In an early moment of refreshing frankness, Aristotle acknowledges that it’s not generally fun to do what’s good.  He, like many psychologists after him wonders how to reconcile gut impulse to the cause of virtue.  Freud, for example notes the way impulse and morality aren’t on the same page. He talks of the conflict between gut and good as an eternal struggle between id and super-ego that in a mature person gets mediated by a well-formed ego.

Aristotle’s answer is a little different from Freud’s.  He doesn’t see gut and good in unresolved tension.  He said you can train your gut to want to do good. You start by using reason to override your gut’s impulses toward fun. At some point the gut gets the idea.  It discovers the means to take more fun from doing good than it does from just doing what’s simply fun. 

Your gut gets the idea…I’m a theorist by profession and avocation. I love ideas and find them powerful. But, then that’s a vocational hazard for us professors.  It’s easy for us to overestimate the power of ideas.  We fall prey to what I call “Ideolatry” the idealizing of ideas, as though they have the power to radically and permanently change how people behave.  In this we’re in the same camp as gurus and New-agers who say incredible things like  “Once people realize that we’re all one they’ll want to be kind always.”

Ideas don’t really have that much power.  I know. I’ve been in late-stage, process-heavy romantic relationships in which we talked as though, through our ideas, we can make our guts believe anything we want.  In these relationships we would make futile declarations like, “OK, I now realize that I’m safe here. From now on, whenever I think you’re attacking me, I’ll just think that it’s a cry for help.” Like New Year’s resolutions, these idea-based promises that from now on our gut will be good are very short-lived.   The gut has its reasons, most of which have been learned through the school of hard knocks.  It’s not going to forget all that just because I have some new idea.

Still, I’m with Aristotle on a gut’s trainability.  And a lesson in how to do it comes to me through watching Obama’s evolution.  According to a detailed New Yorker account of the trajectory of his campaign, Obama recognized early on that his calm non-reactive style was a risky strategy in challenging even a wounded Republican party.  Plenty of past Democrats had tried taking the calm, non-reactive moral high ground and were creamed.  Yes, maybe Obama would have some distinguishing trait that would protect him, but maybe not.  It was a risky strategy.

At some point though the table turned.  The strategy started to pay off. The more it paid off, the less he had to coax himself into trying it. The more he could lean into and bank on it. The more calm he stayed, the more McCain floundered. More McCain floundered the more staying calm paid and the easier it was for Obama to stick calmly and confidently with the habit of looking calm and confident.


I marveled at how in each instance of provocation Obama was able to remember the idea of staying calm. But that’s not really how it works. His gut has learned from successes that it pays to stay calm.

The gut has its reasons learned in the school of hard knocks.  You can’t convince it with ideas alone. Your gut is not going to take your ideas’ word for it, and besides it’s very hard for us to remember an idea in every instance in which it applies.  Still, with ideas you can persuade your gut to try a new approach.  If the new approach pays off, the gut embraces it, and it becomes a habit.

In other words, through your ideas, you can propose experiments for your gut to try, and if they prove rewarding then your gut adopts new practices. To Aristotle, doing good isn’t your gut’s default value, but if you can coax your gut into experimenting with good, you will prove to your gut that good can be fun, and then good will become the gut’s habit.

To which I would only add, so long as doing good pays off somehow.  You can’t convince your gut of just anything.