I’m currently reading Shannon Vallor’s fine book Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (OUP, 2016). I’d like to pick up on a minor theme, one that frequently puzzled me when I’ve been reading certain kinds of academic books. It goes something like this:

The theoretical discussion of the kind of moral education described therein, one that’s centered on the cultivation of the salient virtues, points, at times, to the existence of moral exemplars of moral and intellectual virtue that are to be emulated, particularly when the young moral agent is impressionable and in need of moral habituation. And yet, despite the fact that these moral exemplars, which are built into the model and which might involve stock gestures toward Gautama, Socrates, or Confucius, are necessary, it’s not altogether clear to me where actually existing moral exemplars are in the modern world that we actually occupy. Where are these elders of which you speak?

Around 2012, the speaker and writer Dougald Hine said something revealing: “There are no grownups upstairs.” My experience over the past 13-odd years has borne out his thesis. Modern culture–globalized and functioning largely in accordance with liberal political assumptions about, among others, the centrality of a deracinated autonomy–is most surely not cultivating saints, sages, and otherwise morally and intellectually virtuous persons, at least not in spades. Hence, when a writer too facilely points to the need to “venerate our elders,” the reasonable reply would be: “Who, again? Who are these elders? One of my grandmothers was a hypochondriac and a crank while the other, who lived well into her 90s, loved indulging in all sorts of selfish pleasures.”

The truth is that we are not living in a Wendell Berry novel, one in which intergenerational families care for and look after one another and in which, we might say, “everyday heroism mights everyday decency.” Far from it. Our world hardly resembles Berry’s imagined one.

For this reason, embracing an enterprising view of what’s needed in modernity isn’t just for kicks. It’s a necessity. Because–to stay with my present example–there isn’t a ready supply a moral exemplars, these will have to be selected and cultivated so that others can, in the future, hope to read books on technology and the virtues and readily see that the theoretical discussions are also clear and obvious descriptions of everyday reality.