(An acquaintance pointed out that this was in the Declaration (I did have a "feeling"...🤔), not the constitution. I was taking a bit of a chance referring to the constitution when I wasn't quite clear in my memory whether it was the constitution or the Declaration. Should have looked it up, a quick glance at Google would have done. I'm so 20th-century, still relying on my memory and continually forgetting that we don't need memory anymore--we have Google! I'm not going to go through the whole post and change all the references to "Declaration" rather than "constitution;" the essential point, the linguistic speculation, remains the same 🙂).
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It is considered very insightful when a person points out that the American constitution enshrines not "happiness" as a right but rather the "pursuit of happiness."
Well, I suppose it's an insight, and a useful one, though it's voiced so often as not really to be an insight anymore and a bit of a yawner.
Still and all, yes, it's important: life comes with no guarantees of "happiness" (whatever that means, and that will, as it happens, be the point here). But as for life itself, and essential freedom, and the natural, instinctive human drive to attain something called "happiness," whether it pans out or not, they are indeed inalienably human, therefore essential human prerogatives and "rights."
Still, after we've made the useful distinction between a specious "right to happiness" and the more plausible right to pursue happiness, do we really know what we're talking about or, more to the point, what the constitution's writers had in mind?
The right to pursue what? What did "happiness" mean to them? Could "feeling just swell" really have been such a core value, a sort of Prime Directive in the universe they knew, that they'd have placed it right up there with very life and freedom as life's sine qua non components?
The three hills to fight and perhaps die for: life, freedom, and my retirement bungalow at the shore.
I've long felt that the "happiness" the popular (I'm being kind) culture understands, compared to the happiness denoted in the constitution, is a bit like a Disneyworld-souvenir-shop $3.00 Mickey Mouse watch compared to a $10,000 Longines.
If you're very quick to catch such subtleties, you might have noticed how I've used "perhaps" and "as it happens" here. Yes, intentionally. "Happy, perhaps, happen, happenstance," it's all connected. The attached article discusses it.
Those guys at the end of the 18th-century, they weren't devoting life and limb, with the very real prospect of finally being strung up as their reward, all for the sake of a mere seratonin surge, our right to get exactly the shade of mauve we insist on or else we'll drag the interior decorator's sorry backside to court.
The "happiness" it is our inalienable right to pursue (though not our inalienable right to get) might indeed make us feel quite good at times, at other times not so swell. Sometimes it will feel dreadful. Yet if we believe in it we will pursue it, because it's as organic, instinctive, inalienable as breathing. So what sort of happiness is it?
I suppose some modern rough equivalents would be words and phrases like "purpose, meaning, fulfillment, convictions, achievement, self-actualization, realization of potential."
It's a potpourri (or cornucopia?) of notions that, taken together, convey what I understand as the broad happiness-concept the constitution envisions.
Now the bundle doesn't of course forbid any seratonin-rush, your Piňa Colada on the hammock, your third semi-guilty cup of tea in the morning, or even your freedom to demand a "safe space" at work (or the company's freedom to say no). But these tangential outcomes are thoroughly divorcable (a word?) from the happiness the founding fathers meant. Cull them out, give them up, and essential "constitutional" happiness is undiminished.
In their language, at their time, in their sociocultural-historical context, laying their very lives on the line for their convictions, the idea that "the right to always feel nirvana-wonderful and unbothered by anything" was something the Fathers hallowed in the nation's founding charter is ridiculous beyond all expresssion.
The word "happy," along with its "-ness" and words like "happen, perhaps, happenstance, hapless, mishap, haphazard," comes to us after a long etymological history in which it arose as broadly indicating something like "the way things pan out," luck, fortune, occurrence.
We still hear it in usages like "I happened to see him yesterday," and "Perhaps [i.e., 'as per the possibilities, perchance'] it will rain."
A hapless person is a person nothing has worked out for, no matter his efforts. A mishap is an unfortunate occurrence.
Another intrinsic connotation of this word, from way back, has to do with what "fits," what really "works." The hapless person is a misfit, perhaps very unjustly and cruelly, but misfit status is what the poor hapless person is experiencing. Life just isn't working for him.
At a certain point this English "happy/happiness" notion (the cousins of which in other Germanic languages still mean "luck") took on an affective nuance--not just what happens to you or what you achieve but how you feel about it. The personal impression of contentment, gladness, the subjectively satisfying interpretation of one's circumstances as good, even perfect.
Never mind that the interpretation could be catastrophically wrong, in which case we can rightfully call the happiness itself a catastrophic delusion. Consider Brave New World, a book about very happy people....
America's Founding Fathers put their necks on the line, not in the service of our seratonin levels, but in the service of our inalienable right to strive after the realization and fulfillment of our God-given potential, our contribution (what today we call an "investment") to the world's best hopes and prospects.
Just an inalienable right? Or a duty?
