Rick McGinnis:
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements
Reviewing journalist Barbara Amiel’s memoir here a few years ago, what struck me most was an observation she made about her time in transatlantic high society, when her husband Conrad Black’s success and fame was at its peak. She was adopted by a circle of rich women, the wives of rich men – a self-described charity case less valued for her accomplishments than her husband’s celebrity, invited to take part in a venerable social circuit for the wealthy and high profile.
Their calendar revolved around the social season in New York and London – charity galas and black-tie opening nights, to celebrate and financially support ballet, opera, art galleries, and symphonies. It was a world unchanged since it was described by Edith Wharton and Henry James, but Amiel noted that it was nearly gone now.
The new generation of rich wives of rich men who came after them were less interested in high culture than causes. Their support had shifted to high profile charities, au courant social movements, and NGOs with topflight public relations teams who fundraised through gala dinners, movie premieres, concerts, and informal but still exclusive events that resonated more with the worldviews of these conspicuously educated, socially liberal women and their husbands.
I was reminded of this when reading Musa Al-Gharbi’s book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, an exhaustive analysis of the history and motivations behind a century of social justice movements in the West, and how they’ve been championed, co-opted, and ultimately left behind by a mutable but increasingly visible class that Al-Gharbi calls “symbolic capitalists.”
Al-Gharbi, a sociologist who teaches at Stony Brook University, defines symbolic capitalists as “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction (as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to physical goods and services).”
They are people who work “in fields like education, science, tech, finance, media, law, consulting, administration, and public policy” and as “academics, consultants, journalists, administrators, lawyers, people who work in finance and tech, and so on.”
“If you’re reading this book,” he writes, “there’s a strong chance you’re a symbolic capitalist. I am, myself, a symbolic capitalist.”
The title of Al-Gharbi’s book refers to French philosopher Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, a 1991 exploration of how “the narratives ‘moderns’ tell themselves about what makes them unique, in fact obscure the nature of the ‘modern world,’ making it difficult for its denizens to properly understand and effectively address contemporary social problems.”
Al-Gharbi’s book, he promises, “will explore how actions undertaken in the name of social justice often exacerbate the inequalities we condemn, even as our ostensibly egalitarian commitments blind us to reality.”
He describes how we repeatedly experience social movements whose aim is to fight injustice, reduce inequality, and improve the lives of the poor, women, and oppressed minority groups in society, but ultimately doing little to change the status quo while protecting or improving the lives of the people who appoint themselves leaders of these movement – the symbolic capitalists.
Seeking a motivation for this behaviour, Al-Gharbi goes past race, gender, age, and sexuality, and even bypasses class – always a reliable metric when delineating self-interest – and goes to status, a far more fungible motivator for symbolic capitalists, who aren’t just comprised of wealthy or simply comfortable elites but anyone aspiring to join their ranks.
The term “woke” isn’t new, and he describes its roots, going back to 19th century abolitionists. Al-Gharbi describes four “Great Awokenings” in the last century, the first around the start of the Great Depression, a second and most obvious one during the ‘60s, a smaller third one at the turn of the ‘90s, and the one we have just lived through, now apparently receding. (Though being cyclical and prompted by economic crises, he assures us we will doubtless see another.)
Our current Awokening, he says, began with the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement prompted by the 2008 financial crisis, and evolved through #MeToo, codified its institutional aims with the push for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gained serious momentum during COVID lockdowns, and crested with Black Lives Matter before meeting serious pushback during the first and now especially the second Trump administration.
But Al-Gharbi’s analysis of previous Awokenings stresses that the intended beneficiaries – workers, blacks and other racial minorities, immigrants, women, gays – have either seen little substantive improvement in their condition when the moment recedes or were already benefitting from social change that was building irrespective of the Awokening moment.
The issue, he says, is that these movements are inevitably hijacked by opportunists, conscious or unconscious, riding the moment in search of improved status. These are broad, society-engulfing moments that potentially implicate nearly everyone – especially now that social media has made it easier than ever to share hot takes, bully, threaten and join in canceling the victim of the moment while going about outwardly banal lives.
Though Al-Gharbi insists that technology is nowhere near as crucial as it’s considered to be – it’s more an amplifier or enabler than a root cause; we have been able to share in satisfying acts of group retribution when media was more traditional, communication less immediate.
The urge to join in these movements might be simply human nature. He writes that we’re moved to rage against targets like “capitalism and the superrich – often cloaking our struggles for wealth, status, and power as social justice advocacy – although our passion for revolution tends to rapidly face once our own objectives are met.”
Al-Gharbi quotes sociologist Max Weber: “In truth – let’s be honest with ourselves here – 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…after the emotional revolution, comes the return to traditional everyday life; the hero of the believers, and even the belief itself, disappears or becomes even more effective as a conventional slogan in the political philistine’s or functionary’s arsenal.”
At the moment the stereotypical foot soldier of the Awokening is a middle-class, middle-aged white woman, liberal and educated, easily denigrated as a monster of entitlement – the “Karen” that everyone across the political spectrum is eager to mock. TikTok, for instance, is groaning with video of “Karens caught in action,” most of them staged for clicks and clout.
But Al-Gharbi points out that white liberals have been perceived as benefitting far more from social justice movements, like the civil rights battle that was folded into the second Great Awokening. Black American leaders like Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King all described how their white allies from academia, government, and journalism seemed more interested in what we would now call “performative” support that waned the longer and harder their struggle became.
He quotes Ebony magazine editor Lerone Bennett Jr., writing in 1964: “Oppressed people learn early that the problem of life is not the problem of evil but the problem of good…The white liberal is a man who finds himself defined as a white man, as an oppressor in short, and retreats in horror at that designation. But – and this is essential – he retreats only halfway, disavowing the title without giving up the privileges, tearing out, as it were, the table of contents but keeping the book. The fundamental trait of the white liberal is his desire to differentiate himself psychologically from white Americans on the issue of race…he joins groups and assumes postures that permit him and others to believe something is being done. They key word here is believe.”
Al-Gharbi’s book will doubtless be read avidly by conservatives, and though he notes in passing that the Right is as full of symbolic capitalists as the left, it will provide solid justification for anyone busy with the business of turning the word “woke” into a pejorative.
The issue according to Al-Gharbi is that there are few consequences but many potential rewards to be gained from the performative rituals of woke politics in the interest of either improving your status or deflecting attention to more convenient scapegoats. He writes that, “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 and aspirations. Symbolic capitalists simultaneously desire to be social climbers and egalitarians.”
“Believing in equality is not a political act,” Al-Gharbi concludes. “Nor does it change anything in the world – least of all for the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged. The problem isn’t that there aren’t enough people who ‘believe’ in equality – it’s that there isn’t sufficient will among believers to translate their feelings into concrete realities ‘in the world’.”
