How to Reclaim the Pursuit of Happiness

By Joe Pitts

Sunday, April 23, 2023

 

It is impossible to understand America without reference to our Declaration and its bold proclamation that all Americans — in fact, all people — are “endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To borrow from Henry Olsen: It is impossible to separate the American project from the Declaration, just as it is impossible to understand Christianity apart from the commotion in Palestine circa a.d. 33, the crucifixion of a rebel rabbi from Nazareth.

 

Every major domestic political debate since our Founding has swirled around this proposition and the promise it contains. What does it mean to possess rights? Who possesses them? What is the “pursuit of happiness” made of? Unfortunately, in recent years, we have succumbed to what is really a perennial temptation: the belief that the pursuit of happiness, enabled by our natural rights, is defined entirely by choice. The more choice, the more freedom, and the more happiness — or so the logic goes. But our contemporary experience seems to contradict this theory.

 

This modern understanding of the pursuit of happiness is best articulated by former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in his opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

 

People today have more choices than ever. Not only can we choose from a cornucopia of foods and consumer goods. We are also empowered to choose our career, our lifestyle, our family, and our identity. We are even asked to define our own conception “of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

 

Our lives are defined by choice, and to live a life within the context of a particular community or tradition is looked down upon as “parochial” or “old-fashioned.” “Be freed from the constraints of society,” we are told, “and live a life of creativity and individuality!”

 

And there is something fundamentally good about this liberty we possess: We ought to reject caste systems that determine our destiny for us prior to our birth. America would not be America without the freedom of the individual to pursue happiness, and oftentimes on one’s own terms. As former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said in her speech to the Republican National Convention in 2012, “The essence of America — that which really unites us — is not ethnicity, or nationality, or religion. It is an idea — and what an idea it is: that you can come from humble circumstances and do great things. That it doesn’t matter where you came from but where you are going.”

 

But in the face of all this choice, most of us cannot help but feel that something is missing. We feel it in our bones, in the creeping sense that there is more to life than radical autonomy and independence. We seek more than anything to know ourselves and express our individuality, and yet it has become increasingly difficult for us to understand how that can even be accomplished. In wholeheartedly embracing the notion that “it doesn’t matter where [we] came from but where [we] are going,” we have forgotten that without places to come from, there are few places to go to.

 

It is no coincidence that in the richest nation in the history of the world, in which every person is empowered to make more personal choices than ever before, we struggle with historically high rates of mental illness, suicide, and deaths of despair. Choice, in itself, has not given our lives meaning. Despite the most dogmatic repetitions of modern philosophy, we are more than self-maximizing, self-creating individuals who find ultimate meaning in the unguided expression of our choices.

 

“He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god,” says Aristotle in his Politics. Let the history of the last hundred years, or even the last five hundred, be the test: There are no gods among us. And there are far too many suicides.

 

What our experience suggests is that our own individuality and creativity and, ultimately, our pursuit of happiness require the leaven of meaningful communities and traditions that give shape and structure to our desires. It is these communities and traditions that give us the foundation for flourishing and freedom. These communities and traditions channel our desires toward more-productive ends, inculcating an authentic freedom within us.

 

They give us a framework for understanding reality and making decisions, in a world that is deprived of such frameworks. And many today are not only without a compass. They are without the very means of navigating the oceans of their lives.

 

At the root of our contemporary misunderstanding of the “pursuit of happiness” is a warped conception of human freedom. Freedom today is understood as freedom-as-license, a belief that liberty from constraint is freedom rightly understood. Recovering a more ancient understanding of freedom — one that recognizes both freedom from external oppression and freedom from slavery to our passing whims and desires — would help us to restore meaning to our own lives, and to the lives of those around us.

 

To restore this deeper understanding of liberty, “we need more than the liberation of the individual from coercion,” as Yuval Levin writes. “We need a certain sort of moral formation.”

 

Should we reject the fruits of the modern economy and the wonderful choice it enables? We should not. We cannot turn back the clock, nor should we want to. What we must do, instead, is consciously cultivate the sort of intellectual, moral, religious, and local communities and traditions that enable us to make choices well. It is within these gardens of authentic freedom that we can be morally formed as free people.

 

And then — and here’s the kicker — we must choose to enter into them.

 

In a world of nearly unlimited choice, we find ourselves deprived of our humanity. We cannot fully realize the benefits of our enormous wealth, because we have allowed our affluence to blind us to the true nature of liberty and to a fuller understanding of happiness.

 

Now, more than ever, we require leadership, from the bottom up, that recognizes the authentic promise of freedom and provides a fuller account of human happiness. This leadership will not begin in Washington, D.C., but in our own neighborhoods; in our own backyards.

 

It will require everyday heroes doing the hard work of building a free and flourishing society: life-changing elementary-school teachers, inspiring pastors, honest businessmen and -women, dedicated local elected officials. And these everyday heroes will build new local institutions and restore old ones, with a vision to the future.

 

Our time does not just call for a Lincoln. It calls for many Lincolns, and Susan B. Anthonys, and Martin Luther King Jrs. Fortunately, our dynamism and wealth provide for us all the raw material to take on these roles in our communities at an unprecedented scale. We just have to choose to take advantage of them.

 

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us,” we are reminded by Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring. So let us choose well.