The Moral Landscape of Stories

Modern education has forgotten that stories are not mere reflections of a society’s morals, but active constructions that challenge readers to interrogate the world around them.

It is, in its simplest sense, the sheer volume of words and the long-proclaimed drama that makes the epic so enduring, but what of the moral infrastructure upon which these stories are propped, each brick of which, though fashioned of steel and fire, tells you precisely how to measure your life, how to look at the world and say—yes, this, this is the truth? You see, the ancient ones did not write tales in order to fill pages, but to fill lives with the shape of their truths. Take, for example, Homer’s Iliad, a monument of martial carnage, yes, but more importantly, a raging river of honor, wrath, and mortality. No mere bloodletting, no cheap theatricality, but a profound inquiry into the central animating force that drives men to war, and drives them to their graves. The Greeks, after all, did not ask what a man did in battle, but why he fought, whether it was out of revenge, duty, or the insatiable hunger for glory—and whether the soul could be redeemed after its embrace with death.

On the opposite shore lies the Odyssey, another tale of voyages, of labyrinthine trials, of wits tested against gods and monsters, but here, too, the words rise above the mundane drama of survival, wrapping themselves into a fable about homecoming, loyalty, and identity—an inquiry as relevant now as it was in antiquity. Odysseus’ return to Ithaca is more than the long-suffered reunion of husband and wife, though it is that too. It is about the need to return to oneself, to resolve the tension between what the world demands and who one knows oneself to be. It is about belonging, the kind of deep existential belonging that transcends family, and becomes, in the grand sweep of epic, a return to the self that is only possible through suffering. A hero is not made by battles fought and monsters slain but by the morality he constructs—brick by brick, action by action—in the face of temptation, loss, and doubt.

Here lies the point at which we should pause, for the world has changed since the days of Homer, and with it, the landscape of our stories. Today, the ancient fire that once smoldered beneath every page has been replaced with a kind of informational sterility, a dead weight of neutrality that leaves no room for questions or inquiry. Stories now, as they are presented in classrooms across the world, are often little more than sanitized artifacts—things to read for “comprehension,” things to dissect for “textual analysis,” things to file away in the creaking archives of our collective knowledge. But where, one wonders, is the moral heat, the driving force that once led the ancient to reflect on their lives? Where is the why, the reason that one must turn the pages, not merely to know what happens next, but to know something about the self, the universe, and what it means to walk through it?

Modern education, in its never-ending quest for objectivity and neutrality, has forgotten—or perhaps it simply never learned—that stories are not mere reflections of a society’s morals, but active constructions that challenge the reader to interrogate the world around them, to test the contours of their character against the tides of fate. The ancient epic was a crucible in which virtue was not taught but forged. It was not enough to know the story of Achilles; one had to understand the nature of wrath—why it was, and whether it could ever be justified. And not only that, but one had to ask, with each line of the Iliad, what it meant to live with such wrath, to allow such passions to swirl and build and finally drown the soul. No one escapes these questions. Not even the gods.

But what of the present moment? What is a “story” in a world that has abandoned the question of meaning in favor of information, of teaching young minds only how to process, analyze, and categorize? It is one thing to know what a plot is; it is quite another to know the deeper emotional and spiritual contours that define it. A great story is not an idle diversion; it is a forge that hammers out the steel of one’s moral sensibilities. How, then, can one teach the young not what to think but how to live? This is the task that remains for those who still believe in the power of narrative. It is not enough to simply present students with stories that tell of adventure, conflict, or heroism; they must be presented with the understanding that these stories are a moral laboratory, a place where choices are made, fates are sealed, and the human soul—testing itself under pressure—emerges either reforged or broken.

A return to this moral landscape, to a place where stories matter not because they entertain or inform but because they offer a rigorous education in how one might live, is the path back to something more profound. It is a return to the classics—not for their ancient grandeur alone, but for their intimate connection to the core of human experience. In them lies the wisdom of the ages: not simply knowledge, but the deep, abiding wisdom of how we, as creatures in a complex world, might best live. This is the challenge. This is the truth. And this is the living question that the ancient stories still ask—one that we would do well to ask again.

Michael S. Rose, a leader in the classical education movement, is author of The Art of Being Human (Angelico), Ugly As Sin and other books. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications including The Wall Street Journal, Epoch Times, New York Newsday, National Review, and The Dallas Morning News.