Most Americans Take It for Granted As a Natural

True Happiness by Morean Ie Jenne

BY ROBERT DARNTON

Most Americans take it for granted as a natural extension of "life" and "liberty." But as the author s/zoius, the pursuit of happiness is an idea that has long been debated-and whose ~neaningis still up for grabs.

42 WQ AUTUMN 199 5 he idea of happiness has be- and in Rome by the troops of Charles V come so deeply embedded in during the sack of 1527. The reformations American culture that it some- and religious wars made happiness as a times disappears from sight. It consummation to be desired this side of the is everywhere and nowhere, an grave look more unlikely than ever. implicitT assumption that colors a world But in the Age of Enlightenment the view, hardly an idea at all. But an idea it idea of happiness revived once again, at- very much is, and, if seen from the perspec- tached to other notions such as progress and tive of the history of ideas, it has a long and prosperity. The Enlightenment philoso- impressive pedigree. phers took happiness to be the end of man's It appears among the ancients in the life as an individual and of society's exist- philosophies of Plato and Aristotle and es- ence as a collectivity. The most radical of pecially in the thought of the Epicureans them, Diderot, Rousseau, Helvetius, and and Stoics. The Epicureans incorporated the dJHolbach, built the concept of happiness concept of happiness into a general philoso- into a modernized Epicureanism, reinforced phy of pleasure and pain, which led to an with a strong civic consciousness. ethics of rational self-interest. The Stoics Having reached this point, philosophy linked it to withdrawal from the dangerous in the 19th and 20th centuries could not turn hurly-burly of civic life and contentment in back, despite the countercurrents of pessi- the minimal pleasures of life in Arcadian mism stirred up by figures such as retreats. "Happy is he who, far away from Nietzsche and Freud. Jeremy Bentham's business, like the race of men of old, tills his rallying cry, "the greatest happiness of the ancestral fields with his own oxen, unbound greatest number," actually was formulated by any interest to pay," said Horace in the by two philosophes of the Enlightenment, first century B.C. One could find similar sen- Francis Hutcheson in Scotland and Cesare timents scattered throughout the Augustan Beccaria in Italy. Bentham worked it into a poetry and Ciceronian rhetoric of the Ro- philosophy of enlightened self-interest de- mans. rived from Epicurus and Lucretius and Not, however, among the early Chris- adapted to the reform politics of Britain. For tians. Before his death in 604 A.D., Saint Karl Marx, the prophet of socialist happi- Augustine characterized life on this side of ness, liberal reforms could never reconcile the City of God as the pursuit of vanity individual and collective interests, because through a vale of tears. His message corre- class interests stood in the way. Instead, sponded to the human condition as it was Marx imagined happiness as a historical experienced by most people for the next state to be reached at the end of a dialecti- thousand years, when men and women cal process by society as a whole. worked the fields in a state of semislavery, ate little more than bread and broth, and uch, in a snapshot, is how a his- died young. Theirs was an existence best tory of the idea of happiness summed up by Thomas Hobbes's descrip- might look if seen at a very great tion of life in the state of nature: "solitary, distance, like the earth photo- poor, nasty, brutish, and short." graphed from the moon. But from By the 15th century, however, philoso- such a perspective, everything blurs into ev- phers were facing a revived notion of plea- erything else. What would notions of hap- sure-earthly as in Boccaccio and refined as piness look like if seen up close? I would like in the court of the Medici. To be sure, the to examine two such views located at what classical revival was snuffed out in Florence I have identified as the great turning point by Savonarola's bonfire of vanities in 1497 in the history of happiness, the Age of En-

HAPPINESS 43 lightenment. More precisely, I want to ex- lization). There is something to be said for plore two famous phrases: "We must culti- each of these interpretations. Each fits the vate our garden," offered by Voltaire as the context of Voltaire's concerns in 1758 as he conclusion to Candide (1759), and the right composed Candide: his quarrel with Freder- to "the pursuit of Happiness" proclaimed ick 11; the horrors of the Seven Years War; by Jefferson in the American Declaration of the even more horrible disaster of the Independence. The effort, I hope, will shed Lisbon earthquake; Voltaire's debate over light on that curiously quicksilver phenom- the problem of evil with the followers of enon known as "the American way of life." Leibniz and Wolff; and his recent decision to retire as a country gentleman to Les he last line of Candide, "We must Delices, where he worked hard at creating cultivate our garden," is the fi- a garden of his own. nal remark in a philosophical The garden motif also summons up the discourse that accompanies a Christian utopia of Eden, a favorite target of fast-moving, picaresque plot. Voltaire in his youth. As a freethinking man Spoken by the chastened protagonist, it is about town in Regency Paris, he celebrated meant to answer a question. But what was the pleasures of high society or "le monde" that question? None of the characters in the and derided Christian asceticism. Thus, in final chapter of the book ask Candide any- his youthful credo, "Le Mondain," he thing. They chatter past one another as they mocked the barbarity of our mythical ances- have done throughout the entire story. The tors in a weedy, unkempt Garden. He pic- question is provided by the story itself. In pur- tured Adam as an ape-man dragging his suing his true love, Cunegonde, from one knuckles on the ground and Eve as a foul- adventure to another, Candide is pursuing smelling slut with dirt under her fingernails. happiness. How can happiness be found? Instead of Eden, Voltaire celebrated the That is the question posed by the novel, as by world of wit and beauty enjoyed by the rich the entire French Enlightenment, and the an- and the well-born in "le monde." Happiness swer can be reformulated as "Happiness lies was not to be found in paradise but in Paris, in the cultivation of our garden." not in the afterlife but in the here and now. Of the many glosses on the text, four "Terrestial paradise is where I am," con- stand out: Stoic withdrawal (by shutting cluded "Le Mondain." It was an Epicurean themselves up in the garden, Candide and credo, flung in the face of the church, and his companions turn their backs on politics); it captured the spirit of salon society in the pastoral utopianism (the little society sup- early 18th century. But it had nothing to say ports itself by farming, cutting itself off from to most of humanity, which lived in misery commercial capitalism); secular salvation outside the salons. through work (everyone in the group labors By 1758, Voltaire had seen more of the hard, thereby staving off poverty, boredom world. But he did not cease to delight in the and vice); and cultural engagement (cultiva- good things of life. The last chapter of tion means commitment to the cause of civi- Candide includes a description of the hospi-

Robert Darnton is Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of European History at Princeton University. He is the author of, among other books, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982) and The Forbidden Best Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995). This essay is adapted from a lecture given in Tokyo on October 6,1993, to celebrate the opening of the Javanese Institute for Advanced Study, and draws heavily from the following works: Robert Mauzi, L'idke du bonheur dans la littkrature et la penske franqaises au XVIIIe sihcle (1979);Howard Mumford Jones, The Pursuit of Happiness (1953); Ursula M. von Eckardt, The Pursuit of Happiness in the Democratic Creed (1959); and Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (1982).

44 WQ AUTUMN 1995 tality offered by a philosophic Turk, whose in hallowed ground. Therefore, it was little farm provides a model for Candide's: dumped in a ditch and covered with quick- exquisite sorbet, a fine selection of fruits and lime to speed its decomposition. nuts, "mocca coffee which was not mixed with the bad coffee of Batavia" (Voltaire his obscene act obsessed Vol- was a coffee addict), courteous service by taire right up to the moment of the two daughters of the host, and intelli- his own death, when he feared gent conversation. Candide had received that his body would receive the the same kind of hospitality, though on a same treatment. It appears in grander scale, from the philosopher-king of someT of his most impassioned poetry, in the Eldorado, the utopian society described in Lettres philosophiques, and even in Candide. In the middle of the novel. Voltaire himself chapter 22, Candide visits Paris and is told offered it to visitors at Les Dklices and later the story in all its horror. He then remarks: at Ferney. What distinguished this kind of "That [was] very impolite." Not what we good life from the Epicureanism advocated would expect by way of a comment on a bar- by the young Voltaire in "Le Mondain"? barism that had set a lover's blood to boil. The setting, for one thing. Candide But Voltaire filled the word "polite- settled his community at the eastern edge of ness" with a passion that may escape the European civilization, just as Voltaire estab- 20th-century eye. The first characteristic lished his estate at the eastern boundary of Candide noticed among the inhabitants of France, far from Paris and far from politics. the utopian society of Eldorado was their ('1 never inform myself about what is going "extreme politeness." He marveled at their on in Constantinople," the philosophic Turk good manners, elegant clothing, sumptuous tells Candide. Of course, Voltaire worked housing, exquisite food, sophisticated con- hard to keep himself informed about in- versation, refined taste, and superb wit. The trigues in the French capital, but he had cut king of Eldorado epitomized those qualities. himself off from court life. He had with- Like the philosophic Turk at the end of the drawn from "le monde," and he had book, he "received them with all imaginable changed his tone. A new note of anger and grace and invited them politely to supper." darkness crept into all his writing after he Utopia is above all a "soci6t6 polie" or fled from Frederick I1 and Berlin. He found "policke," which amounts to the same thing. himself increasingly confronted with un- The 18th-century notion of "police" happiness-and, worse, evil. could be translated roughly as rational ad- ministration. It belonged (conceptually, not onsider one of the unhappiest etymologically) to a series of interlocking moments in Voltaire's life. It terms-poli, police, politique-that extend occurred in 1730. His beloved from culture to politics. For Voltaire, the mistress, the great actress cultural system of the Old Regime shaded Adrienne Lecouvreur, sud- off into a power system, and the code of denly died after playing the lead in his trag- polite society belonged to the politics of edy, Oedipe. Voltaire had sat by her bed in enlightened absolutism. her last agony, and he may well have wit- The interpenetration of culture and nessed the unceremonious disposal of her politics is the main theme of Voltaire's most corpse. Death struck Adrienne Lecouvreur ambitious treatise, Le Siicle de Louis XIV before she had time to renounce her profes- (1751).This was a crucial work for 18th-cen- sion and receive Extreme Unction. As actors tury writers, a book that defined the liter- and actresses were excluded from the rites ary system of the Old Regime and that cre- of the church, her body could not be buried ated literary history in France. In it, Voltaire

HAPPINESS 45 ters the French language by studying the CANDIDE, works of Corneille, he controls the court by 0 U staging plays, and he dominates the king- dom by turning the court itself into an ex- L'OPTIMISME, emplary theatre. That idea may be a cliche now, but Voltaire invented it. He saw power as performance: the acting out of a cultural code. This code spread from Versailles to Paris, to the provinces, and to the rest of Europe. Voltaire does not deny the importance of armies, but he interprets the supremacy of Louis XIV as ultimately a matter of cultural hegemony. The script for his court tour de force was written by Molisre, whom Voltaire describes both as a "philosophe" and as "the legislator of the code of conduct in polite society" ("le legislateur des bienseances du monde.") However anachronistic and inaccurate, this view of history conveys something more MDCC LIX. than the chase after the good things in life in "Le Mondain." It conveys direction, purpose, power-something akin to the "civilizing process" of Norbert Elias. It also demotes kings effectively argued that all history is literary and puts philosophes in their place as the true history. Kings, queens, and generals do not masters of history, and it makes the historical count in the long run, although they attract process look progressive-uneven, to be sure, most of the attention of their contemporar- but one in which barbarism retreats before the ies and occupy a good deal of Voltaire's forces of politeness. narrative. What matters above all is civili- Candide finally joins those forces. He zation. So, of the four "happy" ages in the becomes a philosophe-not a false philoso- history of mankind, the happiest of all was pher, like his tutor Pangloss, but a true one, the age of Louis XIV, when French literature who opts for engagement instead of with- reached its zenith and the politeness ("la drawal. His pursuit of happiness, in the politesse et l'esprit de societe") of the French person of Cunegonde, does not lead to a court set a standard for all of Europe. happy ending. When he finally marries her, By civilization, Voltaire meant the mov- she has become ugly and disagreeable. But ing force in history, a combination of aes- the pursuit has taught him to commit him- thetic and social elements, manners and self to something more substantial: polite mores ("moeurs"), which pushes society society, or the process of civilization. toward the ideal of Eldorado, a state in which men are perfectly "polis" and "po- he pursuit of Happiness" is lices." So Voltaire understood politesse as even more familiar to Ameri- power, and he saw an essential connection cans than "We must cultivate between classical French literature and the our garden" is to the French. It absolutism of the French state under Louis 1 is the most memorable phrase XIV. This argument underlies the key epi- in the American Declaration of lndepen- sodes of Le Siicle de Louis XIV. Louis mas- dence, the rhetorical climax to Thomas

46 WQ AUTUMN 1995 Jefferson's enunciation of natural rights and mentaries.) In fact, Locke was so important that revolutionary theory: "We hold these truths many scholars have considered him the to be self-evident, that all men are created grandfather of the American Declaration of equal, that they are endowed by their Cre- Independence, which advanced a contractual ator with certain inalienable Rights, that theory of government that seemed to come amongihese are Life, Liberty, and the pur- straight out of his Second Treatise on Civil Gov- suit of Happiness." What did Jefferson ernment (1690). mean by "the pursuit of Happiness?" And The Second Treatise certainly provides what does his meaning have to do with a grounds for asserting a right to revolution subject that belongs to the history of men- if the government violates its contractual talities-namely, "the American way of obligations to the citizenry. But a right to life"? happiness? Locke kept to the usual trinity- Analysts of political discourse often de- "life, liberty, and property." In his Essay termine meaning by showing what is not said Concerning Human Understanding (1690), as well as what is said. "Life, liberty, and prop- however, he stretched "property" into erty" was the standard formula in the politi- "lives, liberties, and estates," and then went cal debates of the English-speaking world on to talk of "that property which men have during the 17th and 18th centuries. In substi- in their persons as well as goods." In doing tuting "the pursuit of Happiness" for prop- so, he shifted ground from law to psychol- erty, the Declaration of Independence devi- ogy. Property in one's person implied the ated significantly from other founding char- liberty to develop the self, and self-develop- ters-the Petition of Right and the Declaration ment for Locke was an epistemological pro- of Rights connected with the English revolu- cess. It took place when men combined and tions of 1640 and 1688, for example, and the reflected on sensations, the primary signals declarations of the American Stamp Act Con- of pleasure and pain, according to the progress of 1765 as well as the First Continental cedure described in the Essay. Thus, the sen- Congress of 1774. If "the pursuit of Happi- sationalism of Lockers epistemology could ness" is to be viewed as a speech act, its meaning must consist, at least in part, in an implicit comparison with the right of property. By omitting property from his phrasing, did Jefferson reveal himself to be a secret socialist? Can Americans cite him today in order to legitimate demands for social welfare legisla- tion and to oppose the advocates of minimal, laissez-faire government? Before tearing Jefferson out of the 18th century and plunging him into the midst of our own ideological quarrels, it would be wise to ask how "happiness" resonated in the context of his time. As a philosophically minded lawyer, he had a thorough knowledge of the natural law tradition, which went back to Plato and Aristotle and was formulated for the law students of his generation by Locke, Pufendorf, Burlamaqui, and Blackstone. The most important of these was Locke. (Jefferson had a personal distaste for Blackstone's Com-

HAPPINESS 47 be combined with the natural rights of his piness is not opposed to property but is an ex- political theory in a way that would open tension of it. the road to the right to happiness. In short, Jefferson made no pretense to originality. Locke, too, was a philosopher of happiness. He described his statement of principles as the He said so himself: "As therefore the high- mere "common sense of the subject." And a est perfection of intellectual nature lies in a half-century later, when he discussed the careful and constant pursuit of true and Declaration of Independence in a letter to solid happiness, so the care of ourselves that James Madison, he explained further: "Nei- we mistake not imaginary for real happiness ther aiming at originality of principle or sen- is the necessary foundation of our liberty." timent, nor yet copied from any particular and But Jefferson did not need to combine previous writing, it was intended to be an passages from the two John Lockes, the Locke expression of the American mind." of the Second Treatise and the Locke of the Es- say Concerning Human Understanding, because ommon sense" and "the the work had already been done for him by American mind-we are en- his friend George Mason. Mason was the one tering territory the French call who did the most to stretch "property" into "the history of mentalities," "happiness" in the philosophical deliberations and which I would prefer to of Virginia's radical squierarchy. Like Jeffer- describe as anthropological history. The son, Mason had a library packed with the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz works of philosophers, ancient and modern, has analyzed common sense as a "cultural in Gunston Hall, his country estate. Having systemn-that is, as an admixture of atti- worked through this material while partici- tudes, values, and cognitive schemata that pating in the agitation over the Stamp Act, ordinary people use to make sense of the Mason drafted a series of manifestos about world. Ordinary people, not philosophers. representative government and natural rights. True, Jefferson, Madison, Mason, and their He discussed them with like-minded country crowd look like American-style gentlemenÃ‘Georg Washington, Thomas Jef- philosophes. And when compared with ferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry- today's statesmen, they look like giants. But around dinner tables and through correspon- they were also Virginia farmers who inhab- dence. He debated them in free-holder meet- ited a common-sense world of tobacco plan- ings, held in the brick courthouse of Fairfax tations, Georgian manor houses, Episcopal County, in 1774 and 1775. churches, county courts, taverns, horse Then, in May 1776, the Virginians met at races, and (let us not forget it) slavery. The Williamsburg and declared themselves inde- plantations kept them separated from one pendent of Great Britain. Mason provided the another in semiautonomous units ordered philosophic justification for this revolutionary according to patriarchal principles. The step by drafting a "Declaration of Rights," churches and courthouses drew them to- which included the phrase: "All men are cre- gether in settings that reinforced the social ated equally free and independent, and have hierarchy. The taverns and horse races gave certain inherent natural rights . . . among them a chance to vent their passions and which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, strut their status. And the slavery indicated with the means of acquiring and possessing the limitations of statements such as "all property, and pursuing and obtaining happi- men are created equal." ness and safety." Mason's wording runs ex- This contradiction did not weigh too actly parallel to the famous phrase that heavily with men who thought of them- Jeffersonwrote into the Declaration of Inde- selves as successors to the slave-holding pendence a month later. It suggests that hap- patricians of Augustan Rome. Their librar-

48 WQ AUTUMN 1995 ies confirmed the message of their larders. Also, it should be added, the Horatian The classicism of their education echoed the glow dimmed during the next 16 years, a pe- classical architecture of their houses. Cicero riod when Monticello nearly collapsed into and Seneca rang true, because they con- bankruptcy and its master felt increasingly formed with the values of order and hierar- alienated from the Jacksonian variety of poli- chy given off by the everyday surroundings tics, a speculative surge of capitalism, and an in ~ir~inia.So did Locke, the spokesman of evangelical revival of religion. By cultivating a Whig aristocracy aligned against an alien, his garden in Monticello, Jefferson withdrew absolutist monarchy. In short, the philoso- from the world-unlike Voltaire, who used phizing fit the social environment, not as an Ferney as a fortress for conquering it. ideological afterthought but as the reflective gentleman's way of making sense of what f Jefferson himself found an increasing his common sense already proclaimed. disparity between his ideals of the "Sense" in this respect belonged to what 1770s and the realities of the 1820s, how Max Weber called "Sinnzusammenhang,~' did Americans see any continuity at all or "elective affinities": it was a way of or- between his way of life and theirs dur- dering reality. ingI the next century-and-a-half? Horatian How did the Virginians describe reality Jeffersonianism and industrial capitalism in more casual moments, when they were not seem so far apart that one would think they composing theoretical manifestos? Here is have nothing in common. Yet they are bound Jefferson again, writing from his country es- together by a common thread: the pursuit of tate in 1810: happiness. As the intellectual historian Howard Mumford Jones has shown, that theme pro- I am retired to Monticello, where, in the vides one of the leitmotifs of American ju- bosom of my family, and surrounded risprudence. If, as the Declaration of Inde- by my books, I enjoy a repose to which I have been long a stranger. My morn- pendence proclaims, I have a right to hap- ings are devoted to correspondence. piness, shouldn't the courts enforce it? Un- From breakfast to dinner, I am in my fortunately, the Declaration of Indepen- shops, my garden, or on horseback dence did not become part of constitutional among my farms; from dinner to dark, law, except as it was rewritten in the form I give to society and recreation with my of the Bill of Rights, and the Bill of Rights neighbors and friends; and from candle does not mention happiness. The state con- light to early bedtime, I read. My health stitutions, however, do. Two-thirds of them is perfect; and my strength consider- have adopted some variant of Jefferson's ably reinforced by the activity of the phrase. So for more than a century Ameri- course I pursue. . . . I talk of ploughs and harrows, of seeding and harvest- cans have gone to court, suing their authori- ing, with my neighbors, and of politics ties and one another over a right they be- too, if they choose, with as little reserve lieve belongs to them by fundamental law. as the rest of my fellow citizens, and They have claimed the right to happiness in feel, at length, the blessing of being free order to set up massage parlors, sell contra- to say and do what I please. ceptives, and smoke opium. They have rarely succeeded, but their attempts indi- This is happiness, something embedded cate the prevalence of a general attitude- in the daily course of life. It is an American that the pursuit of happiness is a basic in- way of life-but closer to Horace and Virgil gredient of the American way of life. than to the America of Madison Avenue and Of course, a great deal besides constitu- Wall Street. tional law went into this cultural pattern. The

HAPPINESS 49 open frontier, the availability of land, the gold vision that was basically materialistic but rush, the seemingly endless opportunities for that inflamed imaginations throughout the getting rich and getting ahead-all oriented Old World, where millions struggled to get values around the notion of happiness in the out and to get ahead. The dream is still alive 19th century. In each case, happiness ap- today, although the immigrants generally peared as something to be pursued, not some- come from Latin America and settle in Miami, thing showered down from heaven; and the Houston, and Los Angeles. But its realization pursuit often led westward. In this respect, the remains an elusive goal to many African Jeffersonian ideal also provided a jumping-off Americans, whose ancestors-who did the point, because the agrarian, yeoman democ- work on Jefferson's plantation-were legally racy favored by Jefferson provided the ideo- excluded from its pursuit and who provided logical impulse for the conquest of the fron- a living witness to the tragic flaw in the tier. In the Northwest Territory Act and the American dream. Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson himself tried to shape the settlement of the West in a way that hat did not prevent the dream would perpetuate the society of farmer- from gathering more force in philosophes he had known in Virginia. the second half of the 20th cen- Horace Greeley and other publicists echoed tury. Technology seemed to this idea when they proclaimed, "Go West, bring happiness within the young man!" reachT of nearly everyone, because it pro- The real impulse, however, was vided the means of controlling the envi- money, money and land, the chance to get ronment, of enjoying pleasure and miti- rich quick. The gold rush precipitated a gating pain. The point may be so obvious general Drang nack Westen. Ever since that we cannot see it, because we have be- 1848, it has seemed that the whole coun- come insulated from the pains of every- try has tried to move to California. I am day life that existed in the age of Jefferson. exaggerating, of course, because the great If I may provide a homely example, I waves of immigrants who were carried would cite George Washington's teeth. across the Atlantic during the late 19th Washington had terrible teeth. He lost and early 20th centuries generally washed them, one by one, and finally acquired a onto the East Coast and emptied them- full set of false teeth, made of bone, lead, selves in the slums between Boston and and gold. The "Father of Our Country" Baltimore. Many of the poor from Kiev and the toothache-it seems incongruous, and Naples never got farther west than but having read thousands of letters from the East Side of Manhattan, although their the 18th century, I often think of the dread descendants usually crossed the Hudson of rotting teeth, the horror of the itinerant and settled in the suburbs of New Jersey- tooth puller, the sheer pain in jaws every- not exactly in Jeffersonian freeholds but where in the early modern world. Den- on their own plots of land, in houses with tistry may not look like a particularly gardens and white picket fences, which noble calling, but it has weighed heavier turned into the new version of the Ameri- than many professions in the hedonistic can dream. To such people, America re- calculus we have inherited from Epicurus ally was the land of opportunity, even if and Jeremy Bentham. it took two generations to extricate them- To dentistry, add medicine in general, selves from the slums, even if suburbia vaccination, public hygiene, contraception, was a far cry from the Oregon Trail. insurance, retirement benefits, unemploy- Thus did the Jeffersonian vision become ment compensation, lightning rods, central transformed into the American dream, a heating, air conditioning . . . the list could

50 WQ AUTUMN 19 95 go on forever, because it leads through the along with sermonizing about the "City on endless array of goods we associate with the a Hill," or colony of saints. While Thomas so-called consumer society and the services Jefferson expanded on Locke, Jonathan we expect of the "welfare state." I know that Edwards defined happiness as follows: these are hard times for millions of Ameri- cans and that my remarks may sound hol- The sight of hell torments will exalt the low. But I have spent so much time in the happiness of the saints forever. It will 18th century that I cannot fail to be im- not only make them more sensible of the greatness and freeness of the grace pressed with how much control man has of God in their happiness; but it will gained over his environment in the 19th and really make their happiness the greater, 20th centuries. as it will make them more sensible of The pursuit of happiness in America their own happiness; it will give them has spilled over from science and technol- a more lively relish of it. ogy into popular culture, a favorite subject for historians of mentality. The most Americans have been avid consumers of exotic varieties bloom in southern Califor- anti-utopian literature: 1984, Animal Farm, nia: hot tubs, "perfect" waves, "deep" Brave New World, and dark varieties of science massage, fat farms, love clinics, and fiction. They also have produced a vast therapy of every conceivable kind, not to amount of pessimistic literature, from mention the happy endings that still pre- Hawthorne and Melville to T. S. Eliot, Kurt vail in Hollywood. This kind of popular Vonnegut, and John Updike. The Civil War, culture can easily be caricatured, but it the closing of the frontier, the Great Depres- cannot be dismissed easily, because it has sion, the Beat generation, and the antiwar ac- spread throughout the country and now tivists of the 1960s represented so many stages the world. One encounters the face of "Joe of disillusionment with the American dream. Happyt'-a circle with a smile in it-ev- Most young people today feel they live in a erywhere: pasted on windows, pinned in world of limited resources rather than unlim- buttonholes, even, I have found, dotting ited opportunity.Public opinion polls indicate the i's in students' papers. Along with the that they do not expect to do better than their current greetingÃ‘nhav a nice dayu-it parents. If they no longer worry about a expresses the thumbs-up, bright-eyed and nuclear catastrophe and the Cold War, they bushy-tailed form of public behavior that sense economic contraction and ecological can be so annoying to Europeans, who disaster everywhere. In the face of the AIDS prefer the limp handshake, the down-at- epidemic, many of them feel angry-at the the-mouth Gauloise, and the cafe slouch government and at the world in general, for as a style of self-presentation. AIDS represents the ultimate denial of the pursuit of happiness as a way of life. f course, many other strains Second, those who continue to believe in run through the patterns of happiness as an end often pursue it with an culture in everyday America, earnestness that looks self-contradictory. and many run counter to the They take up extreme forms of asceticism. pursuit of happiness. In or- They diet, they jog, they lift weights, they de- der0 to situate the motif of happiness within prive themselves of tobacco, meat, butter, and the pattern as a whole, it is important to all the pleasures that Falstaff categorized un- keep three considerations in mind. First, der the rubric "cakes and ale." To what end? America has always contained a vocal mi- To live forever? Aging has now become a nority of cockeyed pessimists. The Ameri- major industry in America, and the American can jeremiad arrived on the Mayflower, way of life has evolved into the American way

HAPPINESS 51 of death-that is, the subculture of funeral civilization in general. "homes" and pastoral cemeteries that dress What to make of it all? The leitmotifs in death up so prettily as to deny it. But most of patterns of culture do not lead to bottom lines, America's worldly ascetics have transformed so I will not try to end with a firm conclusion. the old Protestant ethic into a new cult of the Instead, let me cite two examples of the pur- self. Self magazine, the "me generation," and suit of happiness I recently came upon. The the appeals to building a better body and de- first expresses the technical, commercial, and veloping a more assertive or better-balanced individualistic strain. Dr. Raymond West an- personality all express a general egoism that nounced a couple of years ago that "happiness looks like the opposite of the Stoical and Pu- is a warm stethoscope," and offered a new ritanical varieties of self-discipline practiced invention to an astonished world: a stetho- by the Founding Fathers. scope warmer, which would make health Egocentric asceticism brings us to the checkups more pleasurable and abolish for- third point, John Kenneth Galbraith's charac- ever the unpleasurable sensation of "ice- terization of the American way of life as "pri- cubes on the back." vate wealth and public squalor." Despite food stamps and Social Security, the welfare state he second example is less trivial. never made much headway in the United It expresses the collective end of States. True, the national parks and some of the American republic as it was the state systems of higher education opened originally defined by Thomas the door to happiness for many millions. But Jefferson, and it comes from the the consumer culture (we do not have a na- inauguralT address President Clinton deliv- tional sales tax) and the cult of rugged indi- ered in January 1993: vidualism (we do not stand in line at bus stops) stood in the way of state-sponsored When our founders boldly declared projects to assure a minimal degree of happi- America's independence to the world ness for the entire population. and our purposes to the Almighty, they knew that America, to endure, would Roosevelt's New Deal, launched to have to change. Not change for the tune of "Happy Days Are Here change's sake, but change to preserve Again," provided no answer to the prob- America's ideals-life, liberty, the pur- lems of poverty and racism. Those prob- suit of happiness. lems continue to fester at the center of our cities, while individuals pursue their per- Noble words. But Clinton would do well sonal welfare in the private enclosures of to think of Washington as well as Jefferson- our suburbs. It is, I believe, a national dis- Washington the statesman and Washington grace, but it is also a general problem- the victim of tooth decay. Imagine Washing- one that goes back to the opposition be- ton sitting down to a banquet in Candide's tween the private and the public varieties garden. If we are ever to bring together the of happiness that were incarnated in two ways of pursuing happiness, the indi- Voltaire and Rousseau, and back even fur- vidual and the social, we should follow ther to the Epicureans and the traditions Washington's example, set our jaws firmly, of antiquity. While remaining rooted in grit our teeth, tuck in, and dedicate ourselves the Jeffersonian tradition, the American to the public welfare. Such, at least, is the view pursuit of happiness shares promises and of one American at a moment when the wel- problems that have characterized Western fare state looks as beleaguered as Monticello.

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