Americans pursue happiness like nobody else ever has – and our Declaration of Independence even pays tribute to our God-given “unalienable Rights” that include “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But how well do we pursue that happiness? Consider: The U.S. shows up as just the 24th-happiest country in the 2024 World Happiness Report, while mental illness, substance abuse and suicide rates are among the worst on the planet, particularly among wealthy nations.
Are we simply looking in the wrong places for happiness?
In short, absolutely. And it’s crippling the republic to have so many restless and wayward souls bumping into each other, often in conflict and almost always in a morass of self-obsession.
George Washington talked of the connection between personal self-governance and political self-governance in a free country – because the two are inextricably linked. How can we govern a country if we can’t even govern ourselves?
“When individuals failed to exercise self-control, they were plagued by anxiety; when groups failed to exercise self-control, they descended into factions and mobs,” Jeffrey Rosen, CEO emeritus of the National Constitution Center, writes in his 2024 book The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.
“In both cases, emotional self-regulation was the key to individual and collective happiness.”
The one thing that can save America
Our nation’s Founders, schooled in the wisdom of the ancients, knew the utter folly of thinking that fleeting pleasures are the path to happiness. So, what did they consider the pathway to be?
One thing in particular – and it happens to be the one thing our parents, our schools and our churches must teach once again if we’re to turn this nation around:
Virtue.
In other words, inner moral clarity and good character.
“For the Founders,” Rosen writes, “the pursuit of happiness included reading in the wisdom traditions of the East and West, always anchored by the canonical text of the Bible, in an attempt to distill their common wisdom about the need to achieve self-mastery through emotional and spiritual self-discipline. …
“Aristotle famously defined happiness as virtue itself …”
Indeed, the Founders were largely echoing the teachings of Epictetus, Seneca, Cicero and others who argued that virtue alone is necessary for a happy life.
In addition, the Bhagavad Gita, Rosen writes, “contains the central lesson about the pursuit of happiness that Adams and Jefferson had learned from Pythagoras’s Golden Verses and Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations: that we are what we think, and life is shaped by the mind; that happiness requires virtue, and virtue requires the cultivation of daily habits of self-mastery and mental tranquility; that we should think and act mindfully rather than impulsively, using our powers of reason to moderate our ego-based passions; and that we should do good for its own sake rather than acting with any expectations about the reactions of others. …
“Adams and Jefferson agreed that the pursuit of happiness was the goal of life, tranquility of mind the key to the pursuit of happiness, and moderation of the passions the key to tranquility of mind.”
Quoting English poet Alexander Pope, Abigail Adams wrote to her son that “Virtue alone is happiness … and consists in cultivating and improveing every good inclination and in checking and subduing every propensity to Evil.”
“Moreover,” Rosen notes, “Abigail warned that self-control could be obtained only by rigorous daily self accounting, ‘the knowledge and study of yourself.’”
In sad contrast, since roughly the 1960s the study of self has meant cultivating one’s passions and supposed needs – as well as bitterly chronicling society’s alleged deprivations of those wants and needs. And now the grievance industry is booming.
Everything is always someone else’s fault. Someone else – certainly not me – must be held accountable for my problems.
The result is a growing pool of miserable toddlers in adult bodies throwing temper tantrums, along with trays of fast food, whenever they consider their immediate needs unmet – which society is supposed to consider a five-alarm fire with a child trapped inside, as it were.
One of the hallmarks of emotional maturity and self-mastery is one’s patience for delayed gratification – a quality rarely seen in today’s I-want-it-now culture.
Is public virtue even possible today?
“Like Hamilton and Madison,” Rosen writes of Adams and Jefferson, “they disagreed about whether Americans as a whole could achieve the personal self-government necessary for political self-government on a large scale. …
“Adams doubted that virtue could be taught on a wide scale.”
James Madison re-enactor, Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia
This must be our task, then, if the republic is to endure: In parenting, in education and in role-modeling, we must endeavor to prove John Adams wrong about us.
We must become a virtuous people again.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” Adams noted. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Benjamin Franklin warned. “As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
“There can be no independence without a large share of self-dependence,” former slave and legend Frederick Douglass added, “and this virtue cannot be bestowed. It must be developed from within.”
“In his 1841 essay ‘Self-Reliance,’” Rosen writes, “which influenced Frederick Douglass and Lincoln, [Ralph Waldo] Emerson set out his vision of the self-mastered individual, following the dictates of conscience rather than those of the crowd, displaying the ‘character’ that comes from ‘ancient virtue’ – namely, ‘self-dependent’ and ‘self-derived,’ moved by ‘the Spartan fife’ rather than the ‘gong for dinner,’ by virtue rather than pleasure.”
Where to look for happiness
The good news is, we know where to look for the kind of virtue that leads to true happiness: to the ancient philosophers, to our own Founders – and, most of all, to God.
“The only sure and permanent foundation of virtue is Religion,” Mrs. Adams wisely wrote.
In his iconic description of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the “doctrine of self-interest, properly understood.”
“In a succinct summation of the classical understanding of the pursuit of happiness,” Rosen writes, “Tocqueville wrote: ‘Philosophers teaching this doctrine tell men that, to be happy in this life, they must keep close watch upon their passions and keep control over their excesses, that they cannot obtain a lasting happiness unless they renounce a thousand ephemeral pleasures, and that, finally, they must continually control themselves in order to promote their own interests.
“This doctrine by itself ‘could not make a man virtuous, but it does shape a host of law-abiding, sober, moderate, careful, and self-controlled citizens … through the imperceptible influence of habit.’”
“The imperceptible influence of habit.” One of the most profound phrases you’ll ever come across.
Franklin’s 13 virtues
In a quest to form such habits, Franklin wrote down 13 virtues he believed were the attributes of self-mastery and self-improvement:
- TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
- SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
- ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
- RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
- FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
- INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
- SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
- JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
- MODERATION. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
- CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.
- TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
- CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
- HUMILITY
Franklin and the other Founders – several of whom studied virtue as well – weren’t perfect by any means, most conspicuously proved, of course, by their gaping blind spots on slavery. But neither were the ancients faultless – and neither are we.
The difference between us and them is, they at least were looking in the right places for happiness.
When will we?
