I caught myself up in an internal inside-my-head debate on happiness due to a search during HCR week on the web for "Nancy Pelosi, pursuit of happiness". After hearing her remarks on the passing of the final bill in House, I wanted to recall exactly what she said:
...we will honor the vows of our founders, who in the Declaration of Independence said that we are 'endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' This legislation will lead to healthier lives, more liberty to pursue hopes and dreams and happiness for the American people. This is an American proposal that honors the traditions of our country.
Nancy’s statements after the House vote set off a firestorm on the right when she mentioned that familiar phrase from the Declaration - “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Imagine, the Speaker of the House lauding a bill that protects the right to seek happiness, among other things. What unmitigated gall.
My simple search mentioned above provided links to a great deal of grief, anger, and fodder from the right-wing and others of some ilk besides progressive. Several articles are posted online that attempt to destroy the idea that ...
- government should have any hand in protecting those inalienable rights when they are threatened by economic forces.
- government, the community, or any individual citizen owns a civic responsibility to provide some equality in that protection for all members of the society.
Note the following from a post in the Atlantic Sentinel a few weeks back:
There is nothing in the Declaration of Independence nor in the Constitution nor in the Bill of Rights that prescribes that Americans bear an active responsibility for ensuring that others may pursue happiness as much as themselves. That responsibility is entirely passive in that they may not infringe upon the rights of others, for every man has equal rights which apply equally to every man.
Speaker Pelosi’s and President Obama’s reading of “the pursuit of happiness" is gravely misguided therefore. It is not the government’s place to better the people’s well-being.
Therefore.
But wait! Civic responsibility! It’s kinda right there in the Preamble of the Constitution. Recall “promote the general welfare..."? We the people?
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
(emphasis mine)
Too many years have gone by since I taught civics, and my chemo-affected brain wheels don’t spin quickly. The brief moments I taught social studies and civics twenty years ago still reinforce my belief that high school students should be required to take at least one well-taught class on philosophy for a nominal exposure to the philosophical foundations that underlay an American’s civic responsibility. That phrase, especially "promote the general welfare", refers directly to an active civic participation, not a passive existence, under the canopy of our Constitution.
One could argue that insuring "domestic tranquility" is part and parcel of the pursuit of happiness, but that’s a discussion for another day.
The term "pursuit of happiness" resides in the Declaration of Independence, placed there by Jefferson, perhaps with thoughts of Paine or of Locke or Home, or by one of the drafting committee members during Jefferson’s submission of his first draft of the Declaration.
There are also debates you can view across the web that discuss why "pursuit of happiness" wound up in the Declaration as an inalienable, or unalienable (discussion on that one here) natural right – a right granted by our Creator, whoever, whatever that Creator may be. Most academics suggest that Jefferson derived the turn of phrase, modified, from John Locke’s Second Treatise. Locke labors at clarifying a theory of property as it might exist in nature without government, before government Chapter V, section 27:
Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.
Further on in Locke’s Second Treatise, the phrase "property, that is, his life, liberty and estate" (Chapter VII, Section 87, Of Political or Civil Society) becomes a more all-encompassing definition of property, which delineates "estate" as just a portion of that property, not the specific material definition. Additionally, "Estate", as I decipher Locke, covers not only the tangible product of man’s labor, not only his possessions - be those land or things - but an even more ethereal body of thoughts, desires, and indeed, that "pursuit of happiness" that Jefferson chose over "property" in drafting the Declaration. Locke’s property is all things that attend to and distinguish the individual existence and distinct personality of man in nature, without the overlay of a civil society. Man engages in civil society to protect these natural, inalienable rights.
It made practical sense for Jefferson to veer away from using "property" as inalienable, given the need for a new nation to produce a taxation platform of its own against the physical property and commerce of its citizens. Jefferson was certainly aware that specifying “property" as a right would open up conflicts between the state and the individual. Thus, "pursuit of happiness" was inserted in the Declaration. As many suggest, this pursuit was not migrated in any formal way to the Constitution, though both life and liberty were reasonably covered in the Bill of Rights amendments. However, remember the Preamble to the Constitution and the reference to "general welfare"? The Constitutional justification of such pursuit, however generally defined, is inherent from the start. It is a right that our polity, formed by We, is entitled to protect.
Debates continue over the nebulousness, the sheer liberalness of "happy". And each generation coats "happiness" in its own special tumbler, shines up "happy" in different ways, through different means.
When "happiness", or the pursuit of liberty, or the pursuit of life itself is blocked, damaged, or destroyed by US economic structures that have defiled all three of those rights for a good third of our population, it seems clear to me that this is territory where we all have a responsibility towards preserving the general welfare of all citizens. I use a “third" of the population as reference, because our current healthcare system also affects and damages those who are underinsured through employment, those who pay exorbitant premiums out of pocket when self-employed, those who have "junk insurance" that doesn’t cover the good stuff, and those who wind up dropped from existing insurance due to reaching lifetime caps, or pre-existing conditions – not just the 45 to 50 million who are uninsured.
The pursuit of happiness is part of a civic responsibility in us all – it is in our benefit to seek and assist the pursuit of others in happiness, for by that general welfare we are all called on by the Constitution. We assure our own freedoms, our own liberties by assuring the inalienable rights of all. Our individually vested inalienable rights can only be strengthened and protected when we assist in the strengthening of the rights of others. This is not a passive request in our rule of law society. And the meaning of civil society has adopted this idea in many convolutions, through many forms of government since Plato’s time.
Those who seem to think that we do not, should not invest in a government that is charged with protecting these individual rights or enhance our laws to effectively represent our sensus communis (humor me) that all citizens are equal, are just plain uninformed.
My own pursuit of happiness has been the realization that happy is not a state for me; rather it is an appreciation of the things that get thrown into the pot of "happy" that are more important. That’s a bit of a dodge, forced as I am to define happiness in this mental gymnastic exercise – a thought we all might try. Slow down, think of happy. Roll over, how does it feel? Happy might be where you are or where you think you are going (what you are pursuing?), not who you are or what you have, or how much you have. It is intrinsically tied to life and liberty. We create government to protect these rights.
Measured on my own reduced time scale, I can say that cleaning out the things I once thought would bring me that state of appreciation has made it clearer that some simple things are just better suited for "happy", when the alternative relates to stress and anxiety and pain. Things like sleeping in one’s own bed as opposed to a hospital bed. Opening the refrigerator door in the middle of the night and finding the kids haven’t drunk all the milk. Realizing that I may not make it to Italy, or ever buy a house to live in, I'll be a renter to the end – even that understanding brings a settlement on the debt of happiness.
Throwing out the useless stuff, the clutter, the detritus of what doesn’t matter. Having the freedom, yes, the liberty, to have healthcare because I am now insured. How long? Don't know.
Silently counting in my head the number of eggs I’ve dyed over the years for three daughters, the egg malted milk balls purchased, the Easter dresses when they were young. Opening my eyes in the morning. Still being able to taste that vanilla one pump Grande latte. Acknowledging that I won’t do these things again, or at some future date I will no longer be able to. These are somehow, in some way, additions to that state of appreciation I’m in, not subtractions. These are choices I make, and for me, they fall under the category of pursuit.
Other things for other individuals – this is in the spirit of that near-indefinable, timeless phrase that Jefferson penned.
I’m still in training for my pursuit. That’s a hell of a reason to get up in the morning. One should always be in training for happy.
Sensus communis.