Notes: Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements

Notes on Musa al-Gharbi in conversation with Tyler Cowen — Conversations with Tyler (https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/musa-al-gharbi/), 16 October 2024.

Four questions [Adler frame]

Q1 — What is it about as a whole? Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, releasing We Have Never Been Woke the same week, defends a structural theory of ‘Great Awokenings’ — recurring periods of elite progressive fervour, of which the post-2010 wave is the fourth, not the first — driven by elite overproduction and a countercyclical convergence of elite and mass grievance. The conversation then turns from theory to al-Gharbi’s biography: his path from Catholicism through atheism to Sunni Islam, his self-identification as a Muslim who happens to be Black rather than a ‘Black Muslim’ in the Nation of Islam sense, and his views on why elite wokeness takes a different, less immediately visible shape in Muslim-majority societies.

Q2 — How is it argued? Al-Gharbi argues from the empirical measures assembled in his book — comparative data across four historical episodes of elite progressive upheaval — combined with named sociological literature (Goldstone and Turchin on elite overproduction; Shamus Khan on elite/nonelite countercyclicality; Joseph Henrich on WEIRD psychology; Olivier Roy on the modernity of political Islam). Cowen’s method is adversarial: he proposes an alternative causal story (media incentives, feminisation, Protestant inheritance, Musk’s Twitter acquisition) and specific counter-examples (the Springfield Haitian-migration controversy, the persistence of housing and job-market strain despite wokeness’s decline), forcing al-Gharbi to isolate which factors explain a specific episode’s texture from which explain the recurring pattern itself.

Q3 — Is it true, in whole or part? Al-Gharbi’s claim that four historically similar episodes recur on a roughly 30–40 year cadence is the book’s empirical spine and is asserted here rather than demonstrated in detail — the conversation only gestures at the underlying measures. [?] The causal mechanism (elite overproduction plus countercyclical convergence) is presented as predictive of timing but al-Gharbi concedes under Cowen’s pressure that other factors are also at play, since the housing/labour-market strain that supposedly drives elite overproduction has not eased in step with the Great Awokening’s apparent decline. The neuroticism-and-ideology discussion is explicitly unresolved — al-Gharbi states directly that the causal direction between progressive ideology and neuroticism is unclear and that he is ‘not completely sold on an answer’. The historical and biographical material (Malcolm X’s break with Farrakhan, al-Farabi and al-Biruni’s contributions, the Catholic Church’s marriage rules per Henrich) is presented as settled background rather than contested claim within this conversation.

Q4 — What of it? The episode’s throughline is that elite status politics is a recurring structural phenomenon tied to the psychology and material position of a specific professional class — Symbolic Capitalists — rather than a single contingent event explainable by any one recent development (social media, Trump, COVID). Al-Gharbi’s own biography then supplies a natural experiment in the episode’s second half: as a convert with lived experience across Catholicism, atheism, and Islam, and as someone who explicitly declines to claim special epistemic privilege from either his Blackness or his faith, he models the ‘partially situated knowledge’ epistemology he attributes to Heterodox Academy. The wiki’s first treatment of elite overproduction, symbolic-capitalist status competition, and comparative wokeness across religious and cultural contexts.

Glossary

Great Awokening — al-Gharbi’s term for a recurring, roughly decade-long period of intensified elite progressive focus on race, gender, and social justice; he counts four instances (1920s–30s, mid-1960s–70s, late 1980s–early 1990s, post-2010), the most recent peaking around 2021. [§ The Great Awokening: elite overproduction and countercyclical fortunes]

Elite overproduction — a term al-Gharbi draws from Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin: a society producing more credentialed people who expect elite outcomes than it has elite positions or living standards to give them, generating chronic dissatisfaction among the excess. [§ The Great Awokening: elite overproduction and countercyclical fortunes]

Symbolic capitalists — al-Gharbi’s term for knowledge-economy professionals (law, academia, journalism, consulting) who trade in symbols, language, and credentials rather than physical goods; he argues this class is gatekept by education and socioeconomic origin into a psychologically distinctive, more ideological, more extreme population. [§ Symbolic capitalists as a class; also throughout]

Countercyclical elite/nonelite fortunes — the pattern, credited to Shamus Khan, whereby periods good for elites (cheap labour, cheap goods and services) tend to be tougher for ordinary workers and vice versa; al-Gharbi argues awokenings require a rare moment when both groups are simultaneously frustrated. [§ The Great Awokening: elite overproduction and countercyclical fortunes]

Competence downshifting — research finding, cited by al-Gharbi, that white progressives (unlike white conservatives) systematically simplify and patronise their speech when talking to Black interlocutors, even controlling for the interlocutor’s class markers. [§ Neuroticism, ideology, and the symbolic professions]

WEIRD — ‘Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic’; Joseph Henrich’s category for a psychologically distinctive cluster of societies, which al-Gharbi links historically to both Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and (per Henrich) the Catholic Church’s medieval marriage-and-family reforms. [§ Wokeness and Islam: WEIRD culture, Protestantism, and the Muslim exception]

Key claims by section

The Great Awokening thesis [§ The Great Awokening: elite overproduction and countercyclical fortunes]

Four historical episodes of elite progressive upheaval share a structural cause: acute elite overproduction supplies the motive, and a countercyclical convergence of elite and mass hardship supplies the means (a mass base willing to back frustrated elites).
The post-2010 wave began with Occupy Wall Street (2010) and expanded into race, gender, and sexuality politics after 2011, peaking around 2021 and declining since on al-Gharbi’s own measures.
Cowen’s challenge — that job-market and housing strain persist even as wokeness fades — is only partly answered: al-Gharbi says some measures of 2010s-era crunch have eased, while conceding other unnamed factors matter too.

Why awokenings end [§ Why awokenings fizzle: unstable coalitions, not resolved grievances]

Coalitions between frustrated elite aspirants and the broader public are inherently unstable: aspirants who gain elite entry disengage, and symbolic capitalists’ distinctive mode of political engagement alienates the ‘normie’ base needed to sustain scale.
This instability is why al-Gharbi believes awokenings rarely escalate into revolutions.
Whether the pattern intensifies over successive cycles (ratchet effect) or is closer to a random walk: al-Gharbi favours random walk, citing the late-1980s/early-1990s ‘political correctness’ episode as shorter and less intense than the post-2010 wave, while stating openness to revision.

Rival explanations tested [§ Testing rival explanations: media, feminisation, and the case for structural recurrence]

Cowen’s alternative account (left-leaning university pipelines into journalism, social media incentives after 2011, Protestant moral inheritance, feminisation of elite professions, ending via media fragmentation and Musk’s Twitter purchase) is accepted by al-Gharbi as relevant to this episode’s specific character but rejected as a complete explanation, since three prior awokenings occurred without social media and before the professions were as feminised.
Al-Gharbi’s stronger claim: the four episodes share ‘an insane amount’ in common despite very different media and demographic environments, which he reads as evidence of structural recurrence over historical contingency.

Neuroticism and the symbolic professions [§ Neuroticism, ideology, and the symbolic professions]

The well-replicated finding that neuroticism, depression, and anxiety are more pronounced on the political Left admits two explanations al-Gharbi does not adjudicate between: progressive ideology could exacerbate neuroticism (via mechanisms like competence downshifting and chronic ally-anxiety), or pre-existing neuroticism could make progressive ideology more attractive.
Independent of that question, symbolic-professional selection (credential gatekeeping, socioeconomic origin) produces a population that is more ideological, extreme, dogmatic, conformist, conscientious, and cognitively sophisticated than the general public — a standing feature, not only visible during awokenings.

Wokeness outside the West [§ Wokeness and Islam: WEIRD culture, Protestantism, and the Muslim exception]

Status-politics movements paralleling Western wokeness (Black Lives Matter protests in Seoul, echoes of Occupy and #MeToo) have appeared in symbolic-capitalist hubs worldwide, including Istanbul, where feminist and gay-rights framing carries far higher personal risk than in London.
Al-Gharbi links wokeness to Anglo-Saxon Protestant social-gospel tradition, and separately cites Henrich’s claim that the Catholic Church’s medieval marriage-and-family programme (banning cousin marriage and polygamy) produced WEIRD psychology — two accounts he says sit in tension but are not necessarily contradictory.
His answer to Cowen’s Konya/Rumi example: Islam is not simply insulated from wokeness-equivalent status politics; Muslim societies host their own version among their own symbolic capitalists, and much of the perceived Islam/West cultural gulf is, per his Socius paper on the Islamic Commonwealth, of comparatively recent historical vintage rather than deep essence.

Identity, epistemics, and biography [§ Black Muslim identity, Malcolm X, and al-Gharbi’s own conversion]

Al-Gharbi distinguishes ‘Black Muslim’ (the politically mobilised Nation of Islam identity) from ‘Muslim who happens to be Black’ (his own current self-description), reflected in his name’s universalist meaning (Musa/Moses, al-Gharbi/‘of the West’).
Black Muslim political mobilisation declined after the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X — who broke from Louis Farrakhan’s antisemitic, anti-white framing following his hajj — and the subsequent discrediting of figures like Farrakhan; ordinary Black Muslim religious practice, disconnected from that political structure, continues.
Al-Gharbi’s own conversion path: raised non-Muslim in a military community → Catholicism, abandoned after concluding from scripture that Jesus did not claim divinity (a rejection that, per Quine’s web-of-belief metaphor, could not be isolated from the rest of Catholic doctrine) → a period of ‘militant atheism’ he could justify rationally but not sustain emotionally → conversion to Sunni Islam roughly fifteen years before this conversation.
He rejects claims of special epistemic insight from his Muslim or Black identity, endorsing instead — via his Heterodox Academy affiliation — a ‘partially situated knowledge’ model in which different backgrounds contribute complementary rather than superior perspectives.

Sociologists of Islam and political Islam’s modernity [§ Sociologists of Islam and the modernity of political Islam]

Al-Gharbi credits al-Farabi with an early social-construction theory of religion (divinely inspired but socially constructed, shaped and sometimes distorted by particular times and places — a claim al-Farabi applied even to his own tradition) and al-Biruni with pioneering ethnographic method and mathematical social science.
He endorses Olivier Roy’s thesis that contemporary radical political Islam is a modern phenomenon, not a fundamentalist throwback, tracing its rise to the late 19th/early 20th century alongside global capitalism, colonialism, and the discovery of oil — concretely, oil wealth transforming Wahhabism from a marginal Arabian sect into Saudi state ideology.
On European Muslim assimilation, he expects broadly typical second/third-generation integration, but singles out France’s aggressive secularism (head-covering bans applied across religious groups to target Muslims, removal of non-pork school meal options) as a distinct source of friction that America’s more pluralist approach to religious minorities largely avoids.

Notes — Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements