ニューイングランドの母校から講演の報告

Journalist E.J. Dionne Addresses Political Strains in the U.S.
November 16, 2017

E.J. Dionne is a visiting professor at HDS for 2017-18. / Photo: Gordon Hardy
In a nation clearly so divided as the United States these days—politically, socially, culturally—how do we fight for our beliefs at an urgent moment without ostracizing those who old other views?
That’s the question distinguished journalist and author E.J. Dionne took on in his recent Horace De Y. Lentz Lecture, "Fighting for Justice with an Open Heart: Conviction, Empathy, and the Niebuhrian Imperative."
Dionne, the William H. Bloomberg Visiting Professor at HDS and the Harvard Kennedy School, is spending the academic year at Harvard teaching, speaking, and pursuing “my own lifelong fascination with the relationship between religion and politics.” Drawing on lessons from theologian Reinhold Neibuhr, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, Dionne urged the collected crowd in Andover Hall to fight for justice while cultivating genuine understanding and sympathy for those on the other side of the political spectrum.
“One way to pose the question,” Dionne said, “is to say: How can we can call out evil, injustice and danger without assuming that all of those with whom we disagree are themselves inherently evil or dangerous?” The answer, he suggested, was to show “faith in the power of conversion—of ourselves as well as of others ... Conversion also entails attentive listening to those with whom we disagree and empathetic understanding of the situations in which our interlocutors find themselves.”

Dionne asked: “How we can be righteous without being self-righteous? Reinhold Niebuhr put the challenge this way. ‘The final enigma of history,’ he wrote, ‘is therefore not how the righteous will gain victory over the unrighteous, but how the evil in every good and the unrighteous in the righteous can be overcome.’ ”

He called on Americans across the political spectrum to inquire about their own motives and not just the motives of others. “We need to ask if, in serving what we see as our values, we might, in fact, merely be serving our own interests. And even if we are persuaded that we are in fact serving the good, we still need to remember that even the best of us always operate from complicated motives.”

Dionne also urged close attention to the public witness of Martin Luther King Jr., who believed in nonviolence and conversion but insisted that, in the struggle for justice, militancy was essential. And he cited the work of the theologian and law professor Cathleen Kaveny, who has called for “prophecy without contempt.”

Quoting “One of my favorite Niebuhrisms,” Dionne said: “ ‘We must always seek the truth in our opponent’s error and the error in our own truth.’ ”

“This is the Niebuhrian Imperative,” he concluded: “To understand the obligation to act in the world forcefully and without hesitation while always being mindful of our own imperfections and our will to power. Niebuhr’s famous description of the purpose of politics reflects these twin duties: ‘To establish justice in a sinful world is the whole sad duty of the political order.’ ”
E.J. Dionne is a distinguished journalist and author, political commentator, and longtime op-ed columnist for The Washington Post. He is also a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a government professor at Georgetown University, and a frequent commentator on politics for National Public Radio, ABC’s “This Week,” and MSNBC. His most recent book, co-authored with Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, is One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported.
—by Gordon Hardy