Vision, virtue, and vocation via the Placial-Modal Frame

Our generation confronts what appears to be an epochal shift in the world order. That may sound grandiose, but consider the convergent mega-trends facing us over the next several decades: energy and water crises, challenges to constitutional democracy, climate change, potential stagflation, AGI and superintelligence, digital currencies, mass inequality, mass immigration, political and social divisions, new cold wars, confusion around sexual identity, transhumanism, and so on. It seems a dark shadow is advancing over Middle Earth, but there are many reasons to hope, which we’ll explore.

Many volumes of books and scores of commentators have arisen to address our “anxious generation” amid the “fourth turning” so we can be a “non-anxious presence” for our fellow human beings.

A contributing factor to our anxious generation is the fact that for so long we’ve been tossed about by the winds of the news and social media without having strong roots from which we can flourish. Having a clear vision, forming virtue to support that vision, and finding our vocation to fulfill its purpose may propose a way forward.

Think of the following as a way to begin to grow a tree on which we can hang our ideas and experiences. Though it’s an ambitious project, attempting to put language to these ideas may help business leaders like me understand and analyze the soil in which our ideas develop, the trunk of their base assumptions, the branches of their implications, and the fruit they bear over time, all of which can bring about a sense of shalom to those we encounter. What follows is written particularly for those in entrepreneurship and capital stewardship.

Vision

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth for the purpose of human beings cultivating a place fit for God to dwell. That created order and its intent were distorted long ago, resulting in the infinite complications and challenges we face today. Yet God is redeeming every square inch of creation back to its original purpose.

As a result of this distortion and the myriad challenges arising around the world, business leaders need a vision to understand how their particular business fits within the sphere of “business” broadly, and how that sphere fits within larger economic sphere with its structures and institutions, such as capital markets and international banking.

We then need a vision for how the economic sphere fits within other spheres and their structures and institutions, such as the state, the family, the academy, and so on, as well as cultural artifacts such as AI or advanced medicine, and how those interrelations form super-structures in which we live and move and have our being.

Increasingly in our digital world, we also need help to understand how our super-structures interrelate with other nations’ super-structures in real time, such as how my US business’s employment practices are affected by the tax laws of South Africa or the currency exchanges between the dollar and the rand.

Finally but importantly, we need help understanding how all these spheres, structures, and super-structures serve the purpose for which we were created, what some have called the cultural mandate or missional or teleological theology.

One such philosophy considers these spheres as “modal aspects” of reality, such as the quantitative, spatial, biotic, economic, juridical, social, and faith-based aspects. This system can help us analyze our businesses from many different viewpoints and perspectives, similar to attempts made by stakeholder capitalism theories but with more theological depth.

While this “modal aspect” philosophy helps to identify the many aspects of reality, another philosophy called placemaking helps us to see our finitude in place and in time.

The use of a vision like this is that we can see where the distortions have affected the created order and offer constructive criticism for how we might address them. Let’s try an example.

Modern business culture has created an atmosphere that has some harmful effects, many of which I’ve regrettably absorbed. The culture seeps in subtly. Yet I want to build something different. The most obvious one is that founders and leaders often elevate the economic aspect above the social aspect.

At an entrepreneurship conference in Dallas a few years ago, business owners were touted from the stage, showered in praise and rounds of applause. It seemed like the only metric of value was scale. “They raised $2M in their Series A! They’re on the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies list! They created 1,000 jobs last year!” I left feeling like that community wasn’t for me.

Those values are everywhere, it seems, not just conferences. On X or LinkedIn, you’ll find threads like “How to grow to $1M ARR with a team of 3,” or “The Exact Playbook for Sending 1,000 Cold Emails,” or “I reverse-engineered Alex Hormozi’s landing page to book $500K worth of leads.”

Messages like these demonstrate what we care about as entrepreneurs. I’m not saying this because Snapmarket is a small company—it is, and we like being small because we can move fast and free. I’m also not saying this because we don’t like growth or run playbooks to achieve growth—we do. I’m saying this because the unintended messages many business owners hear create a false version of reality that ends up hurting themselves, their teams, and their clients.

A friend of mine said recently that business leaders often say things like “We had a good year because our operating margin was 35% and our revenue grew 15%,” but the Christian worldview would have many more questions. You may not have had a good year based on other aspects. He went on, which I think is worth quoting in full because it addressed many of the ideas I’ve been thinking about here:

Elevating money or growth above other aspects is idolatry because we’re simplifying reality, breaking it apart, and focusing on it in order to control reality, becoming like God.

Accountants abstract numbers without seeing the whole picture, just like a surgeon focusing only on the appendix without focusing on the whole person on the table and all the relationships therein. Accounting came out of the medieval period before the Renaissance in Italian city-states. What does that tell us about its assumptions?

Many leaders quantify their “impact.” But Hitler had a lot of impact. It’s better to use words like goodness, truth, and beauty to set it against an absolute, which raises many good questions.

The current culture emphasizes just the technique to get our a certain quantitative, financial outcome. We should bring in moral order to understand that a business or investment is for the purpose of setting up relationships and trust to serve some good end. We can’t depersonalize or abstract away these terms and metrics, like ESG ideals attempt to do, because then we just focus on the technique. We have to incorporate the human person into the picture.

We also have to emplace our businesses and relationships as well. Think of a manufacturing plant moving from Ohio to Vietnam—how does place affect that business decision? That place has produced the workers that have made that company what it is, and now we’re removing them from the picture. It’s a real part of your company history and value that’s hard to quantify.

In contrast, I’ve drawn inspiration from the Dutch Reformed tradition via Abraham Kuyper, Herman Dooyeweerd, and Bob Goudzwaard, a tradition that critiques that worldview and offers a more constructive vision.

Kuyper, for instance, presents a picture of a God who has a claim on all of reality, from the brightest stars to the smallest electrons. Dooyeweerd attempts to build a system for understanding that reality and our place in it via a set of aspects of reality with a particular order. From there Goudzwaard goes a step further by arguing that our modern capitalist structure absolutizes growth and progress at the expense of other aspects like stewardship and community. It turns out we’re limited creatures with limited resources, and unlimited growth is not possible in our universe.

The Enlightenment project birthed around the French Revolution, on the other hand, brought many great things into the world but also provided some damaging effects. By assuming reality is a mechanistic system of atomistic parts, of which humans are just one speck, we believe we can control our destiny more than we actually can. We vie for Progress, a techno-optimist vision of Marc Andreesen for solving problems.

That worldview breaks down when we realize how little control we have over the future. The embedded assumptions play out by creating a business culture, among other things, that believes all you need is a few agentic LLMs automating your way to $1 zillion ARR with a 3-part playbook.

We can intuit that these and other experiences in the tech community raise the question of the purpose of a business in the first place. A proper vision for our work might help us to see how the purpose of a business is to serve other people with a good or service stewarding the kingdom of God.

In that case, what does an earnings call look like if we assessed a business rightly given all these complexities and aspects regarding the oneness of a business entity and its relationship to others and the world? How then do we assess it to ensure it’s a healthy entity serving a rightly-ordered purpose?

In short, the “modal aspect” philosophy and placemaking discussed more below help us to resist the temptation toward abstraction, where mere technique absolutized away from place, people, and purpose create an idolatrous, transactional relationship to reality.

By correctly balancing the various aspects—economic balanced with social and ethical—as well as emphasizing our embodied creatureliness in specific places at specific times, ensuring we remember our sense of community and limits, we can nurture the soil that leads to healthier businesses and systems in order that we might sustainably address the challenges ahead.

Virtue

A clear vision requires a strong character to bear it. They used to call it “moral fiber.” Now, writers like David Brooks of The New York Times call it a “moral ecology,” an ecosystem of values, wisdom, and temperance that help us make sense of and navigate well the vicissitudes of modern life.

In academia, virtue ethics is making a comeback, drawing inspiration from Aristotelean and Thomistic frameworks. In the church, spiritual formation is gaining steam via John Mark Comer’s Practicing the Way or James K. A. Smith’s Cultural Liturgies project, drawing further inspiration from Augustinian ordered loves and Kuyperian worldview studies. In tech, Linear is paving the way with its devotion to craft and quality, what I interpret as a type of virtue ethic in product design. In education, the University of Austin, Khan Academy, and Anand Sanwal, founder of CB Insights, search for new ways to teach and learn. In work, organizations are placing more emphasis on culture, work-life integration, and more. In health, mental health, therapy, and holistic medicine are growing rapidly. Podcasts like Modern Wisdom, Daily Stoic, and The Knowledge Project also highlight a growing resurgence in character formation over pure information.

Further, faith-based organizations emphasize the need to “get in the game” or “re-risk” their ventures rather than “de-risk,” balancing the natural human desire for comfort with the need to “solve the world’s great problems” with “opportunities for redemptive imagination.”

Of course, any of these aspects of society can draw too heavily on our ability to “solve problems” through mechanistic rather than organismic principles, and they can also elevate one aspect above another, such as the technological or economic aspect over the biotic or health aspect.

Yet they represent modern approaches to ancient wisdom, demonstrating that there is indeed a moral or character component to the purpose-driven orientation of our work.

Each of these showcases the need for reclaiming habits, practices, and routines that help us to be the kind of creatures we ought to be in order to faithfully live out the redemptive way of living and working.

By branching out from the roots and trunk, we can start to develop an art of living that acknowledges our embodied, emplaced humanity and our connection to a broader world and fulfill the mission and vision we were placed on earth to accomplish.

Vocation

So, now what? If we have a vision and a virtue ethic supporting that vision, how shall we then live?

Covid disrupted what many wanted from their work lives, presenting the tension between work-from-home and return-to-office. Years later we’re still wrestling with what our work means in a world where some countries’ governments are threatening nuclear retaliation.

Organizations like Praxis and Faith Driven are answering that call with models like the Redemptive Frame and Halftime. Other organizations like Lean In and the World Economic Forum present their own alternatives for what we ought to do with ourselves during our waking hours.

Of course, grand missional narratives can be exhausting to some. Many in my generation were burnt out because they were told, “Don’t waste your life. Be ‘radical.’” Instead, they found solace in a decent job, spending time with their families, and carrying on with their quiet lives. At the same time, many I talk to have a hunger for something more … important to work on? What’s all this for anyway?

I think there’s a middle way. If indeed it’s true that God has a claim on every detail of life and is presently, actively redeeming every square inch of it, then our seemingly mundane work has deeply significant meaning. If you’re a designer, embrace your pedantry by emphasizing 8º corner radii and 16px line heights. If you’re in finance, make a case in your model’s footnotes why the US equity risk premium should be higher or lower than 4.33% to attain a more realistic IRR and investment horizon. If you’re at home with the kids, serve your family with the highest devotion and liturgical rhythms God provides you in the most monotonous and joyful times of your life. Also take a nap.

I have hope that a missional theology of sorts is taking hold, helping people find a purpose or telos, an end to justify all their means, even if it’s to eat, drink, and be merry, for to enjoy our daily work is a gift from God.

The Placial-Modal Frame

Following these driving forces, to put more details on the analytical tools I mentioned above, I’m inspired by the Kuyperian tradition and Goudzwaard’s emphasis on economic limits within our capitalist economy. I’m also inspired by my friend David Larsen’s work in placial theology.

Drawing from philosophical geography and biblical studies, David has developed a methodology for analyzing place first in biblical studies and then into our physical spaces around us.

For instance, geographers argue a “place” has three components: a location, a locale, and a sense of place. Additionally, Larsen borrows language from Sojan trialectics regarding firstspace, secondspace, and thirdspace, creating a new vector regarding time, what he calls futurespace, where we can analyze a place’s vision and progress toward an imagined future hope.

Perhaps there’s a connection to Dooyeweerd’s fifteen modal aspects as well. Dooyeweerd developed an idea that reality is made up of “aspects”:

1. Quantitative (discrete amount)
2. Spatial (continuous space)
3. Kinematic (movement)
4. Physical (energy, mass, forces)
5. Biotic or Organic (life functions, organisms)
6. Sensitive or Psychic (sense, feeling, emotion)
7. Analytical (distinction, conceptualization)
8. Formative (deliberate shaping: history, culture, technology, goals, achievement)
9. Lingual (meaning carried by symbols)
10. Social (sociality, relationships, roles, respect)
11. Economic (frugal management of resources)
12. Aesthetic (harmony, surprise, fun, play, enjoyment)
13. Juridical (due responsibilities, rights)
14. Ethical (self-giving love, generosity)
15. Pistic or Faith (vision, aspiration, commitment, belief)

From these, I’m exploring whether there’s a use for a diagnostic tool or framework that can put all these components together and help us analyze our various spheres in order to better apply our thinking.

I call it the Placial-Modal Frame.

The seven vectors of Larsen’s placial theology combined with the fifteen aspects of the Dooyeweerdian scheme can be overlaid on a business’s operations, a governmental agency’s project, or even a home or neighborhood community to uncover the ways in which we emphasize one aspect over another, creating what Goudzwaard identifies as an idol. Elevating one thing out of harmony with the rest can result in a devotion to that thing that sacrifices everything else.

I have so much more to say about each sentence in this post, but I have a newborn and am functioning on three hours of sleep. If I were to continue to go down the path of PhD studies in parallel with running Snapmarket, I think this is where I’m headed. I want to build for the next generation a new way of thinking about business and money that rightly values each of these aspects in balance. So, if you have any thoughts on these ideas, I’d love to hear them.

As always, thanks for reading.