What is woke, anyway? For the average pundit, it’s the pretension to a superior wisdom or a more fervent dedication in regard to racial and sexual justice. About economic equality and procedural democracy, woke doesn’t have much to say, but about perceived disrespect in matters of ethnicity or gender, it can’t say enough. An abundance of zeal and a lack of proportion have made woke—or identity politics, a roughly equivalent term—something between a laughingstock and a bugbear among the American public at large.
That is Woke 2.0—sanctimony, which is what pretty much everyone now means by the word. But there is, or was, another “woke,” Woke 1.0, of which the second is a sarcastic derivative, like “hippie” from “hip.” Woke 1.0 was in fact a kind of hipness: a genuine sensitivity to the multifarious ways ethnicity and gender can give rise to irritation or even conflict within groups or institutions. It just meant “smart about the briar patch of identity.”
So what does the title of this book, We Have Never Been Woke, mean? Have we never been Woke 1.0 or Woke 2.0? Neither, exactly. “We,” in this case, is not everyone, but “symbolic capitalists”: professionals and members of the intellectual/cultural/service/non-manufacturing economy, who (professedly) aspire to advance equality and social justice. They (we) have failed, and it’s our own fault:
The problem, in short, is not that symbolic capitalists are too woke, but that we’ve never been woke. The problem is not that causes like feminism, antiracism, or LGBTQ rights are “bad.” The problem is that, in the name of these very causes, symbolic capitalists regularly engage in behaviors that exploit, perpetuate, exacerbate, reinforce, and mystify inequalities—often to the detriment of the very people we purport to champion. And our sincere commitment to social justice lends an unearned and unfortunate sense of morality to these endeavors.
It seems, then, that the “woke” we have never been is something like “awake to the self-defeating (and self-aggrandizing) nature of our (purported) efforts toward justice.” We Have Never Been Woke, by the young sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, is a wake-up call.
The book’s main analytic category is “symbolic capital.” Symbolic capitalists are “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstractions, as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to goods and services.” Not to be difficult, but why call them “symbolic capitalists” rather than “symbolic workers”? We don’t call factory workers “physical capitalists,” even though they work on and with physical capital. There’s a vital difference, after all, between capitalists and workers: capitalists jointly own their society and control the livelihood of everyone in it (except the self-employed). Professionals who “traffic in symbols” control no one’s livelihood (except perhaps that of their immediate colleagues), and if they all marched into the sea tomorrow, capital would yawn and hire replacements.
Al-Gharbi insists, on the contrary, that symbolic capitalists are far more powerful than generally recognized. “Decision-making in the political sphere, the private sector, the nonprofit world, and beyond is increasingly informed and constrained by unelected, minimally accountable, largely nontransparent experts and administrators.” The word doing all the work here is “accountable.” These experts and administrators may be unaccountable to the public, but they are certainly accountable to the plutocrats above them, who set the framework of policy. Symbolic capitalists “shape the system in accordance with [their] own tastes and desires, independent of, and sometimes in conflict with, the preferences and priorities of super-elites.” Really? A junior executive at a hedge fund who urges socially responsible investing a little too persistently will soon be unemployed. A Pentagon consultant who recommends against an expensive new weapon that is the apple of the Army’s or Navy’s eye will no longer be consulted. A publisher who promotes a crusade against the scandalous carried-interest deduction is liable to be rebuked or removed if one of his paper’s directors happens to make use of the deduction. Symbolic capitalists can “shape” and “constrain” only to the extent they further the goals of those with the power to set system- or institution-wide goals—i.e., real capitalists.
Much of We Have Never Been Woke is devoted to illustrating how symbolic capitalists advance their own interests while claiming to serve the general interest. This may be true, but many if not most other groups advance their own interests while claiming to serve the general interest: pharmaceutical executives, private-equity pirates, Pentagon brass, politicians, and so on. Actually, I’m not sure al-Gharbi believes there is a general interest. He quotes Max Weber approvingly: “In truth—let’s be honest with ourselves—this belief in the cause, as subjectively sincere as it may be, is almost always a ‘moral legitimation’ for the desire for power, revenge, booty, and benefits.” That sounds admirably tough-minded, but it fails to account for Eugene Debs or George Orwell, Dorothy Day or Simone Weil, Ralph Nader or Daniel Ellsberg, or many thousands of other, less celebrated people. Generosity and solidarity are as much facts of human nature as the desire for booty and benefits.
Keen to demystify “popular” movements, al-Gharbi points to studies showing that participants in Occupy Wall Street and subsequent movements (the Women’s March, the March for Racial Justice, etc.) were “majority white…extremely well-educated…and overwhelmingly left-leaning.” This shows that those movements were not “broad-based.” But most people in twenty-first-century America who can take time off from work at will without fearing for their jobs and who can easily find bail or legal help if they are arrested are young and white, college students or college-educated. Perhaps that’s why they’re the majority of people at most daytime or multi-day demonstrations. Working people, even if they can get off work, are often too tired to demonstrate, don’t know the lingo, and are understandably reluctant to get arrested.
Al-Gharbi squarely poses the question: If symbolic capitalists are really as dedicated to bringing about equality and justice as they claim, why is there so little equality and justice? After all, the “one percent” leftists are always whining about only controls 26 percent of the country’s wealth, while the next 19 percent, where the symbolic capitalists dwell, controls 45 percent. Again, al-Gharbi greatly overestimates the power of symbolic capitalists (leaving aside the question of their dedication). It’s much easier for one percent of shareholders with 26 percent of voting stock to control corporate policy than for 19 percent of shareholders with 45 percent of stock or, for that matter, 99 percent of shareholders with 74 percent of stock. The reason is obvious: coordination. It is far easier for a small but powerful minority to define and enforce a unity of purpose and strategy than for a larger, more diffuse minority or, a fortiori, a large majority.
Al-Gharbi’s explanation is different: not structural but psychological.
We really want the poor to be uplifted. We want the oppressed to be liberated. We want the marginalized to be integrated. However, we’d prefer to find a way to achieve these goals without having to sacrifice anything personally or change anything about our own lives or aspirations. Symbolic capitalists simultaneously desire to be social climbers and egalitarians. We want to mitigate inequalities while also preserving or enhancing our elite position (and ensure our children can reproduce or exceed our position).
“These drives,” he announces triumphantly, “are in fundamental tension.” Social scientists love to find fundamental tensions and are allergic to radical simplicities. But the truth in this case is radical and simple: individual action avails precisely nothing against the vast, entrenched, amply financed, and highly coordinated structures of power in a mature capitalist society unless aggregated into equally large and well-coordinated countervailing structures, a process that, like capitalist consolidation, takes many generations, a great deal of money, and, yes, far more dedication than woke professionals generally display. Of course we should all acknowledge our conflicting goals and, yes, tensions. But they are not the main obstacle to social change.
I share al-Gharbi’s cynicism about woke professionals. But he extends it indiscriminately, to all left-wing activists. Discussing environmentalism in his conclusion, he remarks disparagingly:
Much like other social justice causes, environmentalism is regularly used as a means to feel morally and intellectually superior to others, engage in moral licensing, and mystify social processes. Environmentalism is likewise tied to power and authority claims (i.e., if you don’t behave in the ways I find palatable, profess the things I believe, or otherwise comply with my own tastes, priorities, and preferences, then we’ll all be underwater in ten years).
Is this sarcastic tone warranted? I’m sure al-Gharbi agrees that without substantial policy changes, several large coastal cities around the world will indeed be underwater by the end of this century, which, along with famine, drought, disease, and severe weather, is likely to produce mass migrations that will dwarf all others so far, as well as accelerated species extinction and further catastrophes in the next century. If he were arguing that environmentalism is less successful than it might be because of the shortcomings of environmentalists, I would listen willingly. But he seems to be saying that environmental destruction, as well as economic and racial and sexual inequality, however sincerely symbolic capitalists claim to oppose them, are ultimately just arenas for their self-advancement. No doubt there are examples; we all know and detest social-justice entrepreneurs. But 350.org, ProPublica, the Economic Policy Institute, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Public Citizen, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and hundreds of other nonprofits—including little magazines like this one—have done an immense amount of good without either promising to abolish poverty and oppression or offering to make their members rich and famous.
I don’t mean to dismiss We Have Never Been Woke. Al-Gharbi is obviously intelligent and energetic; he has gathered a lot of interesting data, organized it well, and written it up clearly and forcefully, except for occasional sentences like this one: “Meanwhile, heightened demographic inclusion has been accompanied by a growing homogenization of identity, and increased parochialism against divergent perspectives (including and especially with respect to minority group members who reject institutionally dominant narratives on identity issues).” Such sentences are apparently considered evidence of intellectual heft by tenure committees, which are a necessary rite of passage for young symbolic capitalists like al-Gharbi.
For what it’s worth, I hope he gets tenure, and sooner rather than later. Because the sooner he gets tenure, the sooner he can drop the jargon and instead employ vivid examples, colorful anecdotes, and direct, pungent language, all of which are frowned on by the gatekeepers of every social science. I strongly suspect that there is a social critic in al-Gharbi struggling to break free of the sociologist. If so, I wish him Godspeed.
We Have Never Been Woke
The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
Musa al-Gharbi
Princeton University Press
$35 | 432 pp.
