Critics Respond to We Have Never Been Woke
Critics Respond to We Have Never Been Woke
A brief sketch of how folks have been reacting to the book plus my thoughts on some common lines of critique.
So far, the response to We Have Never Been Woke has been almost unanimously positive – to a degree that’s almost overwhelming. The book has blurbs from scholars whose work has been hugely influential, such as Richard Florida, Tyler Cowen, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett and Tyler Austin Harper. Advance praise in the New York Times said that the book heralds my arrival as a “rising intellectual star.” The Washington Post review said the book establishes me as “one of the most insightful and provocative sociologists” of my generation. One of my absolute favorite book reviewers described We Have Never Been Woke “probably the most incisive and interesting” book that has been written on wokeness.
Wild stuff.
Even more heartening than the positive reception in the mainstream circuit has been the way the book has defied easy categorization across ideological and political lines.
The Reception Across Political and Ideological Lines
Headed towards the book launch, a consistently expressed worry by interlocutors in podcasts, talks, and in conversations with the press was that the book might be hated by its target audience — the people who need to hear the message — while being embraced by antiwoke and conservative people, and leveraged as a tool in the culture wars in a way that was out of step with the intent of the project.
My approach going in was to not worry about this overmuch. As I detail in the text, the perennial joy and terror of putting ideas in the world is that, after a point, they cease to be “yours” and take on a life of their own, which you cannot fully predict or control. You can try to speak out against misuses and misinterpretations – but that doesn’t necessarily stop them (as I illustrate in sections 1.9 and 2.15 if the book, among others).
For my part, I just tried to control what I could control. I sought to answer the questions the book seeks to explore as fully, honestly and fair-mindedly as possible. And I resigned myself to let the post-release politics stuff sort itself out.
It looks like that approach paid off.
To date, the book has been received warmly on the left. Advance praise at HuffPost described the book as “at the same time a serious study of the sociology of culture and one of the most interesting investigations of the woke phenomenon.” Sublation Magazine described the book as a “rigorous, wide-ranging, self-image smashing analysis” that “deserves to be a discourse-shifting, delusion-decimating” release. The Marx & Philosophy Review of Books had great things to say about the text as well.
In fact, the main pushback so far has come from anti-woke and right-aligned critics. Many seem to have gone into the work expecting a brutal takedown of the left and instead discovered a deep study of the political economy of the symbolic professions – a book that analyzes antiwoke and right-aligned symbolic capitalists symmetrically with peers on the left. Rather than a reactionary screed, the text contextualizes the current moment in terms of broader socioeconomic and cultural trends (with a 100 year historical arc). Although it’s accessible and compelling (as reviewers consistently praised), We Have Never Been Woke is also a scholarly book that dispassionately analyzes society without an interest in moralizing, and which doesn’t lend itself easily to “owning the libs.”
I’m thrilled to have cultivated a politically and ideologically diverse readership in my years writing for outlets across the spectrum and working for organizations like Heterodox Academy. Anyone who wants to more deeply understand contemporary social problems will likely find a lot to play around with and learn from in this book. However, it seems that folks hungry for culture war fodder have been leaving somewhat disappointed.
Make no mistake: We Have Never Been Woke is discomforting reading for folks on the left. It starts in a really bracing way. It remains challenging throughout, all the way to the final page. The conclusion willfully denies readers any type of closure or catharsis. Yet, interestingly, it was right-of-center readers who seemed to be most troubled by the book’s overall tone…
Am I a Cynic?
One striking element of the book’s reception to date is that many right-aligned and anti-woke critics have viewed the book as overly harsh on symbolic capitalists, while most other reviewers praised the book for its charity, grace and lack of judgement.
As an example, Quillette reviewer Jon Kay contrasted my book to Nellie Bowles The Morning After the Revolution and concluded, “Al-Gharbi, the academic, is less charitable, arguing that social-justice sloganeering can serve as a means for elites to hoard symbolic capital while deflecting unwelcome scrutiny of their wealth and privilege.”
National Review emphasized, “Though [al-Gharbi’s] book is carefully argued, extensively documented, and highly persuasive, one wonders: Can the emotions unleashed by the Great Awokening, however hypocritical, be reduced primarily to an expression of class interests? … Haven’t “we” — or at least some of us — tried to be woke?”
Meanwhile, the review for the Washington Free Beacon was titled “The Cynics Guide to Wokeness.” The reviewer claimed, “the weakest point of We Have Never Been Woke is that al-Gharbi can be relentlessly harsh on the woke, and on symbolic capitalists more broadly.”
For contrast, the review (by a left-leaning writer) for Christianity Today declares, “Al-Gharbi repeatedly acknowledges he’s a symbolic capitalist, too. He’s asking his peers to be honest with themselves about their complicity in America’s social breakdown. He doesn’t question their motives or principles, but he does reveal the tension produced when those principles are paired with a very human desire to maintain one’s advantages and to pass them on to one’s children. That gentle example deserves imitation.”
The UnHerd review emphasizes, “Al-Gharbi declines to offer concrete recommendations. His conclusion that ideological ferment follows predictable cycles seems to suggest we’re doomed to suffer some other madness in a decade or two. Yet his personal behavior — especially engaging in dialogue with a wide range of audiences — suggests a certain optimism that it’s possible to be a better symbolic capitalist, and perhaps also forge a healthier symbolic capitalist culture… In eschewing the self-aggrandizement and moralism typical of woke and anti-woke literature alike, al-Gharbi offers a model for others to follow.”
Not everyone hoped others would follow my lead.
For some reviewers on the right, the charity I extended to mainstream symbolic capitalists – the fact that I took their sincerity at face value and merely described their ideology and its operation in the world rather than seeking to evaluate whether their beliefs were “good” or “bad” or “right” or “wrong” – this was something they found frustrating.
For instance, the review at Front Porch Republic noted, “Probably to his credit, al-Gharbi puts the best possible face on a reality that is variously amusing, infuriating, and even occasionally relieving… the considerable merit of al-Gharbi’s book is in its fearless commitment to detailing who benefits from wokeness. Its main drawback, I think, lies in its periodic avoidance of the reality that, at least in many cases, the causes championed by woke elites are seriously detrimental to human flourishing and would be even if their champions were so selfless as to pursue them for no personal gain whatsoever.”
The Wall Street Journal review likewise stressed, “Mr. al-Gharbi’s effort to move proudly analytic symbolic capitalists to analyze themselves is important. He is mainly in the business of describing, not moralizing, but the self-serving blindness of woke symbolic capitalists seems like a moral failing.”
Put simply, while some right-aligned readers saw cynicism and ruthlessness in the work, most center and left reviewers saw lots of charity and grace – even as other right aligned critics thought the book went way too easy on symbolic capitalists and their ideology by eschewing moralizing in favor of thick description. With respect to tone, your mileage may vary.
However, setting aside these manners of taste, I’ve been asked few times now in reviews, interviews and talks about whether I see myself as a cynic. Let me answer that directly “on the record” here.
In Ancient Greece, cynicism was an intellectual and social movement comprised of people dedicated to telling the unvarnished truth – without any concern for decorum or taboos. They highlighted that the desire for comfort, predictability, wealth, and status often interfered with human flourishing (eudaimonia). Rather than bringing us fulfillment, chasing these false idols typically rendered people miserable, anxious and unsatisfied. Worse, attaining these empty “goods,” typically in a fleeting manner at best, often came at the expense of others.
To drive these points home, cynics highlighted the absurdity and futility of pursuits people often dedicated themselves to. They pointed out contradictions between what people said they wanted or valued versus how they were actually structing their lives, or how they were actually investing their time, energy and resources.
However, and this is critical, the cynics were fundamentally optimistic. They argued that it is absolutely feasible to achieve fulfillment in this life. In fact, they argued, living a good life is a lot simpler than we’ve been led to believe. It’s accessible to virtually anyone willing to shed superfluous things that we’ve been conditioned to erroneously view as important.
In that sense, the Ancient Greek sense, I could definitely see a kinship between my project and cynicism. Of course, there is also a lot of overlap between cynicism in this sense and, say, the preaching of Jesus (as many scholars have noted). On this account, it is perhaps fitting that We Have Never Been Woke closes by evoking Jesus of Nazareth (spoiler).
But of course, this isn’t what folks generally mean when they paint me as a cynic or ask me if I identify this way. With respect to the modern (pejorative) sense of the term -- no, I am not a cynic.
As many reviewers noted, the book takes pains to emphasize that mainstream symbolic capitalists are not cynical either. They’re sincere in their pursuit of social justice. However, it’s also the case that egalitarianism is not their top priority (especially relative to attaining, preserving or enhancing their elite status and lifestyle).
With respect to the question of whether I’m pessimistic about humanity or the human condition, here I think a quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald is helpful, “One should… be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” This is roughly where I land on many of the problems explored in the book.
The text is relentless towards mainstream symbolic capitalists because, as highlighted at length in chapters 4 and 6, symbolic capitalists are masters at motivated reasoning – far more than most others. Given any kind of slack, loophole or “out” we find ways to exempt ourselves from analysis — we find pathways to embracing arguments of a book like this while convincing ourselves that it’s actually about “others.” So I provided no quarter.
Likewise, the book is focused narrowly on “us” and not other contributors to social problems because symbolic capitalists have immense difficulty controlling our tendencies towards “whataboutism.” Indeed, if readers are eager to hear how people other than mainstream symbolic capitalists are responsible for social problems… they can read just about anything else mainstream symbolic capitalists produce analyzing said problems. There’s not a lot of value added by me adding more self-serving narratives to the heap. The book instead tries to fill in the parts of the picture that are systematically neglected.
In a similar vein, the book doesn’t spend a lot of time praising symbolic capitalists because we praise ourselves plenty when we talk about ourselves in most other contexts. Indeed, many other works studying the rise and impact of symbolic capitalists have been so positive at time of publication that their authors have felt compelled to issue correctives later, acknowledging that, in fact, we play a major role in fomenting social dysfunction. I decided to skip straight to the “corrective” phase of these others’ works. But, for folks interested in what I think is actually good about symbolic capitalists and our social order, see here.
Finally, the book doesn’t close with easy solutions because I don’t think there are any. I wanted people to sit with the weight of the challenges we face -- the immensity of the task before us -- if we’re really committed to our expressed social justice goals. And again, I assume that most of us are sincerely committed.
The problems we face are big. But symbolic capitalists are far from powerless. To push us past our tendencies towards feigned helplessness and poverty larping, I dedicated a whole chapter of the book (Chapter 3, and much of Chapters 5 and 6 as well) to illustrating how symbolic capitalists have immense influence over institutions and society. If we’re actually determined to make things otherwise – if we’re willing to accept risks and costs, to exert genuine and disciplined effort to change things – then it is absolutely within our power to transform society. Some tentative thoughts on what that might look like will appear in a separate essay soon.
Who Cares About Hypocrisy? (Not Me!)
I don’t think hypocrisy is particularly interesting as an analytic matter. I stress this point explicitly in the introduction to the book (pp. 21-22), and repeat this point throughout. The point of We Have Never Been Woke is not to “expose” left-aligned symbolic capitalists as hypocrites (as though anti-wokes or conservatives are not just as bad).
As I’ve emphasized elsewhere, these kinds of attempts at “unmasking” (usually accompanied by uncharitable and non-reflexive motive-mongering) are not particularly valuable outside of scoring points in the culture wars. That is not the project of my book.
We Have Never Been Woke does illustrate a lack of correspondence between symbolic capitalists’ words and deeds – not for the sake of trying to “own” anyone – but because symbolic capitalists are elites. As elites, the distance between what we profess and what we do is of significant practical consequence to lots of other people, including and especially those who are genuinely marginalized, vulnerable and disadvantaged in society. And so, if we want to understand how many social problems come about and persist, who benefits from them and how, then we need to study the actions and behaviors of elites, and how those relate to their legitimizing narratives. That is what the book is trying to do.
In the service of this project, I analyze antiwoke, conservative, and mainstream symbolic capitalists symmetrically. Sections 1.5 through 1.6 and 2.16 highlight how right-aligned and anti-woke symbolic capitalists share similar psychologies and orientations towards politics as the “woke” people they condemn. Indeed, virtually everything in Chapter 4 of the book (explicitly!) applies just as much to right-of-center symbolic capitalists and their mainstream peers. In these same sections, I highlight how Great Awokenings often give rise to “antiwokeneings” and devolve into culture wars. Critically, I stress, the people who drive “antiwokenings” tend to be structurally similar to the people who drive “Awokenings” – with participants apparently motivated by a similar mix of goals (sincere commitments to improve society supervened by desires to enhance their status, wealth and power).
Not everyone has loved this. On social media, and at least once at a talk (so far), I’ve had antiwoke folks fume because I shrugged off hypocrisy per se, and/or because I analyzed folks like themselves in an equivalent manner as the “wokes” whom they define themselves against.
Others somehow deeply misunderstood the project of the book, and seemed confused that I brought up conservatives or antiwokes at all. For instance, the Institute for Family Studies review began by describing symbolic capitalists as, “white-collar workers… academics or nonprofit employees or government functionaries… al-Gharbi argues this class of people will never be paid that much—certainly not as much as the bankers and consultants or philanthropists with whom they associate.”
Again, I dedicated an entire chapter of the book (Chapter 3) to dispelling precisely this narrative. I emphasized at length that, although symbolic capitalists like to say stuff like this (“we live such poor and humble lives”), it’s nonsense. We get paid a lot compared to normie workers. And have much higher social status, better benefits, better working conditions, and many other auxiliary benefits too. It is deep ignorance of how most other workers live that allow us to think we’re “poor” or “ordinary joes” (by comparing ourselves to folks like Jeff Bezos instead of clerks at Wal Mart). As I take pains to illustrate, even “exploited” symbolic capitalists tend to be much better off than most others in America. We’re not “in the same boat.” And what’s more, we don’t want to be. “Great Awokenings” are, at bottom, revolts carried out when elite aspirants do actually find ourselves facing the prospects of normie lives and jobs. It’s a prospect we militantly recoil from. That’s a big point of the book, emphasized over and over, so its striking that the reviewer somehow missed this.
Moreover, literally all of the folks the critic tries to juxtapose in that paragraph are symbolic capitalists! It doesn’t make sense to juxtapose bankers and consultants from professors and journalists, because bankers and consultants are symbolic capitalists too! Millionaires and billionaires are increasingly drawn from the symbolic professions as well. I repeatedly and explicitly include consultants, finance bros, et al. in the symbolic professions throughout the book (and on this Substack for good measure). And I have a whole section of the book that starts by highlighting how millionaires and billionaires are increasingly “us” — and in any event, almost everything the “1 percent,” “multinational corporations,” et al. do is with “us” and through “us.”
Awokenings happen because of tensions within the symbolic professions – they are fundamentally power struggles between established elites and frustrated elite aspirants -- and they were very pronounced in all of the fields named by the reviewer. McKinsey, JP Morgan Chase, and the nonprofit sphere went super "woke" in the 2010s as well (just ask former GOP presidential nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, who has written two books on this topic!). And they underwent an Awokening simultaneously and for the same reasons as higher ed, journalism, and other symbolic fields.
I say this not to drag the reviewer (whose review was very kind on the whole!), but because these are very important points for others to understand. Similar realities hold for the reviews’ misguided discussion around hypocrisy. Again, I’m explicit that I don’t care about hypocrisy at all. Yet, towards the end of the review, the critic claims:
“Though he notes that most symbolic capitalists are liberals, he also notes that most of what he will say also applies to right-leaning symbolic capitalists because they, too, attach great significance to language. It’s an odd point since most of the book is not in fact about symbolic capitalists’ primary focus on language but rather how different their language is from their actions… In an otherwise deeply researched and observant book about his own milieu, it seems odd to have a throwaway section about another group with whom al-Gharbi seems to have little familiarity. Perhaps he believes this seemingly evenhanded approach will save him from the wrath of his symbolic capitalist colleagues. I wish him good luck with that.”
Working in reverse order here, I’m famously unconcerned about the wrath of my colleagues. The idea that I would throw in criticism of the right for that kind of petty purpose is silly on its face: I publish articles about how research and journalism is biased against Trump and his supporters, how DEI is typically counterproductive, and calling for deeper engagement with conservative and religious thought. I served as the communications director for Heterodox Academy. I’ve published articles in National Review, The American Conservative, and other right-aligned outlets (although, I’ve also, previously, been cancelled by Fox News… so… you know… I’ve really experienced all angles of the right).
This deep engagement and charity with the right – and the fact that I grew up in a conservative family and community (as the introduction to the book discusses) – these realities not only falsify the notion that I’m super concerned about seeming pure to my peers, they also highlight cleanly my deep familiarity with conservatives — pace the author’s claim to the contrary. The evenhandedness that the reviewer criticizes (criticizes!) is not an attempt to ingratiate myself with my colleagues. It’s an attempt to tell the truth in a comprehensive and fair-minded way.
More to the point, it’s just false that the book is primarily about hypocrisy. Again, the book is about how social problems come about and persist and who benefits from them and how. If right-aligned and anti-woke symbolic capitalists live in similar communities as their mainstream peers, work in similar institutions, enjoy similar lifestyles, and so on – then they are benefiting from and perpetuating these problems the same as their mainstream peers. The fact that they happen to believe and profess different things is completely irrelevant. A big argument of the book is that symbolic gestures, or the contents of hearts and minds – these matter far less than behaviors, relationships, allocations of resources, etc. And this is just as true for conservatives or antiwokes as it is for progressives.
If conservatives or antiwokes contribute to these social problems but don’t really care, that’s between them and God. Whether or not someone portrays themselves as advocates of the marginalized and disadvantaged has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not they exploit or perpetuate inequalities in their actual lives. It’s the latter thing the book is interested in: how do social problems come about and persist, who benefits from them and how. I’m not interested at all in moralizing about hypocrisy.
But, for the reference, it’s just not true that conservatives don’t have a similar gap between their rhetoric and their behaviors. They absolutely do! Read any mainstream symbolic capitalist outlet (or Google phrases like “Conservatives are hypocrites”), and you can easily be presented with hundreds of examples, with new takes produced daily. But, again, for my purposes, hypocrisy is completely beside the point – for conservatives, antiwokes and progressives alike.
Here I should add: this particular reviewer is not alone in the misplaced focus on hypocrisy. Many, many, reviews and essays about the book (across the ideological spectrum) have focused on apparent hypocrisy. And in interviews, I’ve repeatedly had to reroute conversations away from conversations about hypocrisy. I don’t find hypocrisy interesting, and I’m very explicit about this in the book.
Of course, I understand why folks find hypocrisy to be annoying in others (even if it typically goes unnoticed in ourselves). I get that it’s a sexy thing to talk about when dunking on opponents in the culture war. But that’s not my project at all. Yet, as noted at the outset, a perennial joy and terror of bringing ideas into the world is that people use them however they want, often in ways you couldn’t predict, don’t approve, or can’t control. There’s no way to stop folks from dwelling on hypocrisy, it seems. Even if the book directly and repeatedly tries to discourage this.
All said, though, the reaction to the book has been fantastic. Not a single negative review has been published (yet), despite occasional quibbles like the ones discussed here.
Now’s your chance to weigh in: as colleagues Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy stressed in the book, The Ordinal Society, rankings are of major practical importance for whether and how things succeed in contemporary society. If you purchased the book on a site that allows reviews, please take a minute to add your own review when you get the chance. A five-star review (or equivalent) would be great— the more of those the better. But just provide your honest rating when you can, if the purchaser provides a means to do so. With my thanks.
For those interested in diving into the critical reception in greater detail, a roundup of all professional reviews published to date follows below. And stay tuned for additional thoughts on some of the more interesting provocations in some of the reviews and discussions about the book.
Reviews
Advance Praise
So far, I just finished chapter 1, I love this line you are walking as you described here. I think that book is very valuable already and I've got a lot more pages to go through.
It is very accessible indeed, unless you read all the footnotes and take your own notes like I do 😂, but heh, I'm an academic so here we are.