Something for This Holiday

The pursuit of happiness. It doesn't mean getting as much action as possible? Link. Excerpts:

For anyone who went to church in the 18th century, the "pursuit of happiness" was a familiar phrase. American preachers had delivered sermons on the subject for nearly a century, teaching that a benevolent God intended human beings to seek fulfillment in this life on the way to the next. Like the pious author of the 1767 "True Pleasure, Chearfulness, and Happiness, The Immediate Consequence of Religion," they agreed that to allege that "God himself does not delight to see his creatures happy" was blasphemous. . .

Yet the impetus behind the pursuit of happiness was as much classical as Christian. Like so many of his educated countrymen, Jefferson had read widely in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. And so he knew, with the philosophers Aristotle and Cicero, that happiness was the final end of human existence, the great goal of a life well lived. To pursue happiness was not only a law of human nature but the highest human calling, attained through discipline, self-sacrifice and reasoned moderation. Those who honored authorities beyond the Bible could gather momentum from the force of these ancient pursuits. . .

Did the "happiness" of the Declaration, then, simply mean personal pleasure in keeping with individual taste? In certain respects, yes--for, like Locke, Jefferson believed that happiness was ultimately in the eyes of the beholder. Hence the need for liberty to allow individuals to follow it where they best saw fit. No government could deign to tell its citizens where true happiness lay.

And yet it is essential to appreciate that Jefferson also held strong views on what constituted the highest source of happiness, the purest pleasure of them all. "Happiness is the aim of life," he affirmed, "but virtue is the foundation of happiness." No 18th-century Founder--whether a Christian, a classicist or a cultivator of simple pleasures--would have disagreed.

Here was the common assumption--what Jefferson called a "harmonizing sentiment"--that united Americans in their differences through the magic of e pluribus unum, making one of many. For in Christian, classical or Lockean terms, virtue at its highest meant serving one's fellow citizens, working for the public welfare, furthering the public good. It followed that virtue was the indispensable means to reconcile the conflicts of individual interest. However else they might differ in their understanding of the critical phrase, early Americans could agree that by pursuing the happiness of others, they helped to ensure their own.