In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. Charles Murray
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that, if adhered to, seems likely to evoke the same middle-class morality that so offended Russell about Aristotle’s Ethics.
John Stuart Mill went much further, identifying himself with man’s capacity for rational action as a fundamental source of true enjoyment and happiness. “It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognize the fact that some kinds of pleasures are more desirable and more valuable than others,” he wrote. “No intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base,” no matter how convinced they might be that doing so would yield them a greater amount of pleasure.22 Shortly thereafter, he adds:
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they know only their side of the question.23
Thus, briefly, some reasons for arguing that in the evolution of the concept of happiness an array of philosophers espoused quite different conceptual views of happiness that nonetheless had very similar
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behavioral implications. To borrow from V. J. McGill’s formulation in The Idea of Happiness: in Aristotle, virtue is the substance of happiness; in the post-Lockean revision, it is instrumental.24
The concept of happiness as employed by the Founding Fathers in general and Thomas Jefferson in particular reveals this easy coexistence of intellectually alien traditions. Jefferson was a good Lockean in his view of happiness as the constant pursuit of men. Indeed, he went beyond Locke, viewing the pursuit of happiness not just as something that men naturally did as a consequence of their human essence, but as an end of man ordained by natural law (or by God). A desire for happiness was itself part of man’s essence.25 But he also was drawn to the “moral sense” philosophy of Francis Hutcheson, and argued that “the essence of virtue is doing good to others.”26 Finally, bringing himself full circle back to a Lockean perspective, Jefferson rejected the public arena as a suitable place for virtue to manifest itself, putting it instead in the private sphere of effort and reward.27 As historian John Diggins summarized it, Jefferson “made happiness the end of life, virtue the basis of happiness, and utility the criterion of virtue.”28 In less elaborated ways, the other Founders shared this rough compromise between theoretical options and real ones in the pursuit of happiness: Men may do what they will to pursue their vision of happiness, as long as they do not harm others, but thoughtful men will behave as virtuous gentlemen.
THE SOCIOLOGISTS’ ALTERNATIVE, “AVOWED HAPPINESS”
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, people stopped talking about “happiness” as a philosophical construct. Howard Mumford Jones associated the demise of happiness with William James. No matter what tradition you endorsed, he argued, James left you adrift. With Pragmatism, James had dismantled the notion of happiness as a life lived in correspondence to immutable reason. With Varieties of Religious Experience, he had cast doubt on happiness grounded in theology. “And if happiness means the acceptance of things on the basis of right reason,” Mumford Jones wrote, “the place of rationality in consciousness is so considerably shrunken by a study of James’s The Principles of Psychology . . . that Locke seems for a time to be a mere museum piece.”29 Modern man was upon us.
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William James is not the only suspect in the case, but whether it was he or Freud or the quantum physicists who did in the classical concept of happiness is not the issue. Happiness as defined by Aristotle or the Enlightenment or the utilitarians depended on man’s being a recognizably rational, purposive creature. In the late nineteenth century, that assumption became intellectually untenable. By the time that the twentieth century dawned, the pursuit of happiness had become for the intellectuals a matter of healthy psychological adaptation. The man in the street might still be under the impression he was pursuing an Aristotelian ideal (not identified as such) of the virtuous life. But the scientific view had changed. For the twentieth century, Howard Mumford Jones gloomily concludes, “the problem of happiness is the problem of adjustment between the primitive subliminal urges of our hidden selves and the drab and practical necessities of every day.”30
If the pursuit of happiness is in reality the pursuit of adjustment, then happiness is a matter of whatever feels good, and the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of good adjustment—the therapeutic ethic, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan has termed it in a related context.31 Twentieth-century social scientists have accordingly been reluctant to treat happiness as a construct which may be predefined. Instead, they have worked from the notion of “avowed happiness.” If people say they’re happy, the moderns have said, let us assume they are reporting accurately and then try to ascertain what “avowedly happy people” have in common.
The technique can be as uncomplicated as the one used by Norman Bradburn in his pioneering survey for the National Opinion Research Center in 1961. His interviewers asked simply, “Taking all things together, how would you say things are these days—would you say you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy these days?”32 Another important study asked “How do you feel about your life as a whole?” and gave the respondent an opportunity to circle one of seven points on a scale ranging from “delighted” to “terrible.”33 An other technique has been to let the respondent define the extremes, then place himself at a point on that continuum. The best-known of these is called the “self-anchoring striving scale” developed by sociologist Hadley Cantril in a cross-national study.34 Or the investigator may obtain more specific ratings on a variety of scales (“boring” to
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“interesting,” “lonely” to “friendly,” and so forth) and sum them to obtain a composite measure as Angus Campbell and his colleagues did in the “Semantic Differential Happiness Scale” used in the landmark assessment of American quality of life sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation.35
I will not attempt a systematic survey of the outcomes of these studies, which in any case has been done quite well elsewhere.*36 Still, two general points about the modern social science literature regarding happiness are pertinent to my use of the concept of happiness.
The first point is that social scientists have not found happiness to be a particularly variegated phenomenon. In all cases, the concept of “satisfaction” plays a central role in describing happiness. In some studies (Cantril, Campbell et al.), satisfaction is treated as the chief operational component of “happiness.” An argument still rages about the elements of satisfaction (for example: Is satisfaction a function of the gap between aspiration and achievement? Or of the gap between aspiration and expectation?), but satisfaction itself, understood much the same way you probably think of the word, is indispensable.37
The second point is that momentary pleasures don’t seem to be very relevant to happiness. Social scientists have avoided making value judgments about worthy and unworthy types of happiness so that they could measure what people really thought as opposed to what they were supposed to think. But this open-mindedness has yet to reveal a widely held (or even narrowly held) notion of happiness grounded in hedonism.
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Listening either to evangelists or to the evening news, one gets the impression that living for the moment is a prevalent idea of the good life, but the surveys have found hardly anyone who says he adopts it for himself. Very few people actually seem to attach much importance to the fleeting pleasures of the flesh in deciding whether or not they are happy.
A Working Definition of Happiness
Thus some of the reasons that a highly specific definition of happiness is not necessary to a discussion of the pursuit of happiness. Whatever their starting points, and regardless of theoretical differences, people who think about what makes a life a happy one end up with much in common. If you apply your own definition, it is almost certain that it will share enough of the core characteristics I have just discussed to permit common understanding.
For