How Woke is Woke?
Pleased to reappear in the Washington Examiner Magazine…
Scarcely had the embers of Minneapolis stopped smoldering in 2020 before a wave of pundits and public intellectuals began claiming that we’d already passed “peak woke,” that none of it was really worth discussing anymore, and that “wokeness” had mostly been trumped-up and overstated anyhow. To even use the W-word was “cringe,” to mark oneself as an irrelevant and probably racist rube. What mattered was that with Joe Biden’s inauguration, thoughtful adults would be back in charge, after whatever fleeting rhetorical excesses of the previous few years, and common-sense progressivism would prevail once again.
There were probably a few grains of truth to that narrative, at least by 2022 or 2023, by which time defunding the police had become passe, and low-key irreverence was no longer social suicide among left-of-center polite company. Truly, there were a bunch of folks, typically up in years, who threw around the word “woke” willy-nilly to describe anything they didn’t like. The discourse had indeed thawed a bit as Elon Musk took over Twitter and other major platforms backed off from their most heavy-handed censorship. Then, the events of Oct. 7, 2023, and subsequent fallout brought renewed scrutiny and criticism of the strident illiberalism that dominates much of higher education, spooking a number of prominent schools into declaring institutional neutrality on hot-button political issues.
But, fundamentally, the conceit underlying the broad umbrella of wokeness — that any and all statistical disparities among demographics are entirely socially constructed and can be eliminated with enough will and spending and credentialed experts put in charge — remains the core legitimating ideology of Western governing institutions, especially as they spiral ever further from meaningful accountability to the electorates they ostensibly represent. Even as Scranton Joe revived soothing old hokum from the 1940s, the Biden-Harris administration has tirelessly worked to embed the latest diversity, equity, and inclusion dogma and gender Gnosticism into every last corner of the federal government and affiliated institutions, including NASA and the military, with what in its own words is a “whole-of-government approach.”
So the suggestion that we’re actually past “peak woke” is inherently dubious and often made disingenuously in the context of boosting Democratic candidates facing tough elections: “Nothing to see here, folks, show’s over, problem solved!” But given that wokeness by any other name is still subsidized to the tune of hundreds of billions, it’s more likely that we’re in a temporary ebb tide before it roars back more totalizing than ever.
It was with some trepidation, then, that I heard that the prolific public intellectual Musa al-Gharbi’s forthcoming first book was titled We Have Never Been Woke. Now on faculty at Stony Brook University, a columnist for The Guardian, and previously a sociology fellow at Columbia, al-Gharbi and I had tussled before on my Substack after I’d criticized a few of his tweets I’d felt were overly dismissive of the chilling effect of academic cancel culture. He responded graciously, maybe more than my tone had warranted, and I went away from the interaction still unconvinced but with renewed respect for the man. Even as I thought the premise of his title was utterly preposterous, I owed his book an honest read.
Honestly, I should have paid more attention to the subtitle: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, which gives perhaps a better sense of al-Gharbi’s sprawling, ambitious, and perceptive new volume. Far from dismissing or downplaying the supremely counterproductive absurdity and hypocrisy of 2020-era wokeness, he fruitfully situates recent embarrassments amid the context of several previous “Great Awokenings” dating back to the early 1930s based on elite overproduction driving aspiring elites to desperate cultural knife fights for status, prestige, and income. He goes so far as to analyze present underemployment trends to project new “awokenings” soon to come, even as the parade moves on.
If this latest effluence of cartoonishly exaggerated social consciousness has had a more immediate and ubiquitous effect on society than, say, the earlier “awokening” that spurred the New Left in the 1960s, al-Gharbi attributes that to the growing dominance of the influential class he terms “symbolic capitalists” in American society: professionals who deal primarily with words, ideas, narratives, and abstractions as opposed to workers handling physical goods and services. Wokeness, he contends, has become a key social indicator of education and upward mobility even as it alienates and often undermines the lower-status people the ideology claims to champion.
While woke would-be elites’ ostentatious crusades to reshuffle class and status hierarchies might tend to revolve more around strategic social positioning than substantively aiding the downtrodden, al-Gharbi suggests, they’re not necessarily insincere. And, he emphasizes, the motivations of anti-woke crusaders aren’t necessarily entirely pure, either, as they themselves are often frustrated wannabe elites consciously or unconsciously pursuing their own self-serving, opportunistic agendas.
Like al-Gharbi himself, We Have Never Been Woke is tough to pin down politically: It raises too many provocative questions and gores too many oxen across the political spectrum to let anybody feel very complacent. It’s a highly erudite book, idiosyncratically straddling the line between an academic publication and a broader interest page-turner, that, at its sharpest, transcends all of the citations and footnotes to achieve a pungent first-person sociological and psychological clarity reminiscent of distinctive thinkers in the realm of Eric Hoffer.
As he briefly addresses throughout the volume, al-Gharbi came up from a rather unusual background to reach high-end academia: from being ethnically complicated in a small southwestern military town to attending community college on and off while working full-time to becoming an expert shoe seller at the local Dillard’s eventually denied promotion for being just too promising. It took a lot of years and an awfully bumpy road to at last achieve the heights he has, and I can’t help thinking his most profound insights must arise from direct personal experience and anecdotes rather than dusty scholarly publications. In future volumes and forthcoming columns, I hope the good professor might speak even more directly to where he’s been and is proceeding than to the larger body of academic literature.
But in the midst of more immediate wokeness wars and a closely contested election season, multifaceted ambiguous perspectives might not be at the very pinnacle of demand. They should be, though. Few conversations are as frequently unproductive as the fights we have over that-which-is-called-wokeness, but as important to rethink and get right. And if al-Gharbi hasn’t gotten it perfectly right in this book, nobody has ever gotten it less wrong.
Read in the Washington Examiner Magazine.
Next: Another Fine Mess
“So the suggestion that we’re actually past ‘peak woke’ is inherently dubious and often made disingenuously in the context of boosting Democratic candidates facing tough elections: ‘Nothing to see here, folks, show’s over, problem solved!’ But given that wokeness by any other name is still subsidized to the tune of hundreds of billions, it’s more likely that we’re in a temporary ebb tide before it roars back more totalizing than ever.”
The general public may be past “peak woke,” but the cultural forces that propagate wokeness are undeterred. The country’s graduate schools of education have not pulled back at all on the out-and-out obsession with “anti-racist,” post-modern, critical theory-based curricula, and they are producing a constant stream of new teachers and administrator, all of whom are true believers and installing these ideas in our children apace. Journalism schools don’t even pretend anymore to teach new journalists to be impartial and follow the facts wherever they lead; the next generation is being explicitly taught to push an agenda in their reporting and to protect the powerful rather than question.
At all levels of education, in all subjects, as the few centrist or right-leaning professors, teachers, etc. age out and retire, they’re being replaced by hard leftists, and the next generation will go through 12 or 16 or more years of education hearing nothing but the far left worldview, the far left language and jargon, etc. and many will grow up having no idea there are other perspectives.
The fact that anons can now more easily get away with memeing the woke’s excesses on Twitter without getting canceled isn’t that big a victory when the people and institutions that have children’s attention most of the day every weekday for a dozen years or more are explicitly programming them to be woke.
Great review, and I like al-Gharbi's work (although I don't agree w/ all of it!).
This stands out and squares with my personal experience, "Wokeness, he contends, has become a key social indicator of education and upward mobility even as it alienates and often undermines the lower-status people the ideology claims to champion."
It is about signaling that one has the right ideas and others do not. This is done through confession vis-a-vis "shout your abortion", acknowledging your racism or privilege, ex-communication/cancellation, community rituals in the form of protests and DEI workshops, and amulets such as yard signs and bumper stickers.
My keyboard doesn't have Hebrew but, "Ein klum chadash b'shemsesh"...there is nothing new under the sun.