He raised concerns that celebrities were being worshipped by the young despite having no real reason or talent behind their fame.
"One of the saddest features of modern public life is the erosion of a sense of honour," he said in a new book.
"We worry, rightly, that we are passing to our children a depleted and threatened material environment.
"We should worry just as much about the damage to our moral and imaginative ecology that is caused by our failure to think honestly about character and honour - nobility, if you like.
"Who are our heroes, the people we think of as honourable?
"We'd better have some answers if we are not to surrender the imaginative field to celebrity rather than nobility, success rather than honest conviction or egotistical pragmatism rather than the struggle to become trustworthy."
He added that one of the "saddest features of modern public life" was the adoration of celebrities.
He urged a return to holding values like honour and talent: "It is - obviously - a sense that has roots in religious feeling, but it is not universal in religious people or absent from non-religious people.
"If we let it drift away, we shall find it easier and easier to accept for ourselves and (crucially) for others too a set of diminished expectations.
"And this means not only a more boring life, but one in which we become increasingly inured to cries of protest against inhumanity, unfairness and mean-mindedness."