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What happens when the guardians of cultural narratives and societal norms become inseparable from the very hierarchies they critique?

Today, we explore the concept of "symbolic capitalists" with Musa al-Gharbi, author of We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite and assistant professor at the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University.

In this conversation, Musa discusses the role of symbolic capitalists in perpetuating societal inequalities and how their influence extends to academia and media. His latest book, "We Have Never Been Woke," provides a radical yet introspective take on these themes. Drawing from his experiences at elite institutions like Columbia University, he highlights the paradoxes and internal contradictions of symbolic capitalism. Join us as Musa al-Gharbi articulates the complicity of the professional-managerial class in societal injustices and reflects on the role of identity and networks in shaping academic and professional paths.

About Musa:

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Musa Al-Gharbi, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Musa al-Gharbi: It's great to be back.

John Tomasi: It's really, it's a special pleasure to have you here today, especially because today is the launch day of your new book, We Have Never Been Woke, coming out from Princeton. Congratulations.

Musa al-Gharbi: Thank you, absolutely. Yeah, it's been a long march through the institutions to get the book to change from being just a PDF on my computer to a physical object that you can go buy in the store. And please do go buy it in your local store, help my children continue to live their charmed suburban lives. But yeah, it's great to be here and talk about it.

John Tomasi: A number of us have been following this project for quite some time now, and it's a really exciting project. I think your book says something fundamental about the current state of affairs in the United States. It's also obviously deeply relevant to issues that HxA cares about. So we'll be talking about all of that. I just want to mention at the beginning, as we start, that some of you know, but I'll just say anyway, that Musa is a second-year assistant professor of communications and journalism at SUNY Stony Brook. He's also the Daniel Bell Research Fellow here at Heterodox Academy. You've had a long history at HxA. We've talked about it on a previous podcast. We just want to say a few words about that. Weren't you hanging around Jon Haidt's office as a graduate student in the early years?

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah, yeah. I just saw John randomly at Columbia in 2015, and I was kind of fanboying, like, oh my God, you're Jon Haidt. And he was like, yeah. And then we started talking, and he was like, oh, you seem interesting. Why don't you help me with this thing we're trying to get off the ground? And that thing was Heterodox Academy. And yeah, so in the early days, we'd just meet in John's office and kick stuff around. And yeah, I became the communications director later and held a bunch of other roles.

John Tomasi: Yes, you've played a long role in the history of this organization. And John mentioned to me recently about you. He said, Musa is the past and the future of HxA, which I thought was really lovely. I mean, one of the things you bring, you bring this progressive perspective that has this heterodox angle about it, as we'll see in this conversation today. And that's just really part of the spirit of HxA, that idea that you don't know in advance. We shouldn't be able to know in advance what someone's going to say based on their general ideological orientation. It's much more interesting in life when we think in creative, interesting ways, in question premises, challenge our own side to do better. And you do that with remarkable grace.

Musa al-Gharbi: Thank you.

John Tomasi: That's great. So let's talk about your book. Okay. So, you know, one of the main concepts of your book, and maybe it's the foundational concept of your book, is this idea of symbolic capitalism. Can you just say something about what symbolic capitalism is?

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah. So symbolic capital is a term that I cribbed from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. And basically what symbolic capital is, in Bourdieu's reading, is it's basically the different tools that people use to justify inequalities, to make inequalities seem normal and appropriate. And so Bourdieu identified three versions of symbolic capital. So there's academic capital, which is when you get other people to listen to you, to defer to you, to do the things that you want, prioritize your vision on the basis of things like the credentials you hold or your affiliation with prestigious institutions. So I'm a professor, you know, at an R1 research university, or I'm an expert and I have a PhD in sociology or, you know, so anytime someone is doing, and not just academics, but also journalists, like, oh, I write for the New York Times. Anytime when you're affiliating with some kind of prestigious knowledge institution or talking about your degrees, your credentials, those are examples of academic capital. Trying to get other people to do what you want based on those things. And then there's also political capital, which is getting other people to defer to your vision, to follow your agenda, based on things like the position you hold in an organization. Like, I'm the manager, so you should do what I say because I'm the manager or alternatively, because you have a reputation for getting things done or being competent and that kind of thing. So people will defer to you because they think they should for those reasons. And then finally, there's what Bourdieu called cultural capital. And that's when people do what you want, defer to you because they think you're interesting or cool or sophisticated and they want to get in your good graces. They want you to have a positive vision of them or they just want to make you happy because they admire you and like you. And so collectively, Bourdieu argued, these different forms of symbolic capital don't necessarily create inequalities, but they justify them and they reinforce them and they help the kind of social order reproduce itself. And I call the main subject of my book is a group of people that I call symbolic capitalists. They've been known by other names from other scholars. They've also been called the professional managerial class or class X or the new class or the creative class. And there's a bunch of reasons why I'm not fully satisfied with calling them a class. But so I call them symbolic capitalists because basically when you look at like how do we make a living in professions like education, consulting, law, finance, arts and entertainment and so on. How do we make a living? At the end of the day, our livelihoods are premised on kind of what we know, who we know and how we're known, which is to say we basically, our whole lives and livelihoods are oriented around the production and leveraging of symbolic capital.

John Tomasi: So let me ask you something about that. So when people talk about capital, they think of Marxism and they think of, I think, manual labor as being something somehow related to capital as an exploitive tool. What's the relationship of manual labor to symbolic capitalism?

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah. So in traditional sociological terms, yeah, capitalist is not just someone who likes capitalism, but it's someone who, you know, has control over the means of production and, uses it to, basically extract the surplus value from, from workers to, to kind of pay them.

John Tomasi: From manual workers.

Musa al-Gharbi: From manual workers. Yeah. From the production, from the production and provision of like physical goods and services.

John Tomasi: Yeah. Right.

Musa al-Gharbi: and so, so it's, I'm sorry, industrial capital.

John Tomasi: yeah, yeah.

Musa al-Gharbi: And so, symbolic capitalists, have control over and, kind of, leverage, different social means of, symbolic reproduction is how I put it in the book. So we control, basically we're associated with and exert significant, influence over, institutions and cultural apparatuses that, shape how we talk and think and depict the world and, the kind of collective visions of who we are as a society and where we're going. And, we, we run a lot of the organizations. And in fact, there's this interesting relationship between symbolic capitalists and capitalists and traditional capitalists, in that a lot of us, and this is actually one of the arguments of the book that I think is important, is a lot of us in the symbolic professions, think of ourselves and have pretty much always thought of ourselves as some kind of a check on the millionaires and the billionaires and corporations and all of this kind of stuff.

John Tomasi: The moral vanguard, right? The, the, the intellectual elites, which is a subset of the symbolic capitalists, often think of themselves and certainly present themselves as being a moral vanguard on behalf of the disadvantaged.

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah, absolutely. And, and they have from the outset and, from the creation of these professions. And one of the things that's striking though is that, so for instance, after 2010, there was this big focus on the 1% on the millionaires and the billionaires. well, I guess in particular on like, especially white male billionaires. So, you know, Jay-Z and Oprah are also billionaires, but when people are really against the billionaires, they usually don't mean Jay-Z and Oprah. They mean people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, but set that aside. one of the problems with, focusing on, the millionaires and the billionaires is that, first, as Richard Reeves argued in his book, Dream Hoarders and other research also shows. If we want to understand a lot of things like declining social mobility, growing inequality, and, and other problems like this segregation that, that in many communities has gotten worse over the last 50 years, not better, even as racism has declined. We want to understand a lot of these problems. It's not enough to look at the top 1%. You really have to look at the top 20% or, at least, the upper quintile of society. And, and even if you, want to understand the behaviors of say multinational corporations or the millionaires and the billionaires, like when you, when you look in, in an institutional way of how it is that the millionaires and the billionaires do the things they do, or the multinational corporations do the things they do, you can see that actually we're, we're the ones who make most of this stuff happen. So there's this, public intellectual, Anand Giridharadas, who wrote this book called Winners Take All. And it's about how super elites like to present themselves as the solutions to the very problems that they create, using, nonprofits and things like this to kind of paint themselves as these beneficent people when they're the ones causing the problem. So, okay, who's the one helping them do this magic? They don't do this on their own. How do they do it? Well, they do it through PR firms who runs the PR firms, us symbolic capitalists. They do it through leveraging, nonprofit organizations who administers the nonprofit organizations, us symbolic capitalists. Who's the journalists who give them the fawning coverage when they, oh, that's us also. and so, or even when you look at the multinational corporations, like Amazon got a lot of criticism for basically designing cages for workers. and they scrapped this after it became public and they faced a lot of blowback, but like cages for warehouse workers.

John Tomasi: can you, can you add to your list university professors and their role? Is there, is it obvious what the role would be? Is it, is it reproducing credentialing for the children of the elites? What would you say?

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah, yeah. well, I'll just, I'll finish the cages thing. Cause that's a weird, weird note to leave us at the house or go back to the professor. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, so Amazon had these worker cages, that they were planning and they didn't implement because, okay, but who designed the cages? Was it Jeff Bezos? No, it wasn't Jeff Bezos. It was some functionary dude who didn't view warehouse workers as people in the way that he's a person and was trying to kind of shave a few things so he can get a promotion and impress the boss. And so anything that, that we think of that's terrible that the millionaires and the billionaires are doing or the corrupt politicians are doing or the multinational corporations are doing, it's basically us who are actually doing those things, making things happen. We're central to the operation of any kind of institution or system or dynamic that people want to complain about. It's mostly us making things happen. We're the problem.

John Tomasi: okay. Let me, let me, let me take my university question and put it aside just for a minute. We'll come back to it later on. Let me just stick with the point you're making right now. are the, so who are the, who are the symbolic capitalists? Are they, are they the billionaires or are they the class that supports the billionaires? There's a line from your book that I just want to read that I, that I thought was striking. You said, you talk about these people, these symbolic capitalists, they, they make their living quote through non-made, through non-manual work associated with production. And manipulation of ideas, rhetoric, social perceptions, and relations, organizational structures, and operations, art and entertainment, additions and innovations, and so forth. Then you say, think academics, consultants, journalists, administrators, lawyers, people who work in finance and tech, and so on. That's a really big group.

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah.

John Tomasi: That's a wide group as well. It seems to include professors, and perhaps the people designing the cages, so that's getting a little bit close to the material production, I think. But it also includes the billionaires, I suppose, the tech, the finance dudes.

Musa al-Gharbi: A growing number of billionaires, yeah, are drawn from, from the symbolic profession.

John Tomasi: So just, what I'd like to have you speak to is, are the symbolic, who are the symbolic capitalists? You keep saying we are. Is it us plus the super wealthy, or is it, are they a different, are not part of it?

Musa al-Gharbi: Well, so this is one of the reasons why I don't like discussing symbolic capitalists as a class. It's because we're not a class in the, in the traditional sense. There's a lot of heterogeneity. Within the symbolic professions, you have people like adjunct professors, and you also have people like Elon Musk. Well, no, actually, Musk is not a great example, because he makes his living mostly by producing cars and batteries, and he has a boring company and all of this. But like, but you know, Rupert Murdoch includes people like Rupert Murdoch and adjunct professors. And so there's not a meaningful way to talk about them as a, as a, as a class.

John Tomasi: Yes, their social experience, their lived social experiences are so, are so different.

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah, but they, but critically, and this is the error that a lot of people make is they go, oh, well, you know, adjunct professors, we're so, if you, if you look at adjuncts, and I wasn't adjunct for a number of years. But, and there's, I'll say, and as I've said repeatedly, when you look at the structure of academia, it is really exploitative. I mean, adjunct professors are exploited. They, in the sense that they have no academic freedom to speak of, as I discovered firsthand, they have basically no influence over faculty governance decisions. they get paid a fraction of the pay that professors do, even though they do the most important thing that actually keeps the lights on, which is, teaching the, teaching the students who are, who are flowing through the, and so there's a lot to criticize about the, the adjunctification of higher ed and the way adjuncts are treated in higher ed. but that said, it's also the case that, a full-time adjunct professor is not in the same boat as someone who works at Walmart or Wendy's or something like that. the, the pay, for a full-time adjunct instructor, the median, pay, as I, as I argue, as I show in the book, is higher than the, than the, than the typical pay for an American, worker. And, on top of that, if you're working as an adjunct, you have great working conditions, especially relative to, again, the other jobs that you would, you could be doing. you have a lot of autonomy and flexibility and the job that you do is to stand in front of a classroom and talk about things that you're interested, that are, that you're interested in for an hour to students. And then you grade some papers and I mean, this is not a manual job where you're putting your life and safety at risk where you're, you know, you're not being like Walmart workers intensely surveilled by, you know, AI systems that are keeping track of your productivity and, and writing you up, and all of this kind of stuff. Like, and this is why people persist in these jobs, even if they could maybe make a little bit more as a manager of a Cheesecake Factory. Well, why don't they do that? Because they know they have a better gig doing what they're doing on the one hand. And then on the other hand, because they would rather be an adjunct instructor at university of, at say UC Berkeley than to work a normie job and have, and, you know, abandon that kind of prestige and social role and all of this kind of stuff, which is all to say, there's this move that a lot of symbolic capitalists make where they try to lump themselves in as being in the same boat as normie workers. They're not in the same boat and they don't want to be in the same boat. They aggressively try to avoid being in the same boat, in reality.

John Tomasi: Right.

Musa al-Gharbi: But they like to pretend like they're just ordinary Joes struggling lunch pail people. and that's, that's just not true. and that's why I think it's important to lump the adjuncts in, you know, to, to include, the kind of the people who work more, low prestige, less precarious work in the symbolic professions alongside the others. alongside other symbolic capitalists in the, in, in chapter three of the book, I go through this in a lot more detail. looking at the different connections about how these two, there is this kind of bifurcation within the symbolic professions, but they are deeply related. They share this common set of interests and lifestyles.

John Tomasi: Just something, let me just dig down a little bit on one, on a point you just made about adjunct professors. So adjunct professors, make very low wages by hour. If you put the grading in, they're also often lured by the possibility of sometimes breaking through and getting the tenure track job.

Musa al-Gharbi: Absolutely.

John Tomasi: And so there's something, something very worrying to many of us about the adjunctification of the academic profession. They, it's true. If they're not working at the Cheesecake Factory behind the counter or wearing a cap and a uniform, they get to stand in front of the class and be the authority figure admired by the, their students, perhaps, hopefully. But there also does seem to be something, economically, it's a very similar situation. Because you're pointing as to not the fact that they are differentiating themselves by making more money because they're not. The adjunct professors are not by much. But they have social status. Is that what it is? So what is this thing?

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah, they have a lot more, they have a lot more symbolic capital. And this is what, what's appealing to them. And, and they're often able to persist in, in this job when they could be doing other things that make more money. And the reason they persist in this job is in part because, as you said, they have, sometimes they have hope of becoming a more elite and even more elite, person down the line. other times it's just because they're, they're passionate about this and they can't think, they like literally can't envision sort of anything else. And they would certainly like them envisioning themselves as, you know, someone working a normie job is like disturbing to them. and, like they can't see themselves as a shoe salesperson or something like that. Like that would be like a, but yeah, but you, you just, but then there is something cruel. There is something cruel, in, in the way that, a lot of departments and institutions, fold people, like, for instance, a lot of PhD programs should probably, they have consistent problems, placing their students. They should probably, reduce their admins. Why don't they do that? They don't do that. because the, the tenured stream professors actually like having this disposable workforce of people and they like having large numbers of, of, of grad students. So they can teach their niche courses instead of having to focus on the core courses. And they like, having this disposable, set of TAs and graders. And they turn these people in with hopes typically of becoming professors, knowing full well that most of them will never have that goal. We'll never actually reach that goal. They're not fully honest with students when they start about what their prospects are. They don't really do a good job of preparing them for other career, alternatives. And so at the end of the day, you have this large number of people who sunk six years of their life or more into a PhD program only to find out that this job that they had envisioned for themselves over the course of the better part of another, of, of a decade, basically, it's just never going to happen. and that's cruel. There's something really cruel about that. and, and this is something that's within our control. Departments can choose to, to, do their part to curb this overproduction of PhDs, by just admitting less people, admitting less grad students. And that would mean that the professors have to do more work. they might not have as much time to churn out their papers because they'd have to maybe teach classes, you know, the horror, generally interesting classes, for example. Yeah, and this is actually, and this is one of the main themes of the book actually is that, well, the, there's this, academia is not unique in this regard. a lot of the symbolic professions are, are defined by their altruism and their commitment to helping the marginalized and the disadvantaged on paper. But when you look at how these institutions actually function, they're extremely parochial. They're extremely hierarchical. They're extremely exploitative. Like we don't, we do not, our own institutions and the way that we carry ourselves in our institutions do not well reflect, the, the, the kind of moral ethos we put out into the world about what we're about and what we, what we value. And that's, and that's, and that's a major theme of the book. And it goes, it goes to the title, we have never been woke.

John Tomasi: I want to ask you, you, you make this interesting distinction between, right-wing and left-wing versions of social, social capitalists. And that, can you talk about that distinction? And if you can, if you can connect it to wokeism, that'd be very interesting too.

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah. so I'll start by connecting it to wokeism and then we'll also do it in reverse order. Do it the way you like. so yeah. So one interesting question of the book is, of all of the, the ways, so one argument of the book is that a core function of, of wokeness, of this kind of social justice discourse, these social justice oriented behaviors and political things. what I argue is that one of the things we're doing here, symbolic capitalists are typically sincere when they say that when they identify with anti-racism or feminism or, or identify as environmentalists or allies to LGBTQ people, or like, I don't think that they're being cynical. but that's, but that's, that's not inconsistent with the fact that, despite being, being sincere when we profess these commitments, we also leverage these commitments. We leverage this discourse, to advance our own ends and further our own goals. so we, we use social justice discourse to, in some cases, justify inequalities even. And so why is it that the losers in the knowledge economy, deserve to lose? Why, why is it that people in flyover country, people in small towns and rural areas, people who are more disconnected from the, why is it that they deserve their lot? Oh, well, they hold the wrong, they're racist or sexist or authoritarians. You shouldn't feel bad about those people. In fact, they have more than they, more than they deserve. Let them suffer more.

John Tomasi: Right.

Musa al-Gharbi: and so this is a perverse example of how, like, we often leverage social justice discourse to actually justify inequalities, to, to, to, to explain why people who are suffering in the knowledge economy, who are excluded, deserve to be excluded and to suffer. We don't need to hear their voices and perspectives. We don't need to take their concerns seriously. Those people.

John Tomasi: I'm hearing echoes of Hillbilly Elegy. Is that, is that, is that connected to this, do you think?

Musa al-Gharbi: Well, you know, one thing that, that's wild to me about, I mean, Vance was, was, was, almost in a way arguing that the liberal, and I think this is part of why his book was so popular, honestly, with liberals, because in a deep sense, he was arguing that a lot of the liberal narratives about those people are right. Like, like, unlike, unlike him who got his life together and joined the army and like those people from the community, they just sit there and they're resentful and they're waiting for their government handouts. And like, I'm in a lot, in a, in a deep way, Vance, Vance's own narrative, the key to his success is that he actually affirmed mainstream symbolic capitalist visions of those people. and, I think, yeah. And so the question is like, of all the things that we could possibly, you know, make these power moves for why on earth do we, do we rely so heavily on social justice discourse for it? and the argument I make in the book is that, part of the reason for this is that our professions from the beginning, were, were justified, on the basis of serving the common good and helping the least advantaged. So professors are supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads without favor, without worrying about whether it advantages anyone's economic interests or political interests. We're just supposed to follow the truth and tell the truth that's, journalists are supposed to speak truth, speak truth to power and be a voice for the voiceless and so on and so forth. Doctors, lawyers. and, so from the beginning, the kind of high pay that we enjoy, the social status that we enjoy, the autonomy, the freedom that we have, which is again, no other worker has the kinds of freedoms. The freedoms that symbolic capitalists tend to have, it's wild. Like if people should get a norm, normie job, people who haven't had normie jobs should try out some normie jobs, to see how, I mean, even, even a more constricted academic space. but from the outset, the reason we have this pay, this autonomy, this freedom is because we've said, if you give us these things, everyone will be better off, including and especially the least advantaged. And so, because our professions and our pay and our autonomy and all of this are rooted in this, these narratives about the good work that we do for society, this creates a unique form of, of status competition within the symbolic profession. So people who are able to show that they're especially good at doing that, helping, helping people at serving the common good and things like this are seen as, or, or who are especially committed to these justice oriented goals are seen as especially worthy of, status and prestige. And so on, whereas people who are successfully painted as not being that people who are successfully painted as too cozy with the rich and the powerful, or who are painted as having the wrong views about race and gender and sexuality, they're viewed as being unworthy of prestige, unworthy of status, unworthy of being listened to, and frankly, unworthy of their jobs. And often they do lose their jobs as a result if they're successfully painted in this way. and so, yeah. And so this is, this is, this is, this is the relationship between, this is why wokeness, figures so heavily into the symbolic professions and has from the beginning, what we call wokeness today has gone by other names in the past.

John Tomasi: can I just say, this is, this is what I love so much about your book and it is what it, what it does to me in so many different levels. Your book makes me think of other books that I read in a whole new ways. So for example, you were just talking about, normie jobs that you haven't had when you ought to try one someday. You were speaking to our fellow symbolic capitalist elites when you said that. And I was just thinking, as you said that about Charles Murray's book Coming Apart. And you may remember, he had a quiz on the back of the book. The question was how, how thick is your bubble? And one of the questions he asked was, have you ever had a job where you had to wear a uniform, which would be a normie job. But symbolic capitalist would say, no, except a gown every now and then for graduation, perhaps. have you, and he also asked, have you, have you ever had a job where you have a physical pain from the job when you go home at night? And again, that's a normie kind of job. He paints that as this class divide between the left elites and the working people. Your paradigm, I think, pushes it the whole, it accepts some of that construct, but it explains it in a deeper way that there are people on the left and the right who are using these symbolic positions, using our symbolic position to, I'm not going to say the word exploit. Would you use the word exploit? They're extracting capital from somewhere.

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah.

John Tomasi: Is that, how would you say that?

Musa al-Gharbi: I would say that, a lot of the, our lifestyles, our behaviors, our institutions are exploitative.

John Tomasi: Yeah.

Musa al-Gharbi: I would feel comfortable.

John Tomasi: I shouldn't have said they're extracting capital. They're extracting wealth and income and position and power.

Musa al-Gharbi: Right.

John Tomasi: Something like that. I want to, I want to talk to you about 2010. So 2010, you point in the book as a really important year. You did a big study. can you say something about the study and what, what you found and why it's important?

Musa al-Gharbi: Well, okay. So yeah, one of the studies, my, my, along with my colleague, David Rozado, who's a computer scientist at, in New Zealand at Otago University. He's fantastic, by the way, you should check out David Rozado's, substack and his other research. He's brilliant.

John Tomasi: And I'll mention on this side, David Rozado is a affiliated research fellow with HxA as well.

Musa al-Gharbi: We, we agree that he's brilliant and he's fabulous. So, so.

John Tomasi: That's our shout out. That's our colleague shout out.

Musa al-Gharbi: fellow symbolic capitalists. So David and I.

John Tomasi: Are we going to say symbolic capitalists in the world unite?

Musa al-Gharbi: Let's, let's not do that. Let's, let's not say that.

John Tomasi: But we'll unite for what?

Musa al-Gharbi: that's the big question. so, yeah, so David and I, we, we did a paper where we analyzed, 27 million news articles from 47 media outlets over the past. 50 years. And what we found is that, after 2011, there was this rapid uptick in, discussion about prejudice and discrimination in news media. anti-black prejudice, anti-Hispanic prejudice, misogyny, you name it. All forms of prejudice and discrimination, all at the same time, they didn't seem to be, of course, rising in response to anything in particular that happened in the world in that, in that year. So they weren't a response to, say, Black Lives Matter or Me Too. They predated them. they weren't a, in fact, these shifts that were already underway might help explain why movements like Black Lives Matter or Me Too might've been able to have the traction that they had when other movements that were concerned with some of these problems didn't. they weren't a response to Trump. They predated Trump. and you saw this, this dramatic shift in left-leaning, and right-leaning outlets. You saw it in, you saw it in, print media as well as television media, as we show. And, and then, together and, separately, Rosado and I, and others also showed that there were similar shifts in academic research. Actually, you, you saw similar spikes, in, in, when you look at academic papers that were published using different, databases for academic papers. You can see the same, same kind of spike. You see the same spike in books. You see the same spike in entertainment outputs. I, I did an article on my Substack where I show you see the same, the same trends in video games. Actually, even in video games, there was this rapid preoccupation with race, gender, sexuality, inequality, representation, all of this kind of stuff that started after, after 2011. It was across the symbolic professions, not just in academia. And in fact, this is one of the things that I hope the book helps people see is that a lot of these trends that happened in higher ed, not only are they not new historically, but they're also not necessarily unique to higher ed in particular, but rather they're these, these kind of, there was this movement that happened among symbolic capitalists writ large. And that movement was especially pronounced in institutions of higher learning in part, because we have large concentrations of symbolic, capitalists of the people who are undergoing the shift. and most people who even aspire to symbolic, to, to the symbolic professions, in order to, to get a job as a symbolic capitalist, you, you basically need a college degree. like universities play an important gatekeeping role for the symbolic professions. And so not only do we have, large concentrations of actual symbolic capitalists, we have even larger concentrations of aspiring symbolic capitalists. And so we saw these changes, in a particularly acute way at colleges and universities, but they were playing out throughout the, throughout the symbolic profession.

John Tomasi: one thing I'd like to know about, and this is a huge theme in your book, when we think about great awokenings, which we seem to be in now, most people think of this as being, you know, the first time ever in a unique phenomenon, but your book traces these fascinating histories of previous great awokenings. Can you tell us something about what a great awokening is? What characterizes our great awokening and contrast it with others that you've also charted?

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah. So, the nutshell, a great awokening is this period of, rapid change in how symbolic capitalists, talk and think about social justice and how they engage in, political action. So after 2010, for instance, in the most recent case, you started seeing, symbolic capitalists, shifting radically in terms of their views and polls and surveys. they became, much more concerned about, various forms of inequality. They became more, quote, woke on racial, like on, on race issues than most, minorities themselves are. They perceived much more discrimination in society than most non-white people perceive in society and so on and so forth. So we had this rapid change, in our political views, rapid change in our politics. So we became much more politically active, in terms of protesting, in terms of donations, in terms of, other forms of, of, of kind of political engagement. and again, our, our outputs, everything from academic articles to video games, anything that we put our hands on suddenly became, a lot more political and a lot more, concerned about representation and injustice and all of this kind of stuff.

John Tomasi: and so this, this is almost, almost like a dialogue saturated with social justice, verbiage and I, and perhaps concerns as well.

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah. And, and so, and so that's what a great awokening is. And as I show in the book.

John Tomasi: So I'm sorry, the great awokening is, is it what I said or was that not quite right?

Musa al-Gharbi: No, no, yeah, it is. It's this period of rapid change among symbolic capitalists in terms of, their orientations, how they talk and think about social justice.

John Tomasi: Oh, so it doesn't, so essentially, the great awokening essentially involves a saturate, a moral saturate, saturatization of discourse.

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah. Yeah. this, or, and, and also this kind of, radicalization of even how people feel and like, like as, as reflected in polls and surveys or, or in how they vote and stuff like this. It's just, these moments when we become a lot more, where everything, yeah, where everything we do, everything we say, even a lot of our own thinking and feeling just becomes, really, oriented around, social justice.

John Tomasi: We're going to criticize that in a minute, I think, or at least we're going to dig into it a little bit more using your, your, your, your tools. Let me just pause and invite us, invite the listeners and you to think what that means, what that experience is like, because it's a phenomenon that I think we humans find very attractive. I think this is a time when we're finally going to change something, you know, be here now, if not you, what's the expression? If not now, when, if not you, if not you, if not you, who, if not now, when the, the, the sense that there's a reckoning or racial reckoning in America that many people who've kind of been passive, haven't been involved in these issues suddenly feel like, wait a minute, I should go buy a Robin DiAngelo's book and read it and tell my friends. And I'll teach my kids some American history in a new way because they get swept up in a movement. There's a, there's a phenomenon, an epip, a, an emotional feeling, I think of being swept up in the movement. That's historical and it's important and that is aimed or at least claims to be aimed at something morally positive. Can you say anything more about that? Why, why people get swept up in it and what it's like, what it's like to be swept up in one of these?

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah.

John Tomasi: Well, and one, one of the things that I want to be sympathetic to it, to understand it before we start taking it a part of it.

Musa al-Gharbi: Well, I think one of the things that's interesting about getting swept up in it is that sometimes we don't even recognize the change that's happening. So for instance, a lot of symbolic capitalists noticed that the divide between us and everyone else was growing. But our explanation for why it is that the gap between us and everyone else was growing about race and gender and sexuality and stuff like this wasn't that we had suddenly become more radical. Our assumption was that those people must be becoming more radical in the other direction. Like they must be getting more extreme, more sexist, more misogynistic, more transphobic and homophobic, more xenophobic and racist. Like they must, under the malign influence of people like Donald Trump, they must be going in this radically regressive direction and America is on the, but what's, but in reality, if you look at Republican views, Republicans have been growing more progressive over the same, like in a pretty consistent way. In a way that's completely unrelated to the awakening, by the way, just in a very consistent direction, Republicans today are much warmer on, on LGBTQ people than ever in history. They're much more gender egalitarian than at any point in history, evangelicals. If you, if you look at evangelical views about like women and leadership and stuff like that in the 1970s versus today, there's no, there's no, there's absolutely no comparison. They're more progressive than ever on race, on immigration. You go down the list. Republicans have become much more progressive over the same period, not because of us, because this, this is a movement that has been going on for, for decades, but they have, they have just, it's just an absolute, in fact, they have not grown more racist, more sexist, more authoritarian. And so we, we correctly perceive that the gap between us and everyone else is growing, but because we were kind of locked into one, because we don't necessarily experience the change. Like we feel a sense of consistency within ourselves between who we are today and who we were yesterday and who we were five weeks ago. Like, we don't think, holy, holy crap, I've just completely changed my political orientation over the last six weeks. And so we assume that it must be those people that did that. Those people must be undergoing this radical, malign transformation. And so, so this is one, one way in which symbolic capitalists have misunderstood what's been happening because we don't turn the lens to ourselves. And so you see all these academic papers, journal articles, all of this other stuff, like volumes, insane volumes of this stuff, as I've shown my own research, that, that, that purports to argue that these red line people have just gone off the, off the grid. And they're all a bunch of racist and sexist and misogynist when the truth is they're more egalitarian than ever before in history. And, they're just, they just didn't shift at the same rate we shifted.

John Tomasi: one of the things that you describe in the book and you've touched on a little bit, but I want to, I want to give you a chance to focus on it directly. One of the themes you, you, one of the themes of your book is that, that there's a tendency of elites on the left to identify as the victims that they're protecting. And, I wonder if you could say something about that. And I'll, I'll, I'll say a little bit more and you can, you can take it, take up the second way of asking the same question if you like, but you don't have to. One of the striking images, from your, from your book and your own life story was, a description you have of, I think you were a first year graduate student, perhaps at Columbia, with people out on the medians holding up signs saying black lives matter. If you, if you grieve, it honked for black lives matter. Can you say something about that moment? And then pick up that question I asked about identifying as the victims they claim to be protected.

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah.

John Tomasi: so tell the story better than I did. Cause I'm sorry, you tell it, you tell it so well you were there.

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah. Well, so, you know, during 2020 at the height of the, of the kind of social unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd, there was this ritual, where on like Friday afternoons, a bunch of, it seemed like mostly Columbia professors looking at them. they were, they were, they were, you know, relatively affluent kind of, white people who presented themselves as members of the symbolic profession. anyway, they were, they would, they would stand in the medians of Broadway, boulevard, yeah. Waving these signs about black lives matter and stuff like this. one thing that was, there were two things about this ritual that were striking to me. Well, the first one of course is that, there didn't seem to be a meaningful relation between the thing that they were doing and the thing that they were trying to accomplish. So there's, I can't, I couldn't really map out. And I don't think that they could map out if you asked them how waving this sign on Broadway and getting cars to honk at you would get anyone out of prison or save anyone's life. There didn't seem to be a meaningful relationship between what they were doing, what they, when the cause they wanted to support, which raised the question of like, okay, well, who are you doing this for?

John Tomasi: And I can also add, their, their activities were not, there was no obvious cause of connection and the people speeding behind their cars, honking their horns and then going on.

Musa al-Gharbi: Absolutely. Also, no, no, honking for black lives doesn't do anything.

John Tomasi: and, okay, so that's the, wasn't there, wasn't there, weren't there people like on a bench?

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah. And so this was a striking thing is there were a lot of, on the upper West side, especially at that time, there were a lot of, homeless people, many of them, black. and, and so often, there was this ritual where they'd be in the median waving their signs and there's like a homeless guy there in the median with them. And he has bags full of stuff, also in the median and they're like stepping over his stuff, waving the signs. It's, it's wild. There's a, there's a black person right in front of you. If you want to help, if black lives matter, help this guy, don't wave your sign. like help this guy. but the, but the person right in front of them seemed to be almost like an obstruction, like an object that they had to kind of work around so they could do their protests. And it was wild. It was absolutely wild. Once I started noticing things like this, I, I just noticed them everywhere, everywhere, in my own institution, everywhere in my own kind of, even in my own kind of plans for life. And so, and so it created this kind of brain worm. Sorry.

John Tomasi: In your own plans for life, because you were seeing yourself as moving into a position of influence, an author, an author, soon to be a celebrated author. That's what you mean?

Musa al-Gharbi: Sure. I mean, I'm, I'm here at an Ivy league school. and, and honestly, there's a deep sense in which the book is itself a product of a lot of the things that criticizes. So, for instance, of the things that criticize.

John Tomasi: Yeah.

Musa al-Gharbi: So for instance, I was at Columbia in part because, the whole function of schools like Columbia, the main function, they do other things. They do research and so on. But the main, the main function of Columbia, and schools like it in practice is to, basically, fold in children of, children who are on track to be elites, credential them so that they can be recognized as people who are appropriate to serve as elites. And then, and make those people feel like they earned it, like they deserve whatever they happen, whatever they get later. And so people, and the, the thing about it is in order to do that, that last part to make people feel like they're meritocratic and they deserve it and that they're at Columbia because they're smart and hardworking. And they are smart. It's like, I don't know, but, but there are a lot of other smart people who are not at Columbia. And, so in order for them to think that the reason they're there is because they're meritocratic, bootstrappy, hardworking people in order for that whole mystification to work, it doesn't work. If everyone at Columbia is just country club people and, the son of billionaire Saudis or something like this, you need the whole system to work. you need some people folded into the institution who come from less traditional backgrounds. And so having someone like me there who came from a community college and who's an African American and so on, one having diverse people there, kind of creates diverse experiences for the rich kids. And then also helps the rich kids feel like, they're also scrappy bootstrappers. And it was, so it was never lost on me that the reason why a good part of the reason why I was there at Columbia, why I was sexy to the admissions committee and all of this kind of stuff is because I'm useful. I'm useful for the thing that the institution is trying to do, which is not just knowledge production. It's also elite reproduction. and then in the same way, the book, if I had pitched the same book, but I was at, even if I was just at Stony Brook, if I was a PhD student at Stony Brook, Stony Brook is an R1 research university. It's a fantastic school, but if I was a graduate student at Stony Brook and I pitched this, the same manuscript, there's no way it would have gotten pubs. Certainly not like Princeton University Press. The reason Princeton university, the reason we had an auction to the rights to this book, the reason it ended up at Princeton University Press, it's because I'm at Columbia University and Ivy league school.

John Tomasi: And, and you're saying, I'm sorry, just, I'm just, I'm just, I have to, I have to go ahead in here because you're saying that's a necessary condition.

Musa al-Gharbi: Yes.

John Tomasi: It's not, it's not, there are a lot of graduate students coming out of Columbia and other elite schools, but I'm just saying that, and there was, and do I, do you mind if I just mentioned that there was an auction and it was an aggressive auction from top press, which is one of the most unusual things I've ever heard of from a graduate student coming out from Ivy league schools.

Musa al-Gharbi: Well, but again, if I wasn't at an Ivy league school there, none of that would have happened.

John Tomasi: And then similarly, nice, nice.

Musa al-Gharbi: And then similarly, you know, if I had written the same book, minus the autobiographical parts, if I'd written the same book, but I was a white, a straight cisgender heterosexual white male. And especially if I was overt conservative or evangelical or something like that, there's no way this book would have been published. It would have seemed as too risky, too controversial. The only reason they published this book is, in its current form with all of the edgy content that it contains is because I'm black. It's just a, I'm a black Muslim who writes for The Guardian and other left leaning outlets. and so the book is itself a product of many of the things that it's criticizing. they didn't just, it's not like, and as you said, it's not the case that just any black person can send a manuscript to Princeton and they'll publish it. But it's, it is the case that this book would not have been published in its, in its, in its current form if it wasn't for the fact that I'm an African-American. There's no way. and, and so the, and there's a lot of things like this, even the work that I do, you know, I write for the New York Times and the Atlantic and the Washington Post and all of this. I tried writing for these outlets before I was at Columbia. I wouldn't even get a rejection. I was, I was beneath rejection. I wasn't even worried worth a no. When I was at University of Arizona, when I moved to Columbia, they emailed me, they would cold email me. Hey, would you like to write something for the New York Times about blah. And it wasn't because I became a, suddenly became such, such a much better writer in the time it took to pack up my stuff and move from Sierra Vista to Manhattan. And it's purely network effects. It's purely institutional effects. It's because I'm a Columbia University.

John Tomasi: Right.

Musa al-Gharbi: and so this is the, and you know, so I think my writing is good. It's fine. But, but people should know that the, that a big part of the reason why you see my work in the New York Times is, is not just because I'm a good writer, but because I'm a good writer who is associated with elite institutions like Columbia. And then there's this kind of, path dependency where once you get one thing in the New York Times and in the Atlantic and other, you show that you're that kind of a person who operates in those spaces. Now I can move to an institution like Stony Brook, which is again, an excellent school, but it's not Harvard, Yale, Princeton. And, I can move to an institution like Stony Brook and the New York Times and the Washington Post and Princeton, you know, and Harvard, you know, and everyone's still happy to play ball with me. Because I've already established myself as being worthy of being listened to. and so the, yeah. And so my own, my own life, my own career, this, this very book and it's, and the success it's, it may or may not have in the world. All of that is a function of the very, it's, it's, it's an example actually in a, in a represent and rather than kind of representation of what it's like a literal, it's like a physical embodiment. And if I had the book with me, I would just hold it up because it's like a literal physical embodiment of the very things that's critiquing. But then rather than, trying to avoid or suppress that, I just for the, in the book, I, and in life, as you can see, I just clearly tried to try to lean into it and just be upfront about it. Cause I think it's actually generative and important to kind of wrestle. but yeah. And so as I, as I started noticing these things, it messed up my own. It wasn't just, it's not, the book is not me sitting in judgments like, ha ha, these people over here, ha ha ha. It's, that's why it's called, we have never been woke, not you have never been woke. Because I, I, I do not exempt myself from, from being part of the picture.

John Tomasi: We're, we're at the end of our podcast, but I want to ask you just one more question in, on, on this direct topic. Something you said a moment ago, I'm going to put it a little more sharply and see, see what you want to do with it. what if you were a conservative white person criticizing the hypocrisy of woke culture using the symbolic capital machinery that you're bringing forth? My sense is that a lot of people think, oh, okay, he's, he's, he's a right wing guy taking on the, taking on the left. And, you know, he's a smart, he's a smart right wing guy taking on the left, but he's motivated reasoning. We, we know what he's going to do. We know he's up to, we're not, we're not going to trust. You're not a, you're, you're, you're, you're a black Muslim progressive. Writing this book, criticizing woke culture, analyzing woke culture, analyzing the experience of yourself and many, many, many, many of our listeners, academics and, and, and, and many of our supporters as well. can you say, my sense is that there's something about the fact that you are not a white Republican criticizing the woke movement that gives your book a kind of sincerity. And a kind of power and a kind of, license to be listened to. That's really special and unique. I don't mean to end the podcast with a compliment to you, but do you, do you, do you, what do you think about that? Is your experience that, that, that, that the sincerity of it has, has powered the book? Maybe it's hurt, hurt you in some ways too. I'm not sure, but can you say anything about that?

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah. I mean, one thing that I, I have come to appreciate over my whole interesting intellectual journey with all the ups and downs and all of this kind of stuff is that, is that the messenger does matter, for, for how people are able to, to receive. so again, like in a lot of circles, we have this platonic vision that people would just confront an argument or the facts or whatever, and they wouldn't care who's saying it or what they're motivated by or what they're interested in. They would just analyze the, they would just receive the information and analyze it and kind of change their perspectives and accordingly or something like that. And that's, it would be great if the world worked that way, but the world doesn't, doesn't work that way. our brains are just not wired. In fact, I have an article coming out for for Heterodox Academy soon that really underscores this point about how our brains at a very fundamental level are kind of socially oriented.

John Tomasi: Is this coming out in our Substack for the inquiry?

Musa al-Gharbi: for the new magazine that, oh, the new magazine. Yeah, and so, yeah, and so, you know, the messenger does matter. And so, I think a lot of readers would have a hard time really hearing a lot of the, arguments in the book if it was coming from a, from a conservative evangelical or a straight white person or, or so on and so forth. the fact that it's coming from, a non-white, person who writes for The Nation and The Guardian and, and, and so on and so forth from someone who's associated with not one, but two hyper-liberal fields, journalism and sociology. you know, I think, definitely does change how it's received and I think, makes people hopefully feel less threatened by the message, because the goal of the work is obviously not to burn down the symbolic professions, which is how I feed my own children. The goal is to, to help us, better embody, you know, the, the values and goals that we, that we share, that we profess, if these are things that we care about and these are things that we want to, you know, again, the book, the whole book is premised on the idea that when symbolic capitalists express commitments to these ideals, that they are being sincere, even, even when they're using it to, I guess this is the last point that I'll make. Because I think it's an important point is that oftentimes in, in kind of the discourse, there's this bifurcation where we assume that either people are using something or are saying something, in an instrumental way or they're sincere. So if you can show that someone has an interest in believing or saying something or getting other people to believe something, then we assume that they must be cynical and they must be engaging in some kind of manipulation. They must not really believe it. But that's a pretty bad way, in my view, to think about thinking. So as I, as I argue in this, in this piece I just mentioned, and there's a lot of, the piece is just a literature review. There's like the overwhelming consensus of the cognitive and behavioral sciences and psychology and related fields is that our cognitive and perceptual systems at a fundamental level are oriented towards advancing our interests and furthering our goals. So we literally perceive the world and think about the world at a very fundamental level in, in terms of like how to advancing our interests and furthering our goals. And if we run with that premise and we can see there's actually no tension at all between, being sincerely committed to something and, and having that belief serve your interest. If it's in your interest to hold a belief or to espouse a belief, then you're, you're especially likely to sincerely believe it and to try to get other people to sincerely believe it too. And so the, the argument of this book is absolutely not that symbolic capitalists are cynical or insincere or engaging in some kind of sinister, conspiracy or something like that. We're just take for granted that they're sincere. And so the, the, the, what the book is trying to accomplish is if we are sincerely committed to these goals, to what extent are we the problem, that, that we're trying to, and to what extent can we actually do these things better? Or what would it look like to actually pursue social justice for other people, and to, to try to disentangle this pursuit of our self-interest from, from these social justice goals we espouse. And that's, that's what I hope the book has people wrestle with.

John Tomasi: And I think that's what makes the book so exciting. It has the intellectual content, which is fascinating, but there's also something additional in this book, which is that it's alive. You have the sense of a person examining themselves. And I'm just thinking about, Socrates says, the unexamined life is not worth living. Your experience writing this book makes me think that the examined life is sometimes worth writing about. And that's what you've done in this book. Musa Al-Gharbi, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Musa al-Gharbi: Thank you again for having me. And buy my book.