Higher Love by Steve Winwood was released in June 1986. It spent a week at the very top of the Billboard 100 but only made it to No.13 in the UK charts. A rare occasion where the Americans had better taste in music than the Brits. Many of you may be more familiar with Whitney Houston’s cover and especially the dance version of her version mixed by Kygo.
The lyrics talk about love in a very uplifting, even spiritual, way. They speak to a love of humanity rather than for any specific person in the more romantic sense found in most love songs. I suspect that when many of you think about a higher love you will think about a love that transcends ordinary human experience. Some of you might think about the love of, and for, God.
As an atheist happiness researcher, I remain fascinated by the evidence showing that people of faith generally report being happier. A considerable part of that happiness hit will come from the comfort of believing that there is something – a purpose perhaps – above and beyond human experience. I think this serves people of faith especially well during activities or life stages that are not going so well. Faith is unlikely to make listening to music any more enjoyable, but it could make being stuck in traffic feel slightly less painful if there is a perceived point to it, such as being a “test”. I feel ambivalence towards those with a higher love for God – I think they’re delusional but, at the same time, I’m a bit jealous of that delusion.
Do religious people behave differently to atheists, by being more pro-social perhaps? Well, they often believe that they behave “better”, but the behavioural evidence does not really support this view. Work on behavioural spillovers shows that people’s intentions and actions have systematic knock-on effects on their subsequent behaviours.. Research considering moral actions has produced evidence of a phenomenon called ‘moral licensing’, which occurs when engaging in a virtuous behaviour confers moral credentials on people that give them licence to behave less well afterwards. A bit like ‘banking’ some goodwill to offset against future acts.
People who donated to charity have shown less intention to be environmentally friendly, and when others recalled behaving morally, they reported less intention to donate to charity and volunteer. These findings suggest a potential pitfall that may arise from emphasising the selfless and moral nature of religious people’s pro-social actions: if you feel like a saint, you may act more like a sinner.
Such evidence has led me to believe that looking at people’s intentions for good deeds distracts us from what really matters; namely, the consequences of those deeds. The conceptualisation of a higher love must have recourse to the impact that conceptualisation has on people’s lives. And this requires us to capture the impact of our actions of love on how other people feel. A higher love should involve the biggest happiness hits – not only for ourselves; not only for those we love the most; but also for those who are suffering the most.
I would contend that this kind of consequentialism is needed more now than ever. I can’t be alone in feeling like we’re living in a world where abstract principles, on both left and right, appear to matter more than do the lives of real people. Social media has certainly played its part, where algorithms reward us for signalling virtue and moral certainty over nuance and ambivalence. I’ll leave it to you – or at least to another post – to consider how best to tackle these challenges.
In this context of the modern world, some of the lyrics in Higher Love feel especially poignant 40 years on: “Things look so bad everywhere, in this whole world, what is fair?”. Addressing what feels like an ever-increasing number of economic and geo-political challenges, may well require a higher love which places the feelings of others at the heart of our own thoughts and feelings – and behaviour.
In stepping away from religious texts and media messages, our efforts to encourage a higher love of good deeds should be informed by the evidence showing that selfishness motivates pro-sociality. First, there is strong support for the idea that people do in fact feel good when they do good. For example, a review of neuroscientific evidence indicates that areas linked to reward-processing in the brain are activated when individuals make voluntary donations, including when they are made anonymously. Second, a large body of evidence indicates that we do more good when we will think it will make us look good. As one of many examples, the promise of public recognition encourages more people to make donations in response to fundraising appeals.
So, I reckon that bringing Steve Winwood the higher love he craves in the world requires that we get over ourselves and accept that it’s perfectly fine to feel good about doing good. In fact, we should celebrate it if we are to stop things looking so bad everywhere.