Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination

by Vigen Guroian

If one scratches just beneath the surface of the moral outlook of many Americans, one bumps into the rather naively but also often vehemently held assumption that the individual is the architect of his or her own morality, built out of value “blocks” that the individual independently picks and stacks. We suddenly run into the ghost of Friedrich Nietzsche. There are real and very important differences between what we now call values and the virtues as they were traditionally understood. Let me put it this way. A value is like a smoke ring. Its shape is initially determined by the smoker, but once it is released there is no telling what shapes it will take. One thing is certain, however. Once a smoke ring has left the smoker’s lips it has already begun to evaporate into thin air. Volition and volatility are characteristics of both smoke rings and values. By contrast, a virtue might be compared to a stone, whose nature is permanence. We might throw a stone into a pond, where it will lie at the bottom with other stones. But if at some later date we should want to retrieve that stone from the bottom of the pond, we can be sure that the shape of the stone has not changed and that we will be able to distinguish it from the rest of the stones.