Is It Good To Be Good?
"Love can be expressed
in a great many ways. So, in the book there's a chapter on attentive listening.
You know some people are really good at attentive listening and they do such
beautiful job. Others express love through creativity, they are just able to
create beautiful works of music – Beethoven's Ode to Joy – or literary people.
Some people express love through forgiveness, or through the courage to
confront self-destructive behaviors. Sometimes love is expressed through humor!
For my father it was loyalty. He was the most loyal person I ever met."
– Stephen Post
Interview with Dr. Stephen Post
Bioethicist Stephen Post has long had an interest in the study of love, dating back to a paper on the subject he was assigned while a senior in high school in 1969. But even he could never have guessed that 31 years later he would be contacted by the Templeton Foundation to head up an entire institute dedicated to the scientific research of love, in all of its elusive permutations. Post has taught for the last 19 year's at Case Western's medical school, including working with the Alzheimer's community. His latest book, a direct outcome of his work with the Templeton Foundation, is called "Why Good Things Happen to Good People: The Exciting New Research that Proves the Link Between Doing Good and Living a Longer, Healthier, Happier Life," co-written with Jill Neimark. Available starting May 8, 2007, it explores the scientific research that supports the Golden Rule. We spoke to him about his definition of love, people he thinks personify the act of selfless love, and how his father's preferred way to display love.
JTF: Let's start with the news about the imminent publication of your new book. When somebody asks you what your book is about, what do you tell them?
SP: Well, it's a book about how living a life of love is the best thing, not just for the people around you, but for you yourself. And this is not an anecdotal premise; we have scientific data from 12 different studies to back this up.
JTF: How much of this book do you think is a re-framing of the Golden Rule and how much of it is brand new, sort of groundbreaking information?
SP: I think it's groundbreaking in the ways in which all the manifestations of love are articulated, the ways in which science is brought in. The newness of this book is that it completely breaks away from dualism. From the concept of the self versus the other. Basically we discover our deepest and happiest and fullest and healthier self not selfishly, but through engagement and concern for and care of others.
JTF: Your background is in bioethics. How did you make the transition from bioethics to the study of love?
SP: (laughs). Well, actually it goes the other way. I was originally interested in the study of love and then I detoured into bioethics . . . when I was in high school, I had a sacred study teacher who got me interested in the topic of love–agape love–and I wrote a senior paper on the topic way back in 1969, believe it or not.
JTF: Fast-forward to the year 2000, how did the study of love come back into your professional life?
SP: Well, Charles Harper (JTF Senior Vice President) has an important role in this. Sometime in 1998, Chuck called me and asked me to chair a conference at MIT in Cambridge, Mass on Altruism, Empathy and Agape: A scientific symposium and that went very well. And then a year later I saw Sir John at another conference and he approached me with a cup of tea in hand and we started to talk about what was later to become the Institute for Research into Unlimited Love, which started in 2001.
JTF: You've been teaching for the last 19 years at Case Western's medical school. What have you learned about love while teaching there?
SP: Well when I came here in 1988, I wanted to work with the Alzheimer's community, because I did have an interest in the ways in which care and love were expressed both by family and professional caregivers, but also by the deeply forgetful themselves. So I spent about 10 years working with the Alzheimer's community around the country, and in Canada and even in Europe. I wrote a lot of books about the emotional life of persons who have lost a certain amount of cognitive capacity but can still appreciate and to some extent return generous love. When people have degrees of dementia and even Down syndrome and some other disability, sometimes they reveal to us what is most basic about human existence which is love and affirmation and we sometimes forget about that because we are so busy getting from point A to point B and showing off our intelligence.
JTF: What is the Stephen Post definition of Agape love?
SP: Well, my definition is really very much Sir John's definition of unlimited love. That simply means two things. It means (1) that the love we have for our neighbor, articulated in such things as the Golden Rule, is not limited by "In-group, Out-group barriers." That it is focused on our shared or common humanity, and not some fragment of that humanity. We don't exclude and we recognize the value of everyone in a very profound way which includes people with cognitive disabilities.
JTF: What's the second definition?
SP: Well it's when we participate in the emotion of generous warm love for others that is not self-serving. We just love and we let everything else take care of itself. In other words, we are not worried about reciprocal calculations. We are beyond that and also we are not interested in reputational gain, but instead this kind of love has its own reward. It is almost like when Plato said, "Virtue has its own reward." People who participate in this kind of a lifestyle whether it's Abraham or Mother Teresa or somebody who is very caring in your neighborhood. They have a kind of buoyancy, a kind of energy that comes from experiencing the profound delight in living the way they live.
JTF: What you are describing is that the selfless active of love is a way of "getting" outside of yourself, which is really a way to short-circuit modern narcissism. Do you agree with that?
SP: Oh yes.
JTF: Let's talk about the research in your book. We were all taught as children that it is better to give than receive, but it sounds like your research is suggesting that we can do both. How is that?
SP: It's not so much that one receives in a sense of being ever certain of reciprocity, but there's a way in which the profound emotional state of love is really liberating. The parent feels that, in the mystical moment when fathers and mothers look at a young child lying in bed. This is a difficult thing because the parent feels deeply that this young child's life means as much, or even more, than his own. There is a depth in all of that and it puts ones own life in prospective. It separates one "self" from all the kind of narcissistic preoccupations. Love is a way to live. There are two ways of living. I think that in one way we relate to others because they contribute to my agenda, or our agendas, and no further and the other way of living is where we really discover this kind of deep way, the value of the other as other and that is sort of a fundamental dynamic and what's exciting and what our research shows is that when we make that transition toward this profound unselfish love, that really sees the other, it provides a kind of fulfillment and happiness. You know, you can imagine somebody being surrounded by millions of people who just adore him or her you know, but you can also imagine that person being utterly miserable until he or she actually discovers how to be a kind of a source of love, a cause of love in life.
JTF: But wouldn't some people say that it's all well and good to act "good" or to exhibit love to thy neighbor in order to achieve these positive psychological benefits, but doesn't that obscure the true reason for doing it in the first place?
SP: Yes. That's a very important comment. In life we do things that are genuinely motivated by love of others. That's never completely true though. There's always a sense in which there are secondary motives. What I'm saying about the benefits of a generous life, really don't go to the primary motivation. You know some of these benefit may happen, but they may not because we're just talking about statistical generalizations. I think the people discover benefits in a kind of paradoxical way and that doesn't take away the benefits, the happiness is a kind of unintended byproduct or side effect of a generous life. And if you look at, you know, the Dalai Lama, or as I said Mother Teresa and a thousands others, you know, they can hardly speak about the love and compassion without also speaking of joy.
JTF: How much scientific research was done to generate the findings that you're talking about?
SP: There are lots of studies that the Institute funded. Twelve that were really core to the book, and then there were other emerging research projects around the country that were very much related and that were incorporated into the book. The heart of the book, this theme that it is "good to be good" just happened to be the one theme that emerged on its own. It resonated with me because I remembered from my own experience growing up how enjoyable it was to be involved in helping activities in various ways.
JTF: In the book Paul Wink says, "Every life has its moments of quite heroism. In a sense we are all heroes." What do you think he means when he says that?
SP: Listen, every time the end of the month comes and a husband or wife pays those bills these days, (laughing) it's pretty damn heroic. I think that the 99.9% of the energy of love in the universe, the emotional energy of love in the world is not what we see in the newspapers, but it's just everyday good neighbors.
JTF: Examples below the radar?
SP: Yes, below the radar and in the book you know we talked about how love is in the family and friendships, in neighborhoods, and you know all humanity and so forth, but the thing is that love is expressed and that's my theory of love which goes back many-many years to many other books. It is that it's wrong to speak of love simply in terms of compassion. Love can be expressed in a great many ways. So, in the book there's a chapter on attentive listening. You know some people are really good at attentive listening and they do such beautiful job. Others express love through creativity, they are just able to create beautiful works of music--Beethoven's Ode to Joy–or literary people. Some people express love through forgiveness, or through the courage to confront self-destructive behaviors. Sometimes love is expressed through humor! For my father it was loyalty. He was the most loyal person I ever met.
JTF: You mentioned that there are so many people who are below the radar and that 99% of the love that people express for each other never makes the newspaper, but does anybody come to mind that you've read about in the newspaper that displayed the sort of behavior, the altruistic behavior we've been talking about.
SP: Oh! Sure. Well, there were... there were two, who did come to mind, one was Ming Wesley Autrey.
JTF: Right the guy, who jumped on the New York subway tracks to save the person who had fallen?
SP: Right, and the other person I liked was Larry Stewart, the Secret Santa. Twenty-five years ago he is at a diner and he told the waitress to keep the change and he so enjoyed that experience that as he became wealthy, he was a very successful businessman, he got in the habit of dressing up at Christmas and giving out $100 bills in parking lot to people who look needy. So there are all sorts of people like that and they do little things. Mother Theresa wasn't far off when she said, "there are no great works of love, but more things done with great love." When I'm home tonight and my wife wants to talk to me about something going on at work that completely bores me, but I actually focus on it and listen attentively, that's love, you know.