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.”

By the time I arrived at Cambridge, and later Yale, that flexibility 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.

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 seen what possibility looked like at its best. When I was still in college, I founded and ran a small nonprofit called the Dream Project. My phone rang one afternoon.

“Hi, this is Ryan from the Gates Foundation,” the voice said. “I work with Bill Gates Sr. He was hoping you might have some time to meet with him. He’d love to learn more about your work.”

When we met, he listened. He asked questions. He treated our fragile project as if it mattered. Weeks later, friends began texting to say he had mentioned our work in a public speech. It was an act of faith. Later, another donor listened to me talk for forty-five minutes and wrote a check for a significant sum of money.

Years later, I asked him why. “I could give it to the university,” he said, “or I could give it to you and see what happened. I thought I’d take the gamble.” In Seattle, that logic was normal. Risk was virtue. Experimentation was responsibility. Failure was part of the story. Money moved toward possibility.

Years later, in Cincinnati, none of these questions felt abstract anymore. 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, money meant something else. Many funders saw themselves as stewards. They favored continuity. They gave carefully. They avoided risk. 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.

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.