The country has dramatically changed how it defines satisfaction
By Darrin M. McMahon
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE PROM-ises “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But if you’re lucky enough to live in states like Virginia, New Hampshire, Vermont, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and a number of others, your rights get even better: the 18th century constitutions of all these states spell out not only a right to seek happiness, but also to obtain it.
Of course, blandishments about happiness meant little to enslaved persons or the Indigenous. And there were others—from people struggling at the margins to women trapped in abusive marriages—for whom happiness was inconceivable at the time. We are quick to identify those shortcomings today, pointing out where the founders, for all their farsightedness, were blind. Yet, even as many have worked hard to extend rights more broadly and raise expectations along the way, we have lost sight of some essential aspects of happiness that the founders clearly had in mind.
Consider first that however restricted their views, the founders certainly raised expectations for many, and that was revolutionary in its own right. For most people, happiness was not considered something that could be counted on or controlled. Where life was hard and unpredictable, and the world and its ways uncertain, suffering was the norm. The best one could hope for was to get through it relatively unscathed.
Today, if you feel your right to happiness has been denied, you can bring it up with a lawyer. But before you take your case to court, it’s worth thinking about how the founders conceived of happiness—and how best to find it for yourself. For in many ways, Americans have been wrestling with that conception ever since the Declaration was signed.
To go back to the source, consider the word happiness itself, which in every Indo-European language is cog-E nate with luck: the English happiness, for example, derives from the Old Norse word happ, meaning precisely that—luck. Such wisdom was once widely received. “Call no man happy until he is dead,” exclaimed Solon, the great Athenian statesman, known for being one of the wisest men of ancient Greece. He and others knew that the gods were capricious and human fortune perilous, even for the luckiest. Christians for their part had traditionally conceived of happiness as a heavenly reward for God’s chosen, those who endured their earthly pilgrimage with sanctity and faith. But as for the pilgrimage itself, we should have no illusions: the world was a vale of tears. St. Augustine summed it up: “True
