(This post is part of a series that began with this post.)
The overarching theme of Musa al-Gharbi’s book is examining the gap between the ideas most supported by those who are woke and the actions of those same people. While al-Gharbi isn’t overtly hostile to woke ideas as such, he is troubled by how people who are most aggressive advocates of those ideas don’t live in a way that reflects them. This is why his book is entitled We Have Never Been Woke, and not something like “Why Wokeness is Bad.”
Given how al-Gharbi argues that wokeness has been used to justify policies that enrich and support members of the symbolic capitalist class, often at the expense of the poor and vulnerable populations the woke claim to want to help, it might be tempting to conclude that the woke simply use wokeness as a cynical ploy to cover up their own greedy desire to keep the plebs in their place.
But, al-Gharbi says, this need not be the case. He does not think that the woke are generally insincere in their beliefs:
Critically, none of this entails that symbolic capitalists are cynical or insincere in their professed commitments to social justice. We tend to be true believers.
This sincerity makes it difficult for the woke to understand why various marginalized groups have increasingly been turning away from progressive politics and instead moving toward embracing the Republican Party:
Growing numbers of poor, working-class, and nonwhite voters are growing alienated from the Democratic Party and have been migrating to the GOP. It is difficult for symbolic capitalists to understand these trends because, again, we believe that we represent the will and interests of the marginalized and disadvantaged, while our opponents serve elite interests (and are driven by racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and ignorance).
This is not to say the woke elites haven’t noticed the fact that woke progressivism is largely the ideology supported by wealthy white elites while the Republican Party has become much more of a multiracial party of the working class. But this fact tends to be interpreted in a self-serving way – and one that reverses the logic that progressives used to employ when the relative makeup of the parties went in the other direction:
As the partisan and ideological alignment of symbolic capitalists has shifted, so has the narrative about what the partisan diploma divide “means.” When professionals and highly educated Americans skewed Republican, Democrats held this up as proof that the GOP was controlled by elites while they were the party of “the people.” Now that the pendulum has swung the other direction, the narrative is that the Democratic Party appeals to the educated and professionals because their policies are simply more rational, informed, and effective. As Stephen Colbert put it, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” The GOP, meanwhile, is depicted as the party of ignorant and regressive zealots.
Still, that puts the woke in the uncomfortable position of trying to explain why, increasingly, working-class nonwhites prefer the GOP, and have little regard for the policy preferences espoused by the (mostly white) woke elites:
In principle, this state of affairs could be defended on the grounds that relatively well-off and highly educated liberal whites—precisely in virtue of their college education and higher rates of consumption of “woke” content in the media, online, and so on—perhaps understand the reality and dynamics of racism better than the average Black or Hispanic person. However, given that many of their preferred approaches to “antiracism” are not just demonstrably ineffective but outright counterproductive, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone try to take a stand on that hill.
How do we square this circle? How can it be that the woke are both sincerely committed to bringing about social justice, while also advocating for policies that enrich themselves at the expense of the poor and vulnerable, and that are often contrary to the expressed views of those same people? According to Musa al-Gharbi, the fundamental problem is that woke progressives sincerely desire two different things that are fundamentally incompatible with each other: Members of the symbolic capitalist class want to bring about social justice and support egalitarianism, but they also want to be social elites. They want to hold positions of high prestige (high paying, high status), and they want to climb the ladder and to take steps to ensure their own children will be at least as successful as themselves. But al-Gharbi sees an incompatibility between wanting to bring about egalitarian outcomes and also wanting to be upwardly mobile:
Symbolic capitalists simultaneously desire to be social climbers and egalitarians. We want to mitigate inequalities while also preserving or enhancing our elite position (and ensuring our children can reproduce or exceed our position). These drives are in fundamental tension. This tension has defined the symbolic professions from the outset. Both commitments are sincere.
Here’s an example of a different form of this dynamic that many people will find relatable. John Q. Hypothetical has a sincere desire to lose thirty pounds. At the same time, he also has a sincere desire to eat lots of really tasty foods. In practice, these desires conflict with each other, but that doesn’t make either desire insincere. If Mr. Hypothetical ends up eating lots of tasty food rather than losing weight, this does not show that he doesn’t really want to lose weight or that his desire to trim down is insincere. But it shows that, if forced to make a choice between a smaller waistline and abandoning tasty food, he prefers tasty food more. In the same way, al-Gharbi argues that while the woke sincerely value both egalitarian ideas as well as being social climbers, that does not mean these ideas are equally important to the woke. To see which of these is more important, you have to observe how the woke behave when the incompatibility between them forces a choice of how to behave:
Throughout this text I have insisted that symbolic capitalists are likely being sincere when they espouse social justice commitments. However, just because an expressed conviction is sincere doesn’t mean it’s particularly important. One advantage of drawing this distinction is that determining whether something is important (or a priority) for someone does not require scholars to take anyone’s word. One’s priorities are manifested through action…Put another way, you don’t observe what is important to someone by what they say but rather by what they do, and by how they structure their lives. If something is valuable to a person, truly central to their being, they make room for it. They make sacrifices for it. It reshapes one’s other (more peripheral) commitments, and one’s behaviors, relationships, and life plans.
This is why the woke have never truly been woke, al-Gharbi says. When faced with a policy choice that would make things better for the poor and vulnerable but would be costly for the symbolic capitalist class, they are faced with a choice about whether to make a sacrifice to support egalitarianism or protect their elite status. More often than not — almost always, in fact — they end up choosing the option that preserves their elite status.
To use a tangible example, al-Gharbi extensively documents how licensing and certification regulations were created with the explicit purpose of shutting out the “wrong” kind of people, and have had the effect of artificially boosting the wealth of the symbolic capitalist class. These barriers to entry are disproportionately harmful to racial minorities and serve as structural restrictions that make it far more difficult for members of those communities to improve their situation. However, given the choice between removing these restrictions (thus opening up their own livelihoods to increased competition) in the pursuit of egalitarian goals or preserving these barriers and protecting their own status, the woke consistently pick the latter over the former. Promoting egalitarianism is a sincerely held desire, but it is ultimately less important to the woke than their desire to preserve and enhance their social status. Rather than go through the painful experience of confronting the inconsistency between their behavior and their professed values, they instead reinterpret their behavior as though it reflected those values.
There are four key methods al-Gharbi identifies that can be used to justify how one might behave in ways contrary to their moral commitments: “moral credentialing, moral licensing, moral cleansing, and moral disengagement.”
Of the first, al-Gharbi says:
Moral credentialing is a phenomenon where people become more likely to act in inegalitarian ways, and (critically) become convinced that their actions are nonbiased, after affirming their commitment to egalitarianism or engaging in behaviors they interpret as egalitarian. For instance, studies have shown that when white people publicly affirm their commitment to antiracism, they often become more likely to subsequently favor other whites in decision like hiring and promotion, even as they grow more confident that race played no role in their decision-making. When men identify with feminism, they regularly grow more likely to favor other men in their decision-making, but also grow more confident that their judgments were non-biased.
Sometimes, however, people do things they recognize were wrong to do, but they use moral licensing to get around the problem:
They can exempt themselves from the moral standards they apply to everyone else, confident that the good actions they have performed, or will perform (or other bad actions they have taken or will refrain from taking), will basically “even things out” ethically, result in a net positive, or at least fail to harm their reputation.
If these two strategies don’t work, one can employ moral cleansing:
In situations like these, where our self-image and reputation are compromised or at risk, we often engage in rituals of moral cleansing—behaviors that help restore the sense that we’re “on the side of the angels.” And it turns out that one of the most effective ways we can come to feel good about ourselves in the aftermath of a moral failing is to point out bad behaviors in others. Research shows that condemning and (especially) sanctioning others for wrongdoing can reduce one’s guilt over committing the same offense and helps assure oneself and others that they are different from “those people” being condemned (even if one is, in fact, engaged in similar or worse behaviors).
When these three strategies fall short, the woke tend to pivot towards moral disengagement:
However, should moral credentialing, licensing, and cleansing collectively fail at preserving our sense self-image and reputation, we often resort to moral disengagement instead: redefining situations in ways that neutralize their moral stakes. Sometimes we do this by downplaying the risks or costs imposed on others by our actions or by insisting that any negative eventualities were caused by circumstances beyond our own control, thereby minimizing our own perceived role in others’ misfortune. Other times, we tell ourselves that difficulties imposed on others serve some worthy goal or “greater good.”…For instance, this chapter highlighted how symbolic capitalists often define minorities who espouse inconvenient views as “compromised” in some way, allowing us to simply disregard their perspectives despite our expressed commitments to epistemic and moral deference toward people from historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups. This is moral disengagement in action.
These strategies don’t only allow the woke to feel secure about the virtue of their own behavior. They also allow them to find ways to believe that those who are beneath them in social status are less deserving:
In other cases, guilt over harm caused by people “like us” fuels moral outrage against third-party scapegoats; subsequent retributive actions against these scapegoats tends to cleanse our own guilt or shame. Or, all else failing, we find ways to collectively write off concern about those harmed by the pursuit of our own group interests. For instance, symbolic capitalists regularly portray the “losers” in the symbolic economy as unworthy of moral consideration because they’re racist, or sexist, or transphobic, or ignorant, or support “fascists” like Donald Trump. If “those people” are marginalized, good. They should be. If they’re suffering, who cares?
All of these modes of behavior have the unfortunate effect of actually making the problems the woke want to eliminate even more pronounced within organizations that are controlled by the woke themselves. The more woke values are upheld and promoted, the more it creates the very behavior the woke oppose:
That is, in environments where antiracism, feminism, and other egalitarian frameworks are widely and very publicly embraced, it can become easier for people to act in racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory ways while convinced that their behaviors are fair—and to have those actions actually perceived as fair by others who share the same ideological and political leanings, or who belong to the same social or institutional groups.
Further, al-Gharbi points out that these forms of motivated rationalization are something woke symbolic capitalists are particularly prone to employ, compared to others:
Critically, although moral credentialing, licensing, cleansing, and disengagement are general cognitive and behavioral tendencies, symbolic capitalists may be especially susceptible to these forms of self-serving moral reasoning. As discussed throughout this text, the kinds of people who become symbolic capitalists (those who are highly educated, cognitively sophisticated, etc.) tend to be particularly prone to, and effective at, motivated reasoning in general…Taken together, symbolic capitalists have especially powerful means, far more frequent opportunities, and a pronounced need to produce moral credentials and more licenses or engage in moral cleansing rituals or moral disengagement.
On top of all of this, because the values espoused by woke progressives are generally antithetical, if not outright hostile, to the values held by most (nonelite) members of minority communities, woke culture itself becomes a sort of hostile environment for these vulnerable populations:
Similar realities hold for other forms of social sanction for insufficiently “woke” views. In general, immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities tend to be more religious and more culturally and symbolically conservative than whites—as are people of more modest socioeconomic backgrounds compared to social elites. Consequently, inculcating an environment that is hostile to more “traditional” values and worldviews, although typically carried out in the name of diversity and inclusion, will often have the perverse effect of excluding, alienating, or creating a more precarious situation for those who are already underrepresented and marginalized in elite spaces. When we try to understand why it is that so many “people of color,” or people from low-income, immigrant backgrounds or otherwise “nontraditional” backgrounds, feel as though they don’t “belong” in symbolic capitalist spaces—whether we’re talking about elite K–12 schools, or colleges and universities, or professional settings—this is likely a big, and underexplored, part of the story.
But after all this, there is one final question to be explored. As I pointed out at the start of this post, there is a reason al-Gharbi’s book is titled We Have Never Been Woke, and not something like Why Being Woke is Bad or Why We Shouldn’t Be Woke. If the problem is that we’ve never been woke, that leaves open that the solution is that we should be woke. Is there anything in the ideology of wokeness, properly understood, that ought to be preserved and practiced in a different way from how the woke currently behave? That question will be the subject of part 10 of this series.
