American exceptionalism annoys the world. Happiness is the source of the annoyance. Other countries are built upon battle, blood, nationality, culture, language, and territory. America is the exception. Our foundation is pursuit of happiness. It appears in the first sentence of the main body of America’s IPO, the Declaration of Independence. Happiness is the one novel feature of the document. And this imaginative mission statement, that we’re determined to pursue happiness, comes as something of a surprise after the noble boilerplate of our calls for life and liberty.
We can explore mankind’s other covenants, treaties, conventions, protocols, compacts, and concordants, plus all the corpus juris of the world, written and unwritten, ancient and modern, and not find happiness.
No talk of happiness appears in England’s Magna Carta. The French revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man fails to address the subject. The European Union’s proposed constitution never mentions happiness, although, at 485 pages, it mentions practically everything else including regulatory specifications concerning “edible meat offal” and “lard and other rendered pig fat.” The Lisbon treaty that took the place of the rejected EU constitution doesn’t supply this want of happiness. The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights does state, in Article 24, that “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including … periodic holidays with pay.” Leave it to UN delegates to expect to be paid for their freedom. Anyway, a holiday is not the same as the pursuit of happiness, as anyone knows who’s spent a holiday dragging whiney children on a tour of UN headquarters.
The New Testament, arguably the founding text of Western civilization, mentions happiness just seven times and never in a happy context. Peter’s First Epistle, to persecuted Christians in Asia Minor, says, “if ye suffer for righteousness’ sake, happy are ye.” Jesus is quoted as using the word “happy” only once, on the occasion of washing his disciples’ feet. We admire the Son of Man but we sons of a gun who populate America do not pursue our happiness in this manner.
The United States is the first—and so far only—among happy nations. “Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books,” wrote Thomas Carlyle. Just ask Americans a question about American history, watch them draw a blank, and you’ll see that we are the happy people indeed.
Not that Americans seem very happy at the moment. And maybe Americans never have seemed happy. In his 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards doesn’t sound as if he’s talking to a cheery crowd.
The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you … he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire.
And now, due to the financial crisis, the mortgage foreclosure crisis, and health care reform, we’re not only going to hell, we’re broke, homeless, and sick while we’re waiting to get in.
Happiness, like the freedom we’re so happy to have, is elusive—slippery in physical and conceptual grasp. “I’m happy” doesn’t mean “I’m having fun.” Remember all the fun you’ve had. When it was really fun it didn’t end up making anybody very happy. “I’m happy” is distinct from those spasms of ecstasy that do not elicit any coherent phrases. “I’m happy” is more or less equivalent to “I’m content,” which means “I won’t complain because nobody listens to me.” “Happy” is often used as a none too complimentary modifier: “happy-go-lucky,” “slaphappy,” “happy horseshit,” “happy as a pig in same.” The catchphrases “one big happy family,” “Is everybody happy?,” and “I hope you’re happy now” are never spoken without a happy smirk of irony. Then there’s whatever John Lennon was getting at with “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” Although it’s true under certain circumstances. Try defending the perimeter of your outpost in Kandahar by squeezing a puppy.
However, it should be noted that the Declaration of Independence reads, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” not, “Life, Liberty, and Whoopee.” Jefferson’s choosing “the pursuit of” rather than plain “happiness” is a reminder of what happens to the poor suckers who, in their pursuit of happiness, catch the thing. America’s legions of minor, temporary tabloid stars can tell the rest of the story, if they survive their stardom.
Happiness is hard to attain, harder to maintain, and hardest of all to recognize. Pick the time of your life when you know you were happiest. You didn’t know how happy you were at the time. When the kids were little and you hadn’t slept in three years. That first job in Manhattan, being groped by the assistant marketing director and sharing a one-bedroom Avenue X and One Thousanth Street apartment with eleven other people. Those halcyon days at college that you flunked out of.
Old people are forever reminiscing happily about all sorts of things that wouldn’t seem conducive to happiness, such as World War II. Will the forsaken recipients of largesse from bilked charities someday wax nostalgic about Bernie Madoff’s avuncular ways? The fact that we don’t know when we are happy raises the disturbing possibility that you and I are wildly happy right now. I hope my wife doesn’t find out.
What’s happiness doing in the Declaration of Independence? The original phrase is “Lives, Liberties and Estates,” a brief catalog of man’s inherent rights that appears several times in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Locke was one of the Enlightenment’s foremost proponents of natural law and the rights it naturally bestows, rights that are so much a part of our nature nothing can take them away, and we can’t get rid of them. There were other important natural law theorists, such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui. America’s patriotic thinkers relied mostly on Locke because he argued the case for people’s right to dissolve their government. Also, he was easier to spell. When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence he was referring directly to chapter IX of the Second Treatise, where Locke says that men are “willing to joyn in Society … for the mutual Preservation of their Lives, Liberties, and Estates, which I call by the general name Property.” Every educated person understood the reference (moral philosophy not yet having been replaced by civics in the educational curriculum). Many educated persons must have wondered about Jefferson’s substitution of laughs for land.
The fact that property wasn’t mentioned in the Declaration of Independence still seems odd. The French revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man lists property second only to liberty, and the French revolutionaries had less respect for other people’s property (and less property) than did the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson may have been trying to convey the idea that our new nation wasn’t going to be a European kind of place. America wouldn’t be parceled into aristocratic estates kept intact by primogeniture and entail. Entail is a legal restriction on property, usually land, limiting its inheritance to linear descendants of the owner, and primogeniture is a further restriction that leaves out the girls in the family. Entail was necessary to preserve the power (formerly military, later economic) of the holders of the titles of nobility, which titles the U.S. Constitution would soon ban.
Entail was in bad odor in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rationalist thinkers of the day were ashamed of inherited class distinctions even (sometimes especially) if they were so distinguished. Entailed estates were considered to be the ground from which grew the twisted family tree of peerage occupied by the serpent who urged the rotten fruit of birthright upon Edenic mankind. The metaphor is overfertilized, perhaps, but, said Tom Paine in Common Sense, “Original sin and hereditary succession are parallels. Dishonorable rank! inglorious connection!”
Nowadays, when the British royal family is mostly blogfare and titled Frogs and Wops are of no interest to anyone but Vanity Fair editors, we wonder at the fuss over entail. Yet in the late 1700s Georgia went so far as to pass a law against such laws, attempting to keep the privileged few from monopolizing the broad cotton fields of Tara. Never mind that for every free household in Georgia the state had approximately thirteen thousand acres of unpopulated land. (And Scarlett O’Hara’s father was a bog Irish upstart who won the joint in a poker game.)
More than a decade after America had declared its unentailed independence and made pretensions of nobility illegal, Jefferson was still railing against transgenerational claims on property. In a letter to James Madison, he wrote “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” The italics are Jefferson’s and “usufruct” is the legal right to use and enjoy something—pursue happiness with it—during one’s lifetime. Tom Paine would make the point again in his 1791 pamphlet Rights of Man: “Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations that are to follow.” Even Jane Austen would comment on the issue. In Pride and Prejudice she has the silly Mrs. Bennet say, of the rule that decrees precisely who inherits what, “There is no knowing how estates will go once they come to be entailed.” (A remark that advocates of various environmental and conservationalist entails upon land might want to ponder.)
All these proponents of liberty versus heredity were taking their cue from Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations Smith wrote that the laws of entail “are founded upon the most absurd of all suppositions, the supposition that every successive generation of men have not an equal right to the earth, and to all that it possesses.”
America as a place for fresh starts has illustrious intellectual credentials. Not that we’d know it by looking at America’s uncouth frontiersmen, woebegone backwoods pioneers, seedy homesteaders, giddy forty-niners, illiterate cowboys, huddled masses of immigrants, and Internet start-up wingnuts.
“Pursuit of Happiness” also may have supplanted “Property” in the Declaration of Independence because of definitional concerns. Locke died in 1704, when “Estates, which I call by the general Name Property” was still synonymous with land and land was still synonymous with riches. Until Adam Smith succeeded in improving the world’s understanding of economics (if he ever did), land was considered to be the only ultimate source of profit.
The Declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson but it was revised and edited by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson was a devotee of property in the sense of land and chattel (of animal and human kinds). But Adams, although a farmer, had no Jeffersonian vision of America as a pure, agrarian society. Perhaps this was because Adams, unlike Jefferson, made a living from his farm. Adams and Franklin understood that trade, manufacture, and finance would be as significant in America as “real” estate. And Franklin had a personal interest in a type of ownership different from a land title, ownership of what we would come to call intellectual property. (It was not coincidental to Franklin’s influence that the power to approve patent rights would be granted in Article I of the forthcoming Constitution, and that the first act passed by the new Congress of the United States would concern patent law.)
Jefferson was often concerned about money, but Franklin and Adams were actually thinking about it. Still, we can understand why, for reasons of popularity and taste, the rights in the Declaration of Independence aren’t listed as “Life, Liberty, and Stinking Wealth.”
Roger Pilon, chief constitutional scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, in Washington, D.C., believes there was another reason that property rights were handled with delicacy in the Declaration of Independence. Pilon concludes that Jefferson detected a flaw in the logic of Locke’s “unalienable” rights. Property has to be alienable, in a legal sense, or you can’t sell it. If we lived in a country where property was unalienable, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak would still have the pocket calculator that they sold to raise the money to start Apple. Therefore when we go to work there’s nothing on the screen of the computer that doesn’t exist at the job we don’t have because we’re still farming the twenty-acre tobacco patch that our ancestors gypped the Indians out of for beads and trinkets the last time anybody was allowed to buy anything, in the reign of George III.
Property is an important aspect of the pursuit of happiness. Pilon says the founding fathers would have considered this materialistic side of happiness to be, as the founding fathers liked to say, self-evident. Try paying your mortgage with a hug. (Though that’s what the U.S. government is helping some people do these days.)
The authors of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and the other sources of the American idea of freedom had a materialistic philosophy of independence. And they knew enough philosophy to know that they did.
Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, Madison et al. did not believe that American independence was the same as the independence preached by the so-called cynic philosophers of ancient Greece. The cynics held that independence lay in individual “autarchy” or rigid self-sufficiency. Diogenes was said to have been elated to discover he could drink from his cupped hands and therefore dispense with his mug. But this shows that even the most ascetic pursuit of happiness involves consideration of the material world. (And it shows that Diogenes was a dope who had to found a whole school of philosophy to figure out how to get a puddle to his face.) Diogenes lived in a barrel. “Whose barrel?” Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams would have asked. There was nothing cynical about America’s founding fathers, in any sense of the word, but nothing naive either.
Pilon maintains that “Pursuit of Happiness” replaced “Property” in the Declaration of Independence not to denigrate material wealth but to expand the idea of materialism. America was established as a way for Americans to make and do things. What sort of things Americans make and do and whether these things lead to great riches, pious satisfactions, or transitory pleasures is nobody’s business but our own. America’s political institutions are supposed to be the machinery for our making and doing. America is a tool. America is the only place on earth or in history created in order to be both free and teleological. Teleology is the idea that phenomena are guided by a purpose. America is. But—and here’s what’s new—we Americans get to individually, personally, separately decide on any purpose we want.
What’s the point of other nations? It’s something of a historical mystery. Conquering the world seems to be a purpose for some nations—fortunately not too many, and fortunately not too often, and most fortunately they always fail. Maybe nations arise to provide their citizens with mutual protection against external and internal threats. If this were the usual case, world history would read like an account of the interrelations of the cantons of Switzerland. Certain nations seem to exist strictly to torment their neighbors or their citizens or both. Other nations are simply … there. Notice how in Paris people go to cafés and just sit around all day being French. Or, if they prefer to sit around all night, they can be Spanish and not have dinner until 11 p.m. A friend of mine once said about the rural Turks that they’re so lazy they get up at four in the morning to have more time to do nothing. It gives an American the heebie-jeebies. We have to be making and doing. Albeit what we make is often a mess. And what we do is often our undoing. Lately we’ve added being to making and doing. What Americans are being is famous or infamous (there’s no longer a distinction) or fabulous or centered or self-actualized or spiritual or eco-conscious or, frequently, real fat. Anyway, we Americans are very, very busy, and we owe it all to three little words in our Declaration of Independence.
Or maybe that’s wrong. Maybe Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams were just happy. Jefferson was famously uxorious. Perhaps his wife, Martha, slipped up to Philadelphia for a dirty weekend. And Franklin landed the Declaration of Independence printing contract. And Adams was working his way through a cask of Madeira. The Declaration’s first draft might have read, “Pursuit of Nookie and Graft and I’ll drink to That.” If it had gone to press this way we’d be a different people, less busy and less happy and more inclined to say such things to each other as “Wealthy Birthday!,” “Drunken days are here again!,” and “Sexually aroused to meet you.”