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PORTSIDE CULTURE

MORAL LIMITS  
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Avram Alpert
March 21, 2025
Dissent Magazine
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_ This book, writes reviewer Alpert, is "a powerful account of our
failures to stop the war in Gaza, despite the professed worth we place
on values like empathy. _

,

 

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Omar El Akkad
Knopf
ISBN: 9780593804148

What is the point of our moral ideals in a world where people can
endlessly express care and concern for others—those living in zones
of everyday poverty or spaces of terror like Gaza and Tigray—but do
nothing in practice?

This question haunts Omar El Akkad’s new book, _One Day, Everyone
Will Have Always Been Against This_, a powerful account of our
failures to stop the war in Gaza. What makes El Akkad’s book
especially striking is the doubts he comes to harbor about his own
profession, writing, and how it shapes our moral convictions. When
Kamala Harris can stand at the Democratic National Convention one
night and say she wants to end the war and then send bombs to continue
it the next morning, is there any logic left to making moral
arguments? In El Akkad’s painful refrain: “What is this work we
do? What are we good for?”

El Akkad takes us up to the point of utter resignation before
ultimately reasserting the value of this work. The journey itself, the
willingness to tarry with this nihilistic possibility, is what gives
this book its strength. He does not leave us in hell but insists that
we recognize we are already in one.

For many of us outside the halls of power, writing remains one of the
most visible means of fighting back. Even as El Akkad doubts its
utility, he still writes a book that he hopes might eventually change
how people treat one another—both morally and materially. He scrapes
language, stories, and every element of his imagination to find some
way of writing and speaking that might finally push the powerful from
vague invocation to concrete action. His book is urgent as much for
its potential success as for its insistence that we grapple with the
painful limitations of the world of ideas and values to which many of
us have dedicated our lives.

 

El Akkad is not the first person to wrestle with the relation between
writing and effective moral change. As far back as Aristotle,
philosophers have wondered if the written word could meaningfully
shift how people felt and acted. Aristotle himself suggested that
tragic plays could help us empathize with other time periods, but our
empathy, or pity, would always stop at those who resemble us in
“age, character, habits, position, or family.”

El Akkad’s family fled Egypt for Qatar when he was a child and then
moved to Canada when he was a teenager. In the book, he describes his
excitement at finally moving to a place where Aristotle’s limitation
seemed to have been transcended. In his youthful vision, Canada, and
the West more broadly, had created a world order in which the ultimate
mission was not only the safety and security of its own citizens, but
the well-being of all humans—even if the global society of nations
had not yet succeeded in that aim.

Particularly dear to El Akkad’s development in the West was the
freedom to read and write. Even as the minor slights of Canadian youth
grated on him—like mispronouncing his name or asking him if everyone
went around by camel where he was from—the promise of the written
word elevated him. The first time he took a book out from the library,
it was William S. Burroughs’s _Naked Lunch_, on the recommendation
of an overly confident college student at a party. More than the book
itself, what appealed to his teenage self was the mere fact that he
could ask the librarian where to find it and they didn’t even bat an
eye. “I remember thinking,” he writes, “if this is all there is,
it’s enough,” because the freedom to read promises a culture
committed to “its own rights and freedoms and principles.” He
chose a career as a journalist and later went on to write two novels:
_American War_ (2017) and _What Strange Paradise_ (2021).

It is perhaps not surprising that literature and the ability to read
literature is fundamental to El Akkad’s story of being enchanted by
the West. According to Lynn Hunt, in her history of the origins of
human rights, novels recreate rich interior lives that help people
learn to empathize with one another. They were the motor behind the
universal moral concern and liberty that El Akkad once associated with
the West.

Moral philosophers like Adam Smith also advocated for this universal
morality through fictive thought experiments. For example, he asked
readers to imagine how they would feel if all of China were to be
suddenly destroyed in an earthquake. They might, Smith says, feel
sorrow for the immense loss, reflect on the tragic nature of human
life, and consider the political and economic fallout. And then they
would, in all likelihood, move on with their day. But imagine instead
losing a little finger, he writes. It would become their consuming
concern. They would think of almost nothing else for days and perhaps
lament their fate for years to come. What was for Aristotle a natural
proclivity becomes for Smith a moral failure. We may care more about
our little finger than all of China, but we are wrong to do so.

The moral is in theory good, but the devil is in the geographical
details. The split in decency that El Akkad witnesses in the present
already existed in the Enlightenment. For while Smith and others
professed that Europeans should extend their concerns to the Chinese,
they didn’t always believe that the Chinese could do this for
Europeans. Europe’s supposed moral advance thus created a
globe-sized problem: expanding morality gave it a civilizing mission.
Although colonization and enslavement were said to be morally wrong
and only temporary, they were also said to be historically justified
and even necessary as part of the path to becoming moral like
Europeans. For everyone to have European morality, Europe must first
violate that very morality through violent colonization.

When the college student first recommends _Naked Lunch_, he does so
because it contains the story of a man being consumed by his own
asshole. El Akkad tells us that the student asked him if he understood
the meaning of the story. He insisted that he did, although he admits
to us that he did not. Left implicit is that he understands the
meaning now: not the sophomoric glee of profanity, but the horrifying
realization that we are living in a world being consumed by assholes.

El Akkad’s own fiction developed out of his growing disillusionment
with the value of liberal ideals—not necessarily in themselves, but
in how they were deployed along such geographic fractures. As a
journalist, he tells us in _One Day_, he saw repeatedly what the
supposedly moral system of the West had created. Day in and day out,
in Canada, in the United States, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Guantánamo, he saw that the West was not in fact attempting to act on
its moral values. To the contrary, it was speaking a language of
morality that had nothing to do with the brutality of how it policed
the world.

It is this that El Akkad finds most galling. Growing up, he learned
that many people come to expect cruelty and indifference from their
governments. But cruelty and indifference packaged in the language of
care are what he cannot stand. And in this loose world where values
are never materialized, “every ideal turns vaporous the moment it
threatens to move beyond the confines of the speeches and
statements.” El Akkad relates that an editor once told him to revise
a speech given by an imperial president in _American War _because it
was too “transparently insincere.” The speech was taken almost
verbatim from one that Barack Obama had given in Cairo.

_American War_ is, among other things, a brilliant allegory of the
local resistance to American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The
novel is set in the 2070s and 2080s, when, after the passage of the
Sustainable Future Act, the United States bans fossil fuels (obviously
far too late—the entire East Coast has already flooded, and the new
capital is Columbus, Ohio). The Southern states rebel again, insisting
on their right to burn petrol, and so begins the second Civil War. The
story is told largely from the point of view of a black woman named
Sarat. As a child, she is made an internally displaced person by the
war and lives an austere life at a refugee camp that is eventually
raided to clear out supposed terrorists. Her mother dies in the raid.
Sarat gets recruited to fight for the South although she is
indifferent to the cause of petrol; it is simply a matter of survival
and revenge.

Through the narrative, El Akkad scrambles the reader’s subjective
identifications. Rather than trying to create a sympathetic character
directly in the context of the War on Terror, a war that many opposed,
he pushes us to consider what we would do for a cause dear to our
hearts. Would we support a war against the South to end petrol usage,
knowing full well the cycles of vengeance and terror that war always
brings with it? His brilliance resides in the relentlessness with
which he tracks our contradictions.

El Akkad’s second novel, _What Strange Paradise_, reveals the
continual dissolution of his belief that nice words devoid of
political efficacy carry meaning. The story follows Amir, a Syrian
refugee child, whose ship crashes ashore on a Greek island. He seems
to be the only survivor. A young girl on the island, the improbably
named Vänna Hermes, finds him and shepherds him to safety. It’s not
a spoiler to say the obvious: that her namesake, Hermes, escorted the
souls of the dead; that the child is already dead; and that what we
read is a fantasy of care, a fantasy of what would happen if we
actually lived our morality.

 

In _One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This_, El Akkad
narrates how the last vestiges of his faith in the West cracked around
Gaza. The book began in October 2023 and took off from the viral tweet
that became its title—a strange future perfect sentence predicting
that people would one day reflect on the devastation in Gaza in the
same way that now everyone was always against apartheid in South
Africa. If there is a reason to write, if there is an extent to which
writing matters materially even when it fails in the moment, perhaps
it is here, in the record of actual resistance and actual cowardice
that it leaves for the future.

From the beginning, this is a book about writing and about
language—their power and their failure. We start in medias res,
almost picking up from where _What Strange Paradise_ left off. A
“fog-colored” girl buried under rubble is the only survivor of an
attack. People are trying to say things to soothe her, or to prepare
her for what  is to come. They use Arabic expressions—_Mashallah_,
_Inti zay el amar_—that El Akkad tells us can’t be translated, not
because the words don’t exist, but because the histories and
emotions behind them cannot resonate for someone who has not grown up
hearing them.

And yet he will try to make us understand. Of the latter
phrase—literally, you are like the moon—he asks us to try to hear
that a man is telling this “girl who lived when so many others died
that she is beautiful beyond the bounds of this world.” There, in
that phrase, in that translation, one hopes that even the most callous
must do more than feel something—that they must rearrange their
lives to stop this from happening.

This is the book’s perpetual two-step. Step one, language fails. It
fails to be translated even within its own terms of sounds and
markings. And so of course it fails in its task to get someone who is
not there with this child to rearrange their lives so as to save her.
El Akkad knows that universal concern is a lie, that novels do not
create globally empathic people, that all treaties and treatises are
crushed under gunpowder and steel. He knows that telling this story,
with all the power of his language, cannot stop the war.

But then, step two, we must still use language to try to end the war.
Language is all that El Akkad, and many of us, have to try to make
these experiences real, to try to make people understand something
that they refuse to understand. He still believes in the dream of a
united world that embodies equality, that engenders people who care
equally for each other no matter where they are from, that is no
longer hemmed in and eviscerated by moral scarcity. He knows that he
has no choice but to push for this world.

So he keeps telling us stories, hoping they might help get us there.
He tells us of his family fleeing Egypt for Qatar, and then Qatar for
Canada. He tells us of his dreams of the West, of free speech and
democracy and liberalism as an embodied way of life where he can
choose how to be, what to say. He tells us that he has no false
consciousness about the cruelties of where he came from, that he knows
it is ruled by autocrats who have no more concern for Palestinians
than the extent to which supporting them subdues domestic rebellions.

Then he tells us about the path he has taken to become disenchanted
with everything his younger self sought and held dear. He learns
quickly that, in his privative phrasing, one finds the “harbor never
as safe as the water is cold.” And he sees that Western liberalism
is not a development of fiction, of narrative’s capacity to expand
our ability to see through the eyes of others. Rather that very idea
is itself a fiction: “the magnanimous, enlightened image of the
self” comes with a “dissonant belief that empathizing with the
plight of the faraway oppressed is compatible with benefitting from
the systems that oppress them.”

El Akkad refers to the belief that our empathy makes us righteous even
as we benefit from an uneven world as a “fortress of language.”
Such fortresses “pen” some lives in a permanent elsewhere, caged
on the other side of morality—“a world in which one privileged
sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for
is to not be consumed.”

For the young El Akkad, it was “enough” for there to be pockets of
liberalism accompanied by a general desire for freedoms to spread
noncoercively. It was the job of morality to care about other people
and the job of governments to put that care into action. But he
learned all too quickly that there was a profound geographic fracture
in our moral vision.

Everyone cares, of course, about the child being bombed. The penury of
being human is that too often what follows is a second moment, a
hideous and repressed moment that we rarely dare to speak aloud, when
people think, “Oh, but if some child has to be bombed for the world
order to continue, I don’t want it to be my child.” The deepest
problem of moral scarcity that El Akkad traces occurs not when one
cares about a limited number of people. It is rather this belief that
life can only be good for some, that one side will always be consumed.

If we don’t confront and overcome this second moment, the goal of
politics is no longer seeking justice, but rather ensuring the right
to consumption—while maintaining the language of justice. “It is
not without reason,” El Akkad writes, “that the most powerful
nations on earth won’t intervene to stop a genocide but will happily
bomb one of the poorest countries on earth to keep a shipping lane
open [the Strait of Hormuz].” Never mind that ships in the strait
would not have been targeted if, instead of bombing Yemen, the United
States stopped sending bombs to Israel. This is the perverted moral
calculus of our age. Some lives must be made good, no matter the cost
to others, no matter the logic or truth of any of it.

 

For El Akkad, in his relentless criticism, the hideous logic of moral
scarcity touches all of us, whether we believe in it or not, because
we are social creatures whose existence is not redeemed by our
beliefs. We are also defined by social forces outside of our control.
He praises those who take a moral stand, but he does not want us to
imagine our innocence because of it. We can make known our desire for
the world to be otherwise, but we can’t dissolve our material
connections to atrocity. The citizens of the West are paying for these
bombs regardless of our desires. So what is the point of our morality,
even our global justice thinking? Hence El Akkad’s repeated
questions: “What is this work we do? What are we good for?”

He retraces his history trying to find an answer. At one point, he
rediscovers Smith’s thought experiment. A snow-laden tree crashes
into his deck, destroying it. Twelve hours earlier, his daughter had
been playing on the deck. He had been reading for months about
fog-colored children being pulled from rubble, but nothing felt as
intensely painful as this near miss. Later he remembers a night he had
to take her to the hospital, and even though she was fine, he had
never been more afraid in his life. He concludes: “I don’t know
how to make a person care for someone other than their own. Some days
I can’t even do it myself.”

Perhaps Aristotle wasn’t entirely wrong—we can’t care for the
whole world, because caring means providing more attention to a few
people than we could possibly give to everyone. But that doesn’t
mean we can live happily with our role in destruction. What we need is
not endless empathy, but simply a world that doesn’t require extra
care for entire populations. A world that provides goodness for
everyone.  A world that permits feeling more afraid when your child
is in the hospital because there are not whole countries of children
being decimated.

This doesn’t mean empathy is entirely compromised in El Akkad’s
view, only that it is not enough. He is not the first to criticize
empathy for lacking the efficacy to shift our politics. He joins
contemporary critics like Isabella Hammad and Aruna D’Souza, and
they have predecessors. Although the feeling of empathy may be as old
as Aristotle, the word itself is relatively new. It first appeared in
English in 1909, as a translation for the German _Einfühlung_,
in-feeling. The verb _einfühlen_—to feel one’s way into—has
existed for centuries, but the idea of a specific capacity for this
feeling process wasn’t given language until about a century ago.

El Akkad does not discuss this history, but it’s interesting to note
that one of empathy’s earliest critics was Martin Buber, the
German-Jewish religious philosopher who was also a Zionist, but a kind
rarely remembered today: a cultural Zionist, critical of
ethnonationalism, anti-imperial, and hopeful that a binational
socialist state could arise in Palestine, supplanting both the British
and the Ottomans and making an egalitarian home for two peoples. For
Buber, empathy was the wrong idea to help realize this ideal. He
argued instead for _Umfassung_, often translated as inclusion or
embrace.

While with empathy one projects oneself into another’s life, embrace
reveals that one is already part of that other life. This may include
already being part of its destruction, which is what El Akkad in _One
Day_ asks us time and again to see. What others need is not our
fellow-feeling, but our acts of redemption, our ability, by whatever
means we can, to make a decent world for everyone. That was once
Buber’s hope for Palestine, and it is El Akkad’s today.

This ethic of entanglement may ultimately have no more practical
efficacy than professed empathy, but it might at least make the
hypocrisy harder to swallow. It’s one thing to say, “Of course I
care about that other child, but there’s nothing I can do.” It’s
quite another to say, “Of course I recognize that I am part of that
child’s murder, but there’s nothing I can do.” We are capable of
a great many hypocrisies, but perhaps such an understanding could
finally crack through.

Until it does, El Akkad suggests that we have no choice but the
two-step: recognize our limitations but continue to push everyone to
confront their entanglement. Even those who are already doing this
must come face to face with the political facts that overwhelm their
moral refusal. We can neither lose sight of paradise nor ignore the
journey through hell. We struggle on with the fragments of political
action that we can muster in this broken world, recognizing our role
in destruction, and knowing full well that we cannot immediately end
the slaughter, that our words and ideals have limited power in the
face of money and munitions.

What is this work we do? What are we good for? In part, we help create
a certain clarity of vision—knowing what is wrong in this world and
how it could be better. A simple place to start: not murdering any
civilian, anywhere. But there is no obvious path to achieving even
that basic moral truth. El Akkad leaves us with an uneasy method,
reminding us that our task is as impossible as it is necessary: “We
hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time
comes, we’ll learn to lay tracks on air.”

AVRAM ALPERT is a lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program and the
co-director of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program. His most
recent book is _The Good-Enough Life_.

* empathy
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* Solidarity
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* Gaza
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* morality
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