my Substack and that I argue in the book as well, in a section called, “Disciplined Minds,” there's actually a lot of research in the cognitive and behavioral sciences that shows people who are highly educated and cognitively sophisticated are actually more prone to motivated reasoning, less likely to change their minds in accordance with the facts. Like our cognitive and perceptual systems are seem oriented in a deep way towards furthering our interests and advancing our goals. And so actually what you would expect to see and unfortunately what you do see in a lot of institutions that are, that select for people who are really smart and sophisticated and educated and so on, is that we are masters of motivated reasoning.
GR: (laughter) Masters of delusion.
MaG: And so this is one of the problems. And the other big problem is that a lot of the systems and institutions that we've set up, so like for instance, in journalism, you have this kind of adversarial relationship in principle, adversarial, collaborative relationship between editors and writers or in higher ed, you have all of these decisions that are supposed to be made by committees like for hiring and promotion or for admissions and things like this for peer review publications. And the idea is we all have kind of limitations and biases and by getting people with different values and perspectives and priorities kind of making these decisions together, we can produce something that's more objective and so on. Okay, it's great in principle. The problem is these systems only work as intended when we actually do have a lot of substantive diversity in terms of how people think and how people feel and what their interests are and what their backgrounds are in the world that we actually live in. The symbolic professions are increasingly dominated by this relatively narrow and strange slice of society. People who are highly educated, who are from relatively affluent backgrounds, who live in cities, who are politically liberal and identify with the Democratic Party. And in that kind of a thing, when you have this very narrow and idiosyncratic slice of society dominating these professions in a homogeneous way, a lot of these institutions that are supposed to correct our biases can actually exacerbate them. It can make it easy to have misinformation cascades. It can be harder for people who dissent from the dominant view to actually get their view out there because the gatekeepers shut it down. And you can see this, a lot of my own research has shown that because, for instance, almost all of us in journalism and academia are on the blue line of charts when we want to understand something that's bad, that we think of as bad, like political polarization, we don't start by going, well why are we so weird? How are we contributing to this problem? Where are Democrats going wrong? Our starting question or starting assumption is to assume that the red line is driving the thing that we think is bad, and we try to explain the thing that we think is bad by appeal to deficits or pathologies that are supposed to hold among the red line people. Those people on the red line must be racist, sexist, misogynistic, and so on. And you can see, and the striking thing is, I showed this in a lot of my talks some of which are available on the internet and I have a peer reviewed paper published on this. But you can see in a lot of the charts that we ourselves produce, like we'll produce a chart that clearly shows the blue line is driving the polarization, but the people producing the chart can't see their own data. And so the article, the actual body of the article is here's why the red line people are driving polarization, when you can just look at the charts and see that the blue line is the one that shifted first and more. But not only can the scholar not see it, but the editors can't see it, the people citing the work can't see it, the people sharing the work on social media can't see it because we're all on the blue line and we all assume it must be the red line so we can even produce data and charts ourselves that show that we're driving the problem and we literally can't see the thing. Once you point it out, you can't not see it. But it's hard to get anyone to see it to begin with, right? And so this is a big problem that we have for understanding a lot of social issues, how a lot of social problems come about and persist, who benefits from them and how, why a lot of things don't go the way that we want to would expect. It's because these institutions are dominated by really smart people who are good at motivated reasoning. And we're also really homogeneous in terms of our values and interests in politics and things like that. And so we just sit around agreeing with each other and talking about how everyone else is stupid most of the time, in a way that really interferes with our ability to understand why things are going wrong.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Musa al-Gharbi. He's a professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University and the author of a new book titled, “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.” I want to just pick up on what you were saying before the break. And I guess I'm going to give myself a pat on the back in terms of your book, because your description has resonated so strongly with experiences I've had and things that I have been trying to point out, but it's tough. If we have time at the end I may share a quick story with you and see what your reactions are. But I wanted to ask you this first, and you're obviously aware of this in writing this book, you have a good sense of history, but there have been many previous writers over the years that have come from some of the same places that you're coming from in terms of values who have asserted that there has been this establishment of new elites based on similar exclusive grounds and pointing out ethical contradictions of various kinds. And so, you know, writers like George Orwell, Robert Michels, Christopher Lasch, Milovan Djilas, among others come to mind. I'm also reminded more simply of a song from the 1960s by the satirist Phil Ochs that was called, “Love Me, I'm a Liberal” I don't know if you ever heard that, but the question I guess I have for you is, is there something distinctive about this new group of elites that's different from these other kinds of pointed out contradictions and new classes of the past?
MaG: No, in fact. Well, so actually I think, so this group of folks that I call symbolic capitalists, they've been called other names in the past by other scholars. So they've been called the professional-managerial class, the new class, class x, a lot of classy terms. But yeah, and so I don't call them, I'm not a fan of neologisms, but I didn't want to use this class terms because I actually don't think calling this elite constellation of class is actually the best way to understand what they are. That would be a tangent, I'd be happy to go on, but I'll just bracket that for now. (laughter)
GR: We'll leave that one for next time.
MaG: But all to say, yeah, I think the argument of this book, it's participating in a genre of work by people like Lasch and Michael Lind and Burnham and Richard Florida and a lot of other people who have studied the rise and formation of this new elite. My book makes a few contributions that theirs don't and in some cases couldn't. So, for instance, looking at these periods of rapid shift among people like us and the causes and consequences of these shifts, these great awokenings, that's something that no one else has done yet so far, it's a novel contribution of this book. Looking at, a lot of the books don't really focus on the legitimizing narratives of these professionals. When they do, they focus on meritocracy. But there's this other element of social justice. And so what my book does is it shows how these two things relate, relate these narratives about meritocracy, these narratives about social justice, how they relate to our justifying our bits for power and status and so on. So that's a novel contribution. And then lastly, over time, the composition of these elites has changed a lot. So we're increasingly female, increasingly non-white, growing numbers of symbolic capitalists self-identify as neuro-divergent, disabled and queer and so on. And so these are important changes in the constitution of the knowledge professions. And so one of the things that this book does is actually explore in a deep way, in a way that no other book has done to date, how the changing constitution of these knowledge professions has changed the ways that we talk and think about why we deserve power and status, has changed the nature of these power struggles within the professions.
GR: Yeah, well, that struck me as well. So obviously some people are going to be listening to all this and are going to say something like the following, and I do want to squeeze a couple of other questions in if we could before the end, but they're going to say something like the following, look, just, you know, give me a break. Look at Trump, you mentioned Trump before, look at Trump, look at some of the supporters, look at what's going on, this is really kind of a low-level problem in comparison with all that, and people are going to read this and sort of interpret it as is some kind of perhaps a justification in some way of that frustration on that side of the political spectrum. They might even say something like, look, you know, you're just going around an intellectual barn of your own three times to sort of, you know, to indirectly defend him and his supporters. Briefly, how do you respond to that?
MaG: Yeah, so for one, I'm someone who's been canceled by Fox News, very famously. So I mean, I wouldn't classify myself as a supporter. But you know, setting that aside, the thing about it is, if folks actually want to stop the appeal, undermine the appeal of Trump and DeSantis and these kind of people, like a key thing that drives their appeal actually is the sense of disconnect that a lot of people have between people like us and the rest of society. And if they, if a lot of Americans feel like we don't represent their values and interests, that we're not living up to our obligations we're not delivering the goods, that we look down on them and disparage them, they don't have, that people like them are not represented in our institutions. And a lot of these narratives aren't wrong. Like, it's not it's actually the case that these institutions have grown more parochial along many lines. It's actually the case that many of us do disparage and look down upon people who are sociologically distant from us. They're not making that up, it's a fact. And if they're presented with two options, if they perceive, see that there's these problems in society that aren't getting fixed, that people like us, that they see this growing distance, they don't have a voice and a stake, and they're presented with two options, one of them being, the people like the DeSantis and Trump, who say, look, these institutions, you can't fix them, they're lost, you can't trust these people to reform themselves, and so on. We have to burn them down and start over. And then the other people are saying, hey, nothing to see here, don't believe your lying eyes, actually these things are great and awesome. Like, it's easy to see who's going to win that debate. It's going to be the burn-it-all-down people. So if we want to stop the burn-it-all-down people, we need to acknowledge and address these problems.
GR: Important point. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is the journalism professor and writer Musa al-Gharbi. You know, what you just said there reminded me of something that my brother-in-law texted my spouse several years ago. He does not have a lot of formal education, but he's quite perceptive, and I shouldn't say but, and he's quite perceptive. And he texted this, it was while he was watching something on CNN, he said, they think we're stupid and they don't know that we know they think we're stupid. It's sort of encapsulates what you just said. I want to try to squeeze in, we've got about three minutes left, I want to try to squeeze in a couple questions. I want to start with the most important one and maybe this is the only one we'll get to. But I want to ask this question, it's a very blunt question. It circles back around is something that you had been mentioning before. It really gets at the heart of what you're talking about with some of this homogeneity of points of view. Well, what do you think the reception of this book would have been in the media if it hadn't been written by somebody like you? Someone with your name, someone who looks like you, someone who's, you know, I don't know, like a, you know, white male from a Protestant upbringing or something. You know, what do you think would have happened to this book?
MaG: Yeah, would have been a lot different. So one of the cultural contradictions of this book is it's in some ways a literal embodiment of some of the things it criticizes. So it criticizes the use of elite degrees from places like Princeton and Columbia to decide who's worth listening to. But part of the reason it was published is because I was at Columbia University. If I had been writing from, you know, North Dakota State University, fine school, but it probably wouldn't have been published by Princeton University Press. The book criticizes the ways that people leverage their identity in service of their power struggles and status struggles. But it's the case that is part of the reason this book was sexy to the publishers because I'm a black Muslim who writes for The Guardian and so on. If I had been a conservative, cisgender, heterosexual, white male, Republican anything like that, the reception would have been different after publication, but probably wouldn't have even been published in the first place. Or if it was, even the exact same texts, right, the exact same arguments, but from a white person, if it was published at all, it would probably have had a whole bunch of sensitivity readers and all of this kind of stuff. The only reason I was given the freedom to go pew pew pew and just tell the truth as I see it (laughter) it was in part because I'm a black Muslim who writes for The Guardian and stuff like this. So I hit all the right social signals for the publisher. But yeah, I agree. Like, one of the things the book criticizes is the way that identity is and elite credentials and stuff like that influence who and how people talk and think about like, but the book is itself a product of these very things that it criticized. Rather than denying that, I think it's important to just lean into it and be honest.
GR: Yeah, well, and frankly, I think it makes the book more interesting as well. We've only got literally ten seconds left, so this is going to have to be a yes or no question. But have you lost many, for lack of a better word, woke friends over this book?
MaG: Not yet.
GR: Good, good, that's good to know. Well, we're going to end on that really positive note. I wish we had more time to talk, this is really fascinating. But that was Musa al-Gharbi, and again, his new book is titled, “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.” It's an important book and it's a very provocative and good read. Musa, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me, this has been really interesting.
MaG: It's been great to be here. Thank you for having me.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
