Between Justice and Reality

“Trying to hold justice and reality in a single vision.”

— Richard Rorty

I first underlined that sentence on a winter night in Cambridge, sitting alone at a long wooden table in the university library, my coat still on because the building never quite seemed warm enough. Outside, the stone courtyards were quiet. Inside, everything felt hushed and permanent—as if the walls themselves had decided long ago what mattered and what didn’t.

I was twenty-four years old and trying, in earnest, to figure out how a person was supposed to live.

On the desk in front of me were two books I had been carrying around for weeks. One was by Richard Rorty, full of arguments about contingency and humility, about the idea that none of us ever stands on final ground. The other was by Alasdair MacIntyre, insisting, in his stern and insistent way, that without shared traditions and moral practices, words like justice and virtue eventually lose their meaning.

Between them sat my notebook, already thick with underlining, marginalia, and half-finished thoughts. I had come to Cambridge to study political philosophy, but I was slowly realizing that I was not really searching for arguments. I was searching for permission—permission to believe that my life, fractured across countries, families, and institutions, could still cohere into something honorable.

I had learned early that nothing was guaranteed.

My parents left when I was young, returning to Ethiopia while I stayed behind in Seattle with my brothers. We learned how to be adaptable before we learned how to be secure. We learned how to read rooms, adjust expectations, and survive. We learned that stability was something other people inherited.

“We learned that stability was something other people inherited.”

The older I get, the more I understand how fortunate I was to grow up in Seattle. I used to think of it chiefly as the place where my brothers and I learned to adapt, where I made a life out of circumstances I had not chosen. Now I can see how much of the person I became was shaped not only by what happened to us, but by the people among whom it happened.

There was a quality to many of the Seattleites who came into my life that I have struggled to name. Some were people of extraordinary accomplishment. They were serious about their work and remarkably unceremonious about themselves. They did not always seem interested in where you came from or what standing you had already acquired. They wanted to know what you were trying to do. They could take a young person seriously without asking him first to prove that he deserved their attention.

I cannot separate my optimism about what is possible from having grown up among people like that. Their generosity was not only material. It was a way of looking at another person, of making room for what had not yet come into being. I was the beneficiary of it long before I understood what a gift it was.

As I grow older, my gratitude for Seattle has become something closer to a sense of responsibility. I feel, in ways I am still learning to explain, that the city raised me and then asked me to make myself available beyond it—to take what I had been given and do as much good with it as I could. I do not mean that Seattle placed some grand destiny upon me. I mean that when people have made room for your life to become more than you could have imagined, you begin to ask what you owe in return.

By the time I arrived at Cambridge, and later Yale, the flexibility I had learned as a child had become a skill. I knew how to move between worlds. I knew how to sound confident in spaces that had never been built for people like me. I knew how to succeed inside institutions whose histories did not include my family.

What I did not know was where, exactly, I belonged.

Rorty’s writing felt like home at first. He wrote as if certainty itself were a kind of arrogance. He argued that moral progress did not come from discovering eternal truths, but from telling better stories—stories that expanded our capacity to care about one another. He believed that solidarity mattered more than metaphysics, that humility was more important than purity.

For someone who had grown up improvising his way through American life, this made intuitive sense. My own story had been shaped by contingency. Borders shifted. Families fractured. Opportunities appeared and disappeared. I had learned that survival depended less on rigid principles than on responsiveness and resilience.

But as I grew older, contingency came to mean something more to me than the uncertainty I had endured. It also described my good fortune. I had not chosen Seattle or the people who came into my life there. I could not claim their generosity as an achievement of my own. So much of what I had come to believe about the world—especially my optimism about what a person might make of it—depended on circumstances I had been lucky enough to inherit.

And then there was that sentence: Trying to hold justice and reality in a single vision.

Justice and reality. Not justice instead of reality. Not reality as an excuse to abandon justice. Both. Together. It felt less like a philosophical claim than a description of the life I was already living. Justice without realism felt dishonest. Realism without justice felt unbearable.

“Justice without realism felt dishonest. Realism without justice felt unbearable.”

MacIntyre unsettled me in a different way. Where Rorty emphasized contingency, MacIntyre emphasized continuity. Where Rorty urged flexibility, MacIntyre demanded fidelity. He argued that virtues were not abstract ideals but habits cultivated within communities, practices sustained over generations. Reading him, I felt exposed.

I had spent years learning how to move. He was asking me whether I knew how to stay.

I began to understand that I was not being asked to choose between these thinkers. I was being asked to live between them.

“I had spent years learning how to move. He was asking me whether I knew how to stay.”

Long before Cincinnati, I had begun to feel that tension in Seattle itself. When I was still in college, I founded and ran a small nonprofit called the Dream Project. I was young, and the work was still fragile, but people took it seriously. They listened to what we were trying to do, asked questions, offered help, and made room for an undertaking whose future none of us could guarantee.

I had grown up believing that possibility deserved attention. Through the Dream Project, I began to understand that believing in possibility also meant accepting responsibility for what happened after someone said yes. The generosity I had received was not simply permission to dream. It was a reason to make the effort worthy of the faith others had placed in it.

There were fluorescent-lit classrooms in aging buildings. Community meetings after second shifts. Conversations that ended in exhaustion.

This was where theory gave way to consequence. Some days, the work felt meaningful. Other days, it felt like a story I told myself to justify staying. Ambition faded quickly in the face of responsibility. Ideals learned to negotiate with budgets. Vision learned to compromise with schedules. Justice learned to contend with fatigue.

In the Midwest, many of the funders I encountered understood their responsibility in terms of stewardship. They gave carefully. They wanted to know whether a promising effort could endure, who would carry it forward, and what would remain when its early enthusiasm had passed.

At first, those questions could feel like limits on what might be attempted. Over time, I came to understand the care within them. People would have to live with the consequences of what we built. They deserved more than the excitement of a new idea.

In Seattle, people asked, “What could this become?”

In Cincinnati, people asked, “Will this last?”

“In Seattle, people asked, ‘What could this become?’ In Cincinnati, people asked, ‘Will this last?’”

Neither was wrong. They were answering different moral questions. One privileged imagination. The other honored inheritance. I was trying to learn how to live between them.

Building something durable required repetition, patience, and invisibility. Change accumulated quietly. This was where MacIntyre finally made sense. Virtue was showing up when it would have been easier to leave.

And yet, Rorty remained with me. Because the world was messy. People disappointed one another. Programs failed. The circumstances in which we worked could change, and no amount of fidelity could make an undertaking immune to uncertainty. We still needed the humility to reconsider what we believed and the imagination to see what might become possible next.

Holding justice and reality in a single vision meant learning to live inside that mess without surrendering to it. It meant refusing both cynicism and naïveté. I began to understand that my life was not going to be an argument. It was going to be a practice.

Over time, I began to see that this tension was not just mine. It ran through the country itself. In some places, imagination was prized. In others, stewardship was sacred. For years, I thought I had to choose. Eventually, I realized that was the wrong question. The strength of this country has never been its ability to resolve this tension. It has been its ability to hold it.

“The strength of this country has never been its ability to resolve this tension. It has been its ability to hold it.”

We need places that gamble on possibility. We need places that safeguard continuity. Justice without imagination becomes brittle. Tradition without openness becomes brittle. The work of a democracy is learning how to keep both alive. Those are not contradictions. They are the bonds of our union.

They are what allow a nation of migrants and heirs, dreamers and stewards, to become something like a shared home.

For much of my life, I thought I was trying to solve this tension. Now I understand that I am trying to steward it. I am still learning how to live between contingency and commitment. But I no longer believe that space is a compromise. I believe it is a calling.