My interview with Musa al-Gharbi

COWEN: Let me give you another Great Awakening theory, and tell me what’s wrong with it. Not really my opinion, but I hear a lot.

So on the left, there is a long-term investment in teaching at America’s top universities. He produces a lot of soldiers who would be journalists, and most of them are left-leaning. And then in 2011, 2012 – there’s something about social media interactions and, he says, The New York Times and other major outlets, where they suddenly have a huge incentive to have more articles about race, gender, Black Lives Matter, whatever. When those two things come together, an awakening begins based on the background of Christianity and the growth of feminism in society.

By the time you get to something like 2021, enough media is gone that social media is just going crazy. That just gives us a lot more variety of weird views than just waking up — and besides, Elon owns Twitter, so the waking up ends.

What is wrong with that account?

AL-GHARBI: First, I think some of the things you pointed out are important in making the current situation. For example, many symbolic professions, such as law and consulting, academics, journalism – are performed by women. I talk a little bit in the book about how important it is to understand the power in these many institutions. Not just in the last 10 years, but in the last few decades, in part because women and men tend to engage in very different kinds of status-seeking and competition and things like that. So that matters.

Things like social media are obviously changing the way we interact. But you see, in fact, that things like social media or changes in the media after 2010 – one limitation of using those types of explanations to describe the present is that it becomes difficult, then, to understand why the case is . . .

There were three previous episodes like this, one in the 1920s to early 1930s, one in the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, and then another in the late 1980s to early 1990s. In all cases when we didn’t have social media, when the structure of media businesses was very different than today, and before you had Gen Z “kids these days” with their attitudes, or before most of this work existed. as women do today.

I think all of those things that you said really matter, and they’re important in a sense – because each of these episodes, there’s a lot in common, an insane amount. If you read the book and I go through some of these – I think many readers will be bothered, perhaps, how similar these passages are. But also important are different. They don’t play the same. They are very different: The role of symbolic capitalists in society has changed dramatically over the past century. The constitution of these sectors has changed a lot. There are many more women; there are more non-white people in these jobs than before, and so on.

All of those things you described: I think they’re really important, especially in understanding the ways this awakening might be different from previous episodes, but I don’t think they explain why the awakening happened at all.

COWEN: If the “resurrection” is repeated, do you think there is a ratchet effect where it comes back bigger and stronger each time, like the destruction of war? Or is it just a random walk? Like, the next wave of awakening in 37 years might be half as strong as the one we just had. What is your model?

AL-GHARBI: I think it is impossible; that depends a bit. . .

What I argue in the book is that – for example, if we look at the last awakening in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was very little – it was the last time we had these struggles with what they call it. political correctness, or PC culture, which we call awakening today. As I argue in the book, it didn’t last long, that woke up. It was shorter than most, actually. Shorter than the ’60s, shorter than the post-2010s. It was a little short, and not that good.

I think that there are these kinds of situations that have a lot to do with how difficult or how long they last, how long they can sustain themselves or how long until special frustrated people get – enough of them to be satisfied that they refuse. My guess is that it’s just a random walk, but I’m open to persuasion.