Archer W.: Happiness is in our Declaration of Independence. Isn’t that awesome?
Philip Kennecott: It’s pretty radical, too. To actually have a government that isn’t just about, say, raising an army or using taxes to build bridges and roads or securing the peace, but to actually define what people would do with their freedom: the pursuit of happiness.
But you have to think about those words, “pursuit of”. The government’s not saying that they guarantee you happiness, and they’re not actually defining what happiness is. They’re just saying that you have the right to pursue what you think will make you happy. And what is that? What would the founding fathers have thought about happiness?
I think that the founding fathers might well have been thinking of this very old, ancient Greek idea that human beings thrived and prospered in communities, in states, in cities, and that their idea of happiness was basically an idea of being fully human and governing yourself. But today, we tend to just think of it as the right to make your own choices: Do I want a red shirt or a blue shirt? But lurking behind this for centuries has been another question, and that is: What if I can’t be happy if I don’t have a house, or I don’t have clothes, or I don’t have food to eat? Are those, like, necessary for the pursuit of happiness? And if I need those things to pursue happiness, does the government have any role in providing those things? And that’s been a kind of argument that from time to time we’ve had. Mostly, Americans have said, no, it’s just the right to choose. But every once in a while when things are tough, this bigger notion of what happiness is comes into the foreground.
Archer W.: Thank you, Philip. That was Philip Kennecott from the newsroom of The Washington Post.
