Today’s “Great Awokening” is not the first time the media, academy, and other “symbolic capitalist” professions have adopted a seemingly compassionate ideology as a means to entrench their own status. In his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, Musa al-Gharbi—an assistant professor of communication and journalism at Stony Brook University and a former Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in Sociology at Columbia University—examines the motives and methods of the knowledge economy’s winners as they embrace a self-serving, yet sincere, new moralism. Modern Age’s Gene Callahan recently interviewed Professor al-Gharbi. Below is a lightly edited transcript. —ed.

Gene Callahan: First of all, let me say congratulations on writing such an excellent book.

Musa al-Gharbi: Oh, thank you.

GC: There were a couple of things that perhaps I disagree with you on. But the wealth of material you assembled in defense of your thesis is really impressive. How long did you work on this?

MA: Longer than I had planned to. But that’s because I actually ended up writing two books.

Basically, what I wanted to do in the initial pitch to Princeton was to spend about half of the book looking at “symbolic capitalists” and the social order that we preside over and the ways we legitimize our power grabs.

Then in the second half, I was going to turn the analytic lens from the winners in the knowledge economy towards those who perceive themselves to be the losers. I was going to look at people who are sociologically distant from us, people who are living in small towns or more suburban areas, or people who live in more rural areas, people who do jobs where they’re providing physical goods and services to people.