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Musa al-Gharbi

lines on the record: 57
first: 2024-10-16
most recent: 2024-10-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“To get it into the state of sin today. And so the second book, what I'll be thinking about for the next couple of years are going to be people who are more sociologically distant from knowledge economy professionals and trying to look at the struggle between us and them and to understand it in a deeper way. I mean, I've done some provisional work and I do have a lot of pretty tight content for the second book and I'll be shopping it out to publishers after we see how well this one does or not. But I'm going to be doing, of course, a lot of research and thinking about these tensions in the near future. And that'll be kind of occupying my brain space.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The short term, I have a second book project, a kind of follow-up to this one. So this book was kind of focused a lot on knowledge economy professionals on the kind of winners in the knowledge economy, on institutions of knowledge production and so on and so forth. And the initial plan for this book, when I pitched it to Princeton, was that I was going to do like part of the book focused on us, on symbolic capitalists, the knowledge economy professionals. And then towards the latter end of the book, I was going to kind of turn the analytical lens from the winners in the knowledge economy to people who perceive themselves to be the losers, people who are more sociologically distant from us, who provide physical goods and services to people, who live in smaller towns, more rural areas, and so on and so forth. It proved untenable to do that in the space of one book. In fact, even this book, even when we split it into two books, it still took a little bit of cutting and polishing.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite movie, I like a lot of the Charlie Kaufman movies. He has this one, Senectity, New York, that I think is really fascinating and a lot of fun. I like Charlie Kaufman's movies pretty consistently. Woody Allen, a lot of his movies are great. You know, he's been on a big journey in terms of his filmmaking over the years from this kind of slapstick funny stuff to these kinds of. But I think it's all really interesting and good. I love Woody Allen's movies.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favourite novel You know that's an interesting question. It's been a minute. I mean the brothers by Dostevsky I really love when I started writing this book and actually really starting when I probably when I started my PhD program I used to read a lot of fiction and it's been a while I realized as I was writing my book that it had been Probably a decade since I had read something that was purposely fiction. I read a lot of, I had a couple of books by Umberto Eco that I had wanted to read for a long time, Foucault's Pendulum, The Name of the Rose. And so I dove into those. I really enjoyed them. And so I'm trying to get back into reading fiction now. But it had been a long time, I realized.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Drives a lot of detentions and friends. It's because they do have this really hostile approach towards religion in general, especially public-oriented religion and religious minorities that I think is unfortunate. And so I think some of the problems that you see in France are a product of France. But I think in other cultural contexts where there's less of that kind of militant government oriented hostility towards religion, a lot of these things are easier to resolve.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“France does have this really aggressive hostile kind of approach to secularism, a really militant approach to secularism, where, for instance, in some schools they try to push pork on kits. They kind of eliminate non-pork options. They say, you know, your kid is either going to eat the same things as other French kids or they're going to go hungry. That's the choice they have. Or they kind of outlaw things like head coverings, even though nuns, people from Eastern Europe, a lot of people wear head coverings other than Muslims. But in order to prevent Muslims from following their own cultural traditions, they make it sold at no one can wear head coverings. Actually, they have partial exemptions for nuns, which is interesting. And things like no one can wear crosses or other forms of religious ornaments in a prominent way. So this kind of militant, rather than kind of America's more pluralistic approach, you know, France has this really militant confrontational approach to dealing with religious minorities that I think”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reproduce Sudan and France now that said there are elements of their own society and culture that people do from the society and culture they came from that they think are actually good and worth preserving or that they think are like I actually think this is a better way of doing things why don't we do it this way here why do we you know and again these are negotiations that that happen kind of across the board when you have large numbers of migrants And so you know, I think a lot of these tensions will persist so long as there are continued waves of migration, but will ultimately I'm optimistic that there will be some equilibrium. They'll work themselves out. I think one source of tension in France, I think in particular, is that France has a, and this is why I think it's sometimes easier for immigrants to integrate in countries like America, frankly, is”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's generally the case that a lot of times, and I think this is true across ethnic and religious lines, is that a lot of times second, third generation people do integrate a lot more with the mainstream culture, in part because they have strong incentives to do that, like if they want a wider friend network, if they want to succeed in the professional sphere, the schools that they're going to, and so on and so forth, all of these, there are all sorts of pressures and incentives that incline people to And on top of that, you know, frankly, it's often the case that, you know, people come to different countries for a reason because there is often something that was very unsatisfying about the milieu that they were living in that was unsustainable or intolerable. And so they come to other countries in search of a different life. And this is also a thing that helps push people towards actually pursuing that different life rather than trying to simply”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No matter where the migrants are coming from, if you have large numbers of people that are entering a different society and culture, especially if they're clustering in particular places and kind of forming ethnic enclaves and stuff, there will be tensions between the long-standing population and the new arrivals. I mean, we're seeing this right now in Springfield and Haiti being fanned on by the current Republican presidential nominees. But even before JD Vance and Donald Trump started talking about this and making it a national issue, there were tensions within Springfield between the Haitians and the longstanding and people in Haiti, not Muslim. That's a thing that you would expect.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Late 19th, earliest, early 20th century, especially to the broad global economic order in seeing the development of capitalism, seeing kind of colonial expansion, and also the discovery of things like transformed. When you think about Saudi Arabia, like Wahhabism was a kind of was an offshoot that was prominent among a small sect of a very poor society, a poor pretty remote society in Saudi Arabia and the discovery of things like oil and the transformation of Saudi Arabia from a rural poor place into a rich petro-state that's tied to this kind of a store Salafist understanding of religion was a very geopolitically consequential development and completely transformed in a very profound way that are not fully appreciated, I think, in a lot of these conversations.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think he's absolutely right about that. I alluded to that, I guess, briefly earlier in the conversation where I said a lot of the narratives and assumptions people make when they perceive the differences between Islam and the West today are actually of much more recent historical vintage than a lot of people might assume or take for granted. And in fact, prior to that period, there was a lot of rich interplay between, there were tensions between Muslim and Christian societies, you know, going back centuries. But there was also a lot of rich, very rich cultural transmission, interplay, and so on and so forth as well. There are these kinds of shifts starting in the...”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Greco-Roman culture and even before, and in a lot of other contexts, like math other than traders, math wasn't used for practical purposes so much. And in fact, a lot of people pooped the idea of using trying to Baroni was actually really important in part. A lot of his work on comparing chronologies across time, I mean, across cultures and across geographic locations and things like this, was really pioneering in integrating mathematics into the social sciences in a way that wasn't commonly done before. And so he's also really important.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reinforced in the Quran itself, which is another thing that I think a lot of Muslims don't fully appreciate, is that the argument Al-Farabi's argument is that religions are divinely inspired but socially constructed and they kind of have this origin in kind of deep universal truths, but they also are products of particular times and places that importantly shape how people understand and pursue and kind of relate to those truths in ways that can be, in some cases, even distorting and limiting. And he didn't exclude his own society and culture or his own religious faith tradition from this point as he was making. Really important for integrating mathematics into social science because prior to like,”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advanced what I think is one of the first robust social construction theories of religion. And so he tells this really kind of rich story to explain why it is that religions have so much commonality, but also why they're importantly different. And the story he tells, like he's pretty militant in his work or pretty committed in his work to not basing it on scripture to make arguments from reason and from kind of looking at the making observations of the world around him. But the story he ends up telling, the kind of social construction narrative he ends up telling about religion is actually very robustly”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That paper I mentioned, it's called People of the Book, Social Science and the Islamic Commonwealth period. And it focuses, that one focuses on four people, Al-Farabi, Ibn Khaldun, and al-Razi, and someone else whose name is not coming to me right now. But all to say, I actually think I like Al-Farabi's work a lot, among other things. One of the contributions I think that's really important of his and is underappreciated is he's one of the social scientists, he might have been the first person to really come forward with a Alberuni was the other one, which is wild for me to forget him because he's actually really important. Okay, but Al-Farabi actually is important because”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On itself is full over and over and over again. It stresses this point actually, the Torah, well, actually the Talmud writ large, yeah, the Torah, the Gospels, I actually do recognize those as of equal footing. I don't view them as in any way being inferior to the Quran. I just, I would say that my background in Catholicism in some ways enriched my understanding of the Quran. I mean, it's a very rich text for people who have familiarity with the Bible, which I think is actually kind of regrettable and unfortunate that more Muslims are less familiar with Judaism and Christianity than, to my mind, they would be ideal. But yeah, so I'm not a Muslim supremacist in that way.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was an atheist for a while, but then I had this problem where I kind of rationally convinced myself that religion was garbage. And there was no God. But I couldn't make myself feel it. And so this left me in a dilemma where it's like, well, I could just say I'm spiritual, but not religious, or I could say that was kind of intellectually unsatisfying to me and spiritually unsatisfying. Or I could just deny these feelings that I had, but that's terrible because then you're like a bad faith atheist and that's really weird. So I started asking myself basically. And so I started looking into other faith traditions. And at some point in this journey, I started reading the Quran and I came to the conclusion that it was a prophetic work. And so I was like, well, if I think Muhammad is a prophet and I do believe in God, then maybe I'm a Muslim. And so I looked into it more and eventually took the plunge. But while I do think the Quran is prophetic work, I actually don't think, and actually the Quran,”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gradually came to be alienated from religion writ large and became a somewhat militant atheist for a little bit. But that's what started me down the path, basically, is I came to conclude from my study of the scriptures that Jesus probably didn't understand himself to be God and that as a consequence the kind of religious tradition that I had been part of that goes back millennia and the kind of rituals that we participated in that people had been doing around the world for all of this time.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Catholicism didn't go that route. And the philosopher Quine had this theory of kind of way of talking about our beliefs. He described them as a web of these kind of interconnected beliefs where some of them are kind of more central and where if you kind of tear them out of the thing, they don't just go by themselves. They pull a lot of other stuff with them. And in the case of as a Catholic, if you reject the idea that Jesus is God, if you reject the idea of a trinity of one God and three persons, then that changes a lot. It changes the meaning of sacraments like communion. It changes the meaning of just so much. And so there wasn't really a way to reconcile Catholicism with the beliefs I came to hold about Jesus and what his message was and what his intent was. And as I left Catholicism, as I became kind of alienated from Catholicism,”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there, that's funny. This isn't a thing I've actually talked about yet. The core problem that I ended up having. Is that based on my reading of the scriptures, I came to believe that Jesus was not God and did not understand himself to be God and wasn't arguing that he was God made flesh. Even some of the words he used to refer to himself, like he constantly referred to himself as the Son of Man. Well, in the Torah, Ezekiel is repeatedly referred to as Son of Man, not to indicate that he's God incarnate, but precisely to remind him that he is not, that he is the Son of Man. And so Jesus adopting that term for himself, constantly referring to himself in that way, and so on. So in this and in many other ways, as I was reading the scriptures, I came to believe that Jesus wasn't God. And in principle, that's not a way that doesn't rule out Christianity in the early church. There were a lot of Christians who didn't believe that Jesus was God, who just viewed him as a prophet.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know he's actually, there's a great book that just came out. I think it's Mustafa Aikol who wrote it called The Muslim Moses. Yeah, about, you know, how across faith traditions actually, like Moses is a figure of great importance across Islam, Christianity, and Judaism as the central figure who helped bring the law and kind of guide believers into the down the right path. It's funny. So my name is Moses. My son, I named him Ezra, you know, because Moses was kind of the bringer of the law, Ezra was a restorer of the law or whatever. So there's this kind of interesting. I do agree that there is this kind of universalistic orientation even in my name.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While I'm kind of more culturally aligned with black Muslims in America just because again there's a more common set of history and culture in all of this, I subscribe to a more kind of universalistic view of what we should be striving to do as Muslims to engage with people across faith traditions, across ethnic traditions and so on and so forth. I mean across ethnic lines and so on. Having a kind of parochial Inward looking view at black people as somehow distinct from everyone's.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a Muslim who happens to be black rather than a black Muslim. But the reason I answered the question the way that I did in the first case is just because there's a deep sense in which, I mean, because I've been black my whole life, but I've been Muslim for a much shorter period of time, about 15 years now, I think. And so I guess of the two identities, one of them has a longer standing association, which is probably why I answered the question I did. But now that I understand what you were, well, kind of what you are getting at a little bit better from the follow-up questions, I guess I would understand myself more of as a Muslim who happens to be black in the sense that there is this kind of longstanding”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, most black Muslims in America are Sunni. I guess one of the things that's different, I mean, the difference is just more cultural, right? So again, for most other kind of Muslim communities in America, they're kind of interesting mishmashes of, in fact, a lot of them are actually more specialized. So there are a lot of mosques in America where most of the people who attend them are, for instance, Indonesian or where most of the people who attend them are from Pakistan or India or where most of, you know, and so there are there is this kind of interesting ethnic sorting. It's not, and it's actually kind of unfortunate to my mind, kind of at odds with the universalistic message of Islam. But you see the same thing in Christian churches in the United States too, right? You have black churches, you have white churches, you have churches with specific subsets of white people, other churches with different, you know, so it goes. I think actually if I'm revisiting the initial question, I would sort myself.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made it such that there's not really a black Muslim political force in a politically mobilized activist base of black Islam and the way that there was in the 60s and 70s, but there do continue to be a lot of black Muslims. It's just that they're not tied to this kind of weird political structure. That was the case as they were in the 60s and 70s.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it's dwindling in the sense that some of the leaders associated with that movement have been discredited. So even Malcolm X himself, who was one of the key spokespeople for the kind of political oriented arm of black Muslim culture grew alienated from people like Louis Farrakhan over the course of his life and came to see people like Farrakhan as corrupt, as preaching this kind of gospel, this kind of anti-white gospel that's out of step with Islam as he came to understand it when he went on Haish and stuff. He came back from the Middle East with a completely different, more universalistic oriented approach to Islam and began to kind of go to war with Farrakhan and others. And then he was killed. So I think things like the assassination of Malcolm X and the gradual discrediting of people like Louis Farrakhan have”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“heritage more indigenous, more uniquely American heritage of Islam in the black community among American descendants of slaves, black community. Yeah, and so I think that's interesting.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that seems right. You know, there's this kind of interesting indigenous culture. So one thing that's interesting, if you look at Islam in America or you look at a lot of mosques and kind of Muslim communities in America or kind of geared around immigrants and the immigrant experience because a huge share of the Muslim portion in the United States are first, second, sometimes third generation immigrants, but people who haven't been in the families that haven't been in the United States for as long as for generations to generations as well. But there is this kind of an exception to that general pattern is that there is a, although Muslims have been in the United States since the being, I mean the founders were writing about Islam and Muslims. In fact, using Muslims as kind of a limit case for tolerance, like we should be able to even tolerate those people, but there is something interesting about there's this kind of longer indigenous”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or directly that again that are common in my field that seem to argue that there's some subset of people who have especially acute understandings of the social world rather than the point that I made and that I think you also make, which is that we all have actually partially insinuated knowledge and by kind of cramming our stuff together, we get a really we get a much more complete comprehensive nuanced understanding of the world. That seems true to me. I don't think it's true though that like, you know, Muslims or people who are mixed race in the case of or other, depending on what these narratives are, have some kind of like special insight.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, well, and so here's the thing as I think it's actually true. I think it's actually true that people with different kinds of life experiences and backgrounds and values and commitments do perceive and reason about the world in sometimes a non-trivially different ways. And this is why I've long been affiliated with an organization called Heteronox Academy that one seeks to kind of research on that point and I've done some research on that point myself. But then also tries to encourage institutions to fold in a wider and engage with a wider range of thought and perspectives and stakeholders and stuff like this. I actually do think there's truth to that broad point that you and I probably do perceive and reason about the world in different ways and no small part because we have very different life experiences, very different commitments, social ties, social networks and all of that. That seems perfectly plausible to me. I just have an aversion to narratives that implicitly or not”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Social theorists make an argument about how it might be that some particular set of society might have unique insight over society compared to most other Americans. And it just tends to always be the specific slice of society that the theorists themselves belongs to. And so it ends up being a story about like, why am I smarter than everyone else? Why can I see things that everyone else?”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I'm a convert to Islam, though, so I was raised in the United States by non-Muslim parents in a military town, in a military community, and I came to Islam later, although my wife is Lebanese and she grew up most of her life in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon and other places like that, although she did spend non-trivial share of her childhood in the States as well. Cultural disconnect from a lot of other. But I'll say there's this tendency in the social sciences, especially in my field, which I don't love where you'll see.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Period. One of the big arguments that I make in that paper is that a lot of the ways that we understand a lot of the associations that people have today about Islamic culture and how it's different from the West and why it's different from the West, a lot of these trends are actually, some of them have kind of deep longstanding historical roots, but some of them are actually more of more contemporary vintage.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was actually not Protestantism. It was the Catholic Church's kind of marriage and family program that forbid things like cousin marriage and add all of these other kind of forbid polygyny and concubines and all this and had all these kind of other downstream effects. And he shows that actually places that the Catholic Church had kind of stronger and more pronounced rule over are actually more characteristically weird. And so I think that that story that Henrich tells sits at an interesting angle with what I just said about Protestantism. But I think both are actually true. I'm just not sure how to exactly reconcile them. Okay. Either way, the point is most Islamic societies, and actually not just Islamic societies, but even societies like China and so on have importantly different kind of cultural, historical heritages, maybe not as different as I wrote a piece for a sociology journal Socius about social science during the Islamic Commonwealth.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So again, I do think at least part of the story is that there is this relationship historically, culturally, and so on between what you might call weird culture and wokeness and also Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and wokeness. I do think there is kind of this interesting set of relationships. And they're actually kind of... That's a really interesting thing to say because actually part of Joe Henrik's argument in the weirdest people of the world is that what helped push for these kind of unique ways of thinking about society in the world.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's an interesting historical relationship, and it's also, there's this kind of really interesting and profound, I think, relationship between the social gospel of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the United States and the UK and so on. And a lot of what we understand to be lokeness today.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, London. You do actually see some of those elements around gender and sexuality and stuff playing out in these movements. One thing that's different is the justification is sometimes less, sometimes it's like purely pretty secular people who are participating in it as well. Because in a lot of societies and cultures, not just in the United States, symbolic capitalists are often kind of less oriented towards especially traditional forms of religion. And actually, this is one thing that I think is interesting. And I think this goes to the heart of what you were asking about in some way there is this interesting relationship between wokeness and kind of Protestantism. Of course.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would things play out in a Muslim society specifically, and how would it maybe be different? I suspect, and actually I don't need to suspect, it is just the case that in a lot of Muslim societies, like say if you look at Turkey, they had a number of protests related to the Erdogan government and some perceived kind of oppressive or kind of power grabbing moves by Erdogan and his coalition that were unrelated to the great awakening they were about. This guy is doing this thing right now, right? And we think it's bad. But it is the case when you look at some of the protest movements that have happened in places like Istanbul that are more connected to the kind of globalish protest movements that you see in America, even in those contexts, things like pushing for feminism or gay rights, while much riskier and more controversial in a place like Istanbul than in”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of parallel movements worldwide in a lot of symbolic calculus spaces among symbolic capitalists in a lot of international contexts. So for instance, the Black Lives Matter movement had, if you go to symbolic hubs around the world, including places like Seoul, South Korea, where there's not really a meaningful percentage of black people in South Korea, but they have Black Lives Matter protests. And the same thing with Occupy Wall Street protests or Me Too or the March for Science. They play it out in a lot of these very heterogeneous international contexts, but mostly, but in all cases, almost exclusively among symbolic capitalists and in symbolic economy hubs. And so it seems like there are this set of kind of commonalities in terms of our politics, in terms of our interests, in terms of our social position, other things like that that do seem to drive kind of similar things, not identical. Okay, so how”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, one of the things that's interesting is when you, I didn't get a chance to talk about this too much in the book because, you know, space, you can't talk about everything. But one thing that is interesting is that when you look at internationally, there do seem to have been”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Select for this unusual kind of slice of society to begin with. And then how that relates to the views we hold, I think, is a really interesting question. And I'm not completely sold on an answer yet.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do talk about a little bit in the book is that the symbolic professions in virtue of gatekeeping who becomes part of them by college degrees and as a result of other factors, the socioeconomic, the kind of communities symbolic capitalists tend to grow up in, et cetera, et cetera. It is the case that the people who get folded into the symbolic professions tend to think about the social world at all times, even when we're not in periods of awakening. They tend to have very idiosyncratic kind of psychological profiles and modes of engagement in politics that are very different than most people. We tend to be more ideological in general. We tend to be more kind of extreme or more likely to hold extreme political views. In some ways, we're more dogmatic, more conformist, we're very conscientious on the positive side. We tend to be more cognitively sophisticated and so on. So the professions themselves.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A sense in which sometimes people internalizing these progressive commitments and really wanting to be a good ally and wondering if they're a good ally and wondering if the people that they're trying to ally with perceive them to be a good ally and stuff like that. So it could be that the progressive ideology itself kind of exacerbates neuroticism or it could be that These kinds of ideologies are more attractive to you compared to ideologies where you wouldn't worry about what is this other person. So I don't, you know, I think the relationship there is unclear. It's interesting. Is it a common driver's thing? But one thing I will say.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They shift a lot, they do things like competence downshifting, which is like when white conservatives talk to minorities, they talk about them and you ask them, like, what's your job? What do you do? They answer those kinds of questions the same, whether they're talking to a black person or a white person for progressives and liberals, when they're talking to a white person, they'll give a more sophisticated answer about what it is they do, but then when they're talking to a black person, you know, even when you kind of control class marchers and stuff, they downshift. They talk in simpler language in a way that's kind of patronizing. And you see this in a range of studies that white liberals tend to be more conscious of race and therefore change in a more dramatic way how they engage with non-whites versus whites. And so this kind of rumination, like, oh, am I possibly offending someone? Am I saying the right thing? What is this person thinking of me? Do they think I'm racist? Do they think I'm a good ally? So there is probably...”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I wrote this article for American Affairs that's called something like How to Understand the Subjective Well-being Gap between liberals and conservatives or something like this. There is a lot of research going back decades and across societies and cultures that seems to suggest that a lot of forms of neuroticism and also things like depression and anxiety and other things like this do seem to be more pronounced among people who self-identify with left ideology. The question is, is there some kind of similar factors that kind of drive people towards that kind of predisposed people towards neuroticism and also predispose them towards leftism? Or is there some way in which progressive ideology might feed into neuroticism, for instance? So in a lot of social justice-oriented spaces, there's research that white people, when they engage with minorities, white progressives, when they engage with my...”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's kind of a random walk. That depends a little bit on, so when we look at the last period of awakening in the late 80s and early 90s, that was the last time we had these struggles over what they called political correctness then, or PC culture, which we call wokeness today. As I argue in the book, it didn't last as long that awakening. It was shorter than most of the others, actually, shorter than the one in the 60s, shorter than the one after 2010. It was a little shorter. And it also wasn't as quite as dramatic. So I think there are these kind of contextual factors that significantly inform kind of how severe it is or how long it lasts, how long it's able to sustain itself or how long it is until the frustrated elites get enough of them get satisfied that they disengage. My guess is that it's more of a random walk, but I'm open to persuasion.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a lot more women, there are a lot more non white people in these professions than there were in the past, and so on and so forth. So all of those factors you describe, I think they actually do matter, especially for understanding. The ways in which this period of awakening might differ from previous episodes, but I don't think they explain Why awoken has happened at”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Episodes like this one in the 1920s through the early 30s, one in the mid 1960s through the late 70s, and then one in the late 80s through early 90s. In all cases where we didn't have social media, where the structure of media enterprises was importantly different than it is today before you had Gen Z kids these days with their idiosyncratic attitudes or before a lot of these professions were as feminized as they were today. So I think all of those factors you said actually do matter and they actually matter in the sense because each of these episodes in common like an insane amount and when you read the book and I walk through some of these like I think a lot of readers will be troubled maybe by how similar these episodes are but they're also importantly different they don't play out identically they are importantly different the role that symbolic capitalists occupy in society changed immensely over the last century the constitution of these fields has changed immensely well”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so for one, I do think that some of the factors that you identified are important for contextualizing the current moment. So for instance, a lot of the symbolic professions, like law and consulting academia journalism, they are being feminized. I do talk a bit in the book about how this matters for understanding the dynamics in a lot of these institutions, not just over the last 10 years, but over the last several decades, in part because women and men tend to engage in very different forms of kind of status seeking and competition and things like that. So that does matter. Things like social media obviously do change the way interactions play out, but you can see actually that things like social media or changes in the media landscape after 2010, one limitation for using those kinds of explanations to explain the current moment is that it becomes hard then to understand how or why it was the case that there were three previous”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“about a lot of social problems in ways that are very different from other people, we tend to go about politics in a different way than other people. And this alienates people. And so you start seeing these kinds of internal tensions develop within social movements. And this is also one of the reasons why they just can't sustain themselves is because the coalition itself is kind of unstable in a deep way. And this is one of the reasons why awokenings typically don't result in revolutions is if they go on beyond a certain period of time, they have a hard time retaining their coherence.”
2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source