Men Without Chests

A gut feeling

Have you ever had a gut feeling about something? Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs, a fictional character on the show NCIS, had “gut feelings” almost every week. And his gut was amazingly accurate.

Whether or not your gut is as good as Gibbs’ gut, I’m guessing you’ve been told to “trust your gut” at some time in your life. I will also guess that you have done that, but that your results were not as consistently good as those Gibbs enjoyed.

It’s almost like he had better writers than the rest of us.

Personally, as I assess my own decision making about this and that over the years, I have favored my head over my gut.

That is to say, I want to believe that rational thought is the primary force behind my important decisions. Except for the “cool factor” appeal of making a decision based on gut feelings (instinct), I have discounted instinct. Instead, I should have developed it.

None of our best decisions, I now know, are purely rational.

Use your head

When it comes to solving problems, all of us tend to use the assets we’ve learned to trust. I know people who are wealthy enough to solve a problem now and then using money. I’ve had friends who could solve some problems with charm. Power is another tool that has been used effectively.

My go to, as you might surmise, is to think. That method is generally not as fast as money or power, but intellect is what I have, so I use it.

Wikipedia has this description of an intellectual: An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and reflection about the reality of society, and who proposes solutions for its normative problems.

When we think of an intellectual as a “brainiac,” we miss the real meaning. An “intellectual” isn’t always the smartest person in the room, but is someone who thinks, researches, and reflects on the world around them and then proposes solutions for the problems they see.

If Jethro Gibbs is the ultimate gut detective, Monk is the ultimate intellectual detective. He observes, he thinks, he reflects. (Two new shows feature female intellectuals: Elsbeth in Elsbeth, and Morgan in High Potential.)

To be fair to the definition, none of those detectives are proposing solutions for society. They are solving crimes. But the process is basically the same: observe the world, identify the problem, research, reflect, then propose a solution. (The butler did it!)

C. S. Lewis was an intellectual, and he said the answer isn’t in trusting our gut more, and it isn’t even in using our heads more. The answer is the two of those mixed together. That happens in…

The chest

Eighty-one years ago C. S. Lewis gave a series of three lectures in London. If you do the math and know history, you will realize it was 1943 — in the middle of World War II.

Later those lectures were printed and assembled into a book called The Abolition of Man. Though Lewis was a Christian, these were not sermons and the book is not a Christian book.

It is, however, very much a book about morality — a universal value. In some future article I will say a little more about that. For now just know that from East to West, morality is highly valued.

It is also rarely — and I mean very rarely — taught. (Which makes you wonder just how highly morality is valued after all.)

The first lecture of the three was titled Men Without Chests. C. S. Lewis did not steal that from me, I stole it from him. And now I will explain it.

Men without chests is not a sex-specific statement. It applies to women equally, but in his lecture he uses the masculine to illustrate his point.

The head, he says, is the place of intellect. The belly is the place of instinct. If angels are pure intellect, and animals are pure instinct, mankind is some of both. The question then is this: how do those two come together? And if they do, what is the result?

Lewis says they come together in the territory between the brain and the belly. He calls that the chest, and he says it is indispensable in making good and proper choices. It is, in fact, where morality lives. Morality is the secret ingredient that allows intellect and instinct to bind together, creating the best possible answer.

New chests

In other words, the chest is the bridge between the head and the belly, the meeting place for head knowledge and gut reactions.

Lewis believed that “proper moral education should train emotions and habits to form stable sentiments aligned with reason and virtue.” That’s a beautiful but challenging sentence. I’ll say it like this:

Reason and virtue must blend together to form an emotional foundation that lets us act virtuously and pursue the truth passionately.

There was a time when I poo-pooed emotional arguments in favor of purely rational arguments. That was wrong. But if emotional arguments are not based on morality, and if they don’t include both intellect and instinct, they should not be trusted.

We saw a lot of those kinds of emotional arguments in the run-up to the recent elections. They were more about hate than love, more about what’s wrong than making things right, more about attacks than about solutions.

I hope those arguments did not persuade you, though I know they are very effective. Why?

Because in the years since 1943 we haven’t made much progress in educating our young people or ourselves in morality. We still have far too many “men without chests.”

Let’s turn that around. Let’s educate our families, our employees, our leaders, and most of all our young people in the ways of morality. At Do Good U, we offer that training to schools and businesses. But you can do it too. Every time you do good, you teach others to do the same.

Good is in your chest. Use it, and others will discover that it is in them, too.