Curse or Blessing? (The Pursuit of Happiness, Part I)

In their July 4, 1776 preamble to the Declaration of Independence (DOI), our country's founders declared that all men (read "wealthy, white, often slave-owning landowners) have been "endowed" with "certain unalienable rights." These were, they decided, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The first two rights are obviously utopian ideals, since both can be, have been, and are being taken away as you read this. The last one, "pursuit of happiness," is even more chimerical than its predecessors. It's the founding-father version, it seems, of the mechanical rabbit that greyhounds chase around the dog track. So, why is it there?

As it turns out, Thomas Jefferson is to blame. According to one source, Jefferson borrowed the phrase from a Samuel Johnson fable called "Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia." After a friend is kidnapped, the prince, who lives in Happy Valley, laments, "What is to be expected of our pursuit of happiness when we find the state of life to be such that happiness itself is the cause of misery." In a separate essay, Johnson wrote, "We are still so much unacquainted with our own state, and so unskillful in the pursuit of happiness, that we shudder without danger, complain without grievances, and suffer our quiet to be disturbed." Given this bleak assessment, one might think the founders included the phrase in the DOI, either out of bourgeoisie ignorance or malevolent sadism, to give Americans (and all humans, really) the sleep-challenged nights so many experience.

On a more positive note, in his book The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, Jeffrey Rosen argues that the founders, who read the classical Greek and Roman texts, believed the pursuit of happiness to be "a quest for being good, not feeling good--the pursuit of lifelong virtue, not short term pleasure." Those virtues include industry, temperance, moderation, and sincerity, characterized by self-improvement, character development, and self-mastery. "They believed," he writes, "that political self-government requires personal self-government."

It's too bad the founders did not include Rosen's definition in the DOI, if that's indeed what they meant. Think how different things might be today had that been the case.

At least one of the founders recognized the potential problems that might stem from the ambiguity of "the pursuit of happiness." In a 1786 letter to James Monroe, James Madison wrote that "ultimate happiness" is often misconstrued as the "immediate augmentation of property and wealth." If that is true, he continued, "it would be in the interest of the majority in every community to despoil and enslave the minority of individuals; and in a federal community to make a similar sacrifice of the minority of the component states."

If Madison were here today, he might point his finger at us and say, "I told you so."

Be that as it may, the question remains as to whether the pursuit of happiness is a blessing or a curse. It is certainly a blessing in myriad fleeting instances, those famous "Kodak moments," that come and go every day. It is a curse, on the other hand, given the constant pressure, whether internal or external, to, as the Partridge Family once put it, "come on, get happy."

In what seems like eons ago, I wrote a series of blogs on "How to be Happy." The suggestions offered by happiness experts, academics, and psychologists are diverse and overwhelmingly numerous. I realize now, however, that Monty Python had it right all along.