The Pursuit of Happiness

Once again, I’m promoting the excellent podcast Philosophize This! which talks about the history of philosophy. Stephen West has moved on to John Locke (episode no. 35), and I’m finding myself profoundly disturbed.

I learned about John Locke, inadvertently, when I studied the US Constitution when I was in school: “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; …” John Locke’s version of natural rights were “life, liberty and property“, and I’ll come back to that little switcheroo at the end.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on why the things going on in the US (and the rest of the world) disturb me so much at the moment, to point that I’ve been weaving in and out of depression. I think it’s that I grew up believing that this philosophy was, well, a bit “sacred and undeniable”: that all men were created “equal and independent”. So where does that make it okay to deport people without even correctly identifying them through due process? So all men are equal, but some men are more equal than others…(and for those of you who didn’t, as I did, spend a full year of their lives reading analysis essays about George Orwell’s Animal Farm because it was one of the selected texts for the Cambridge First Certificate, that’s where I’ve paraphrased that from.)

I mean, Jefferson’s idea was a really good one, and most of the people who grew up in the US believed in that. It made us feel like we were “one of the good guys” (and yes, I know, there are literally thousands of examples where the US was not one of the “good guys” but those examples felt like perversions, or maybe Cold War necessities of that time and context, and the US was mostly pretty carefully covering its tracks. If they were propping up South American or African dictators in the “war” against “communism”, it wasn’t like most that was being heralded in the evening news. Which was just the news, then. Which is maybe one of the reasons why many people don’t trust the news today, because that sort of stuff should have been talked about at the time. There were cover ups. And the people who were writing about it made really bad choices in fonts.)

And now for the switcheroo, changing “property” for “the pursuit of happiness”. These things seem so not synonymous, but it depends on where you put your emphasis. “Property” is the having of things, and “the pursuit of happiness” might just be….the pursuing of having things. Americans were maybe never intended, according to this phrase, to become the “haves” among the “have nots” of the world. They were intended to pursue their “having” and maybe never attain it.

This is obviously not a recipe for happiness, but it is a recipe to understand the way that many Americans equate “having stuff” with being happy. (If I could just buy that thing, have that kitchen, live in that house, buy that car, I will be happy). Many of the previous episodes of Philosophize This! talk about how this was not believed to be a long term foundation for real happiness among a whole slew of philosophers, and not just the eastern ones.

So what is happiness? For me, it’s having the capacity and leisure to learn about things. And being with Foro, of course. Never forget to be silly, and to laugh at yourself first and foremost.