From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Thu Jan 10 2002 - 02:56:37 MST
"The Pursuit of Happiness"
Four Revolutionary Words
It's a small phrase when you think about it: "the pursuit of
happiness." It's somewhat over-shadowed in the Declaration of
Independence by the weightier notions of "life" and "liberty." In
today's mass culture, it even comes close to being banal. Who,
after all, doesn't want to pursue happiness? But in its own day, the
statement was perhaps the most radical political statement ever
delivered. And when we try and fathom why it is that the United
States still elicits such extreme hatred in some parts of the world,
this phrase is as good a place to start as any.
Take the first part: pursuit. What America is based on is not the
achievement of some goal, the capture of some trophy, or the
triumph of success. It's about the process of seeking something.
It's about incompletion, dissatisfaction, striving, imperfection. In
the late eighteenth century, this was a statement in itself. In the
Europe of the preceding centuries, armies had gone to war, human
beings had been burned at stakes, monarchs had been dethroned,
and countries torn apart because imperfection wasn't enough.
>From the Reformation to the Inquisition, religious fanatics had
demanded that the state enforce holiness, truth and virtue. Those
who resisted were exterminated. Moreover, the power and status
of rulers derived from their own perfection. Kings and queens had
artists portray them as demi-gods. Dissenters were not merely
trouble-makers, they were direct threats to the perfect order of the
modern state. This was a political order in which everything had
to be perfectly arranged - even down to the internal thoughts of
individual consciences.
Enter the Americans. Suddenly the eternal, stable order of divine
right and church authority was replaced by something far more
elusive, difficult, even intangible. Out of stability came the idea of
pursuit. To an older way of thinking, the very idea is heretical.
The pursuit of what? Where? By whom? Who authorized this? By
whose permission are you off on some crazy venture of your own?
Think of how contemporary Islamic fundamentalists must think of
this. For them, the spiritual and intellectual life is not about
pursuit; it's about submission. It's not about inquiry into the
unknown. It's about struggle for the will of Allah. Since the result
of this struggle is literally the difference between heaven and hell,
there can be no doubt about what its content is, or the duty of
everyone to engage in it. And since doubt can lead to error, and
error can lead to damnation, it is also important that everyone
within the community adhere to the same struggle - and extend
the struggle in a fight against unbelievers.
Today, we find this religious extremism alien. But it was not alien
to the American founders. The European Christians of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not so different in their
obsessiveness and intolerance from many Islamic fundamentalists
today. And against that fundamentalist requirement for
uniformity, the Founders of a completely new society countered
with the notion of a random, chaotic, cacophonous pursuit of any
number of different goals. No political authority would be able to
lay down for all citizens what was necessary for salvation, or even
for a good life. Citizens would have to figure out the meaning of
their own lives, and search for that meaning until the day they
died. There would be no certainty; no surety even of a destination.
Pursuit was everything. And pursuit was understood as something
close to adventure.
And then comes the even more radical part. The point of this
pursuit was happiness! Again, this seems almost banal to modern
ears. But it was far from banal in the eighteenth century and it is
far from banal when interpreted by the radical mullahs of political
Islam. Here's the difference. Before the triumph of American
democracy, governments and states and most philosophers viewed
happiness as incidental to something else. For Christians,
happiness was only achieved if you were truly virtuous. Happiness
was the spiritual calm that followed an act of charity; the satisfied
exhaustion after a day caring for others. For Aristotle, happiness
was simply impossible without virtue. Happiness was an
incidental experience while pursuing what was good and true. The
idea of pursuing happiness for its own sake would have struck
Aristotle as simple hedonism. The happiness someone feels
drinking a cold beer on a hot day or bungee-jumping off a bridge
was not a happiness he recognized. And for almost every pre-
American society, other goals clearly had precedence over the
subjective sense of well-being. Remember Cromwell's England?
Or Robespierre's France? Or Stalin's Russia? They weren't exactly
pleasure-fests. Again, in radical Islam today, American notions of
happiness - choice, indulgence, whimsy, humor, leisure, art -
always have to be subjected to moral inspection. Do these
activities conform to religious law? Do they encourage or
discourage virtuous behavior, without which happiness is
impossible and meaningless? These are the questions human
beings have always historically asked of the phenomenon we call
happiness.
Not so in America. Here, happiness is an end in itself. Its content
is up to each of us. Some may believe, as American Muslims or
Christians do, that happiness is still indeed only possible when
allied to virtue. But just as importantly, others may not. And the
important thing is that the government of the United States takes
no profound interest in how any of these people define their own
happiness. All that matters is that no-one is coerced into a form of
happiness he hasn't chosen for himself - by others or by the state.
Think of this for a moment. What America means is that no-one
can forcibly impose a form of happiness on anyone else - even if it
means that some people are going to hell in a hand basket. Yes,
there have been many exceptions to this over the years - and
America has often seen religious revivals, spasms of cultural
puritanism, cultural censorship, and so on. But the government
has been barred from the deepest form of censorship - the
appropriation of any single religion under the auspices of the
state. You can call this all sorts of things. In my book, it's as good
a definition of freedom as any. But to others - countless others - it
seems a callous indifference to the fate of others' souls, even
blasphemy and degeneracy. This view is held by some Christian
fundamentalists at home. And it is surely held by Islamic
Fundamentalists abroad. We ignore this view at our peril.
There are, of course, many reasons why America evokes hostility
across the globe. There are foreign policies; there are historical
failings. There is resentment of American wealth and power.
There is fear of the social dislocation inherent in globalization.
But there is also something far deeper. What we have forgotten is
how anomalous America is in the history of the world. Most other
countries have acquired identity and culture through ancient
inheritance, tribal loyalty, or religious homogeneity. Even a
country very like the United States, Britain, still has a monarchy
and an established church. If you told the average Brit that his
government was designed to help him pursue "happiness," he'd
laugh. Other developed countries, like Germany, have succumbed
to the notion of race as a purifying and unifying element. Many
others, like Pakistan or India, cling to a common religious identity
to generate a modicum of political unity. In none of these
countries is "happiness" even a political concept. And in none of
these places is the pursuit of something in and of itself an
admirable goal, let alone at the center of the meaning of the state
and Constitution.
And when the society which has pioneered this corrosively
exhilarating idea of happiness becomes the most powerful and
wealthy country on earth, then the risks of backlash increase
exponentially. In the late eighteenth century Europeans could
scoff at banal American encomiums to happiness as an amusing
experiment doomed to failure. At the beginning of the twenty-first
century, with the products of such happiness - from McDonalds to
Starbucks to MTV - saturating the globe, foreigners can afford no
such condescension. Happiness is coming to them - and moral,
theological certainty is departing. In response to this, they can go
forward and nervously integrate - as countries like China, South
Korea, and Russia are attempting. Or they can go back, far, far
back to a world which where such notions of happiness were as
alien as visitors from outer space.
Far, far back is where some in the Middle East now want to go.
The roots of Islamic fundamentalism go back centuries and
bypass many more recent, and more open, strains of Islam. And
we are foolish if we do not see the internal logic of this move. The
fundamentalist Muslims are not crazy. They see that other cultures
are slowly adapting to the meme of the pursuit of happiness - from
Shanghai to Moscow, from Bombay to Buenos Aires. They see
that they are next in line. But they also see that such a change
would deeply alter their religion and its place in society. So they
resist. They know that simply accommodating piece-meal to slow
change will doom them. So they are pulling a radical move - a
step far back into the past, allied with a militarist frenzy and
rampant xenophobia to buttress it. This move is the belated
response of an ancient religious impulse to the most radical
statement of the Enlightenment, which is why it is indeed of such
world-historical importance. As I write I have no idea as to the
conclusion of this new drama in world history - except that it will
have ramifications as large and as lasting as the end of the Cold
War.
What power four little words still have. And what carnage they
must still endure to survive.
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