Many times over the years I’ve expressed frustration with the field’s emphasis on language while it’s not clear to me that a whole lot of progress has been made in access to recovery-oriented care of adequate quality, intensity, and duration. (See here, here, here, here, and here.)
I just finished the book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi, which spoke to the broader cultural emphasis on language.
The book is about the class of people he calls symbolic capitalists (AKA the Professional Managerial Class, the New Class, the Creative Class, etc.) who “make a living primarily based on what they know, who they know, and how they’re known. Symbolic capitalists are professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction (as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to physical goods and services).” “Their work involves the production and manipulation of information, rhetoric, social perceptions and relations, organizational structures and relations, traditions and innovations, and so on. Those who work in fields like education, science and technology, finance and accounting, arts and entertainment, media, law, consulting, administration or public policy are typically symbolic capitalists.” (source)
Over time, as the internal constitution and macrosocial position of the symbolic professions continued to evolve, a unique moral culture took hold among symbolic capitalists and the institutions we dominate. Rather than merely championing the interests of the poor, vulnerable, and oppressed in society, we increasingly claim to literally embody and directly represent the interests of the marginalized and disadvantaged. We regularly count ourselves among them. . . . They do this because, within symbolic capitalists’ dominant moral culture, people who can lay claim to formerly stigmatized identities are perceived to have special moral and epistemic authority, unique cultural cachet, and access to exclusive opportunities and accommodations (intended as reparations for historical wrongs).
. . . Critically, none of this entails that symbolic capitalists are cynical or insincere in their professed commitments to social justice. We tend to be true believers. However, these beliefs are rarely translated into behavioral changes or reallocations of material resources in part because symbolic capitalists tend to hold political priorities, and embrace modes of political engagement, that diverge substantially from those of most other Americans and encourage an idiosyncratic approach to social justice advocacy.
Our lives and livelihoods are oriented around words, numbers, ideas, and other abstractions. As a consequence, we tend to take symbols very seriously. Because we traffic in cultural, political, academic, and totemic capital, we are highly attentive to status differences. We prioritize enhancing others’ symbolic standing over improving their material conditions in part because, for us, the former is genuinely a means to the latter (to a degree that is less true for folks outside the symbolic professions).
al-Gharbi, M. (2024). We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/book.129150.
This post isn’t intended to add to culture war arguments around “wokeness.” Rather, this represents an observational take on the cultural context for the emphasis on language. It puts forth the possibility that this emphasis on language may make functional sense within the culture of symbolic capitalists but may not be as effective outside of that culture.
Recovery Review 