THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

Rev. Mark Ward

Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

October 2 , 2011

I remember when I was a young adult in many ways dreading large family gatherings. Being relations, most of those attending were people I knew, but only tangentially, and so my interactions with them usually amounted to serial interviews: What are you doing now? And so on. With all this, though, there was always one who was determined to push past these social niceties and get at, you know, the real nub of things. And so, inevitably the question would come, “But are you happy?”

Am I happy? After a moment of deer-in-the-headlights blankness while my interlocutor gave me a meaningful look, I would hem and haw about how I wasn’t really sure. Or, if I was feeling talkative, maybe I might share some new insight, such as, “well I’m enjoying journalism.”

So, are you happy?

Ever since Thomas Jefferson asserted what he claimed to be the self-evident truth – a truth that admits no dispute – that we are all endowed by the facts of our births with the inalienable right – a right that cannot be taken away – to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” this question has hovered over our culture.

If we do, indeed, each have this right, then I guess we better be about it. I mean, happiness, right? Sounds pretty good. Except, as good as it sounds, it’s not always so clear what it is. From an early age we think we get happiness. Here it is, on the cover of your order of service, the smiley face. Yay! So, happiness must be what makes us smile . . . except not always.

Remember when you were young and you were in a dispute with someone over, say, the last piece of cake, and however it happened, you won. The cake was yours! But then the loser shot you a scowl and muttered, “Are you happy now?” Well, sure I’m glad that the cake is mine, but I’m not really happy that the other person is feeling bad and angry at me. So, maybe happiness isn’t just all about me.

Some years ago the philosopher Robert Nozick proposed a thought experiment around this. Let’s say that scientists created an experience machine that could stimulate your brain so that you constantly experienced pleasure. And let’s say we could keep you alive for the rest of your natural life, all your physical needs met, floating in a tank, blissed out. Should you plug into this machine? I mean, you’d be happy, right?

Nozick answered “no.” Plugging into such a machine, he said, “is a kind of suicide. . . . (It) limits us to an (artificial) reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct.” It is in the end a shallow way of being that deprives us of experiences of deeper significance. And most disturbing of all, he said, is that “you are alone in your particular illusion.” Friendship, love, altruism are all outside of your experience.

This debate over happiness in Western culture goes back some two and a half millennia to the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He argued that happiness is the ultimate end of all human striving. It is the one thing, he said, “that is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.” Yet he took some care to explore happiness consists of.

There is an element of pleasure, yes, but pleasure can also lead us to grief. There is an element of power, of having control over our circumstances, but power is easily corrupted. Aristotle’s understanding of “happiness” was broader than ours.

The Greek word that he used, eudaimonia, might be more accurately translated as “human flourishing.” What causes us to flourish is not always that which gives us immediate pleasure. We may, for example, sacrifice a potential pleasure for a greater gain. I could decide to share that slice of cake in the hope of getting back into my friend’s good graces. A more accurate summary of Aristotle’s notion of happiness might be "living well and doing well."

My own flourishing will be enhanced if I treat others well. It is bound up in the larger community. And so Aristotle argued that a happy life required the cultivation of virtues – he identified them as things like courage, temperance, liberality – that not only help us realize the best in ourselves but also create harmony in community.

This was the context in which Jefferson was writing when he was crafting the Declaration of Independence. We remember that his famous phrase was actually borrowed from the English philosopher John Locke, but with a twist. Locke said that our natural rights were to life, liberty and property. But as far as Jefferson was concerned amassing wealth was not one of the chief ends of living that the state should be concerned about.

Instead, he borrowed the Aristotelian notion of happiness, and identified the full flourishing of human life as a goal that the state ought to protect. It could not guarantee such a thing, for part of our flourishing depends on our own decisions. But, to Jefferson’s way of thinking, the state ought to uphold the right of its citizens to pursue it.

Now all this sounds so philosophical and wise, but it doesn’t necessarily answer the question of how we find happiness in our own lives. In these tumultuous times, we can be forgiven echoing Alexander Pope’s observation that happiness, celebrated as it may be, usually escapes us: “that something still which prompts the eternal sigh, which still so near to use, yet beyond us lies, o’erlooked, seen double by the fool and wise.” 

Sometimes our feelings incline a little more to this passage in the ancient book of Ecclesiastes that our “Understanding the Bible” class spent some time with last week:

 “All is vanity! What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun. A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down and hurries to the place where it rises. . . . All things are wearisome more than one can express.”

Aristotle himself said that one could not truly judge whether a person’s life was happy until his or her life was over. Small consolation that. In fact, he said one could never describe a young man as happy – sorry, Morgen – because his life had not been long enough to judge.

It’s interesting that Jefferson, though he was schooled in Aristotle, actually leaned in his personal life more closely to another Greek philosopher: Epicurus. Like Aristotle, Epicurus argued for a life of moderation and balance, but he said it was to be found in the judicious pursuit of pleasure. Jefferson gave a nod to this lifestyle, one that he said was dedicated to “ease of body and tranquility of mind.”

Later, though, as my colleague Gary Kowalski has pointed out, Jefferson’s perspective changed. By the time he had reached the presidency he began to feel that the Epicurean notions were a little too concerned with self fulfillment and not centered enough on the common good.

In his later writings, citing pamphlets he had received from his friend, the Unitarian minister Joseph Priestley, that made a case for a liberal, progressive view of religion, Jefferson argued that personal happiness required caring for others, drawing a wider circle of concern in our lives.

Hooked up to Robert Nozick’s experience machine, the good life loses its appeal if it amounts to little more than titillation. Equally, though, the dreariness of the complaints of Ecclesiastes can fade when we are able to make a connection beyond ourselves.

Cathy Smith Bowers, North Carolina’s poet laureate, writes about that sort of experience:

The year I got no valentines, she writes,

it was snowing deep outside.

I’d probably walked five miles on cardboard soles.

The boy behind me must have seen,

tried hard to muffle the sound

as he ripped his own big heart in two.

The part he handed me, said only, Be.

This past year we Unitarian Universalist ministers have all been wrestling with a common question, a question we have posed for ourselves as a way of helping us gain greater clarity about our own callings and the work of this religion. This process has been part of a campaign to help us reflect on what is demanded of ministry in these times and, with the funds that we and other congregations raise this Association Sunday, to begin developing tools and strategies that will help us meet those demands.

The question at the heart of this process is this:

Whose are we?

Certainly it is important that we as individuals to come to terms with our own identities, that we come to know and accept ourselves as we are and strive to name that which gives meaning to our lives. We in this congregation embody that conviction in the first half of our mission statement: as a Unitarian Universalist faith community, we seek to nurture individual search for meaning.

But as a religious movement we must also make the larger connection. Meaning occurs in a context, in the company of others and amidst a dazzling world. It signals the creating of a commitment, a stance we take in the face of the shower of confounding forces in our lives. Here we name that stance in the second half of our mission statement: to work together for freedom, justice and love.

The question, “Whose are we?” invites us to take that a step further, to acknowledge that we are not mere atoms bouncing around in space, that we are involved in the world around us and that there are claims upon on us.

Initially, for most of us this is not an especially controversial observation. We are parents, partners, children, siblings, friends. Each of those relationships implies a claim of some kind that other people have on us.

But are there any deeper claims upon us? Time was once that people saw the world as their playground to use or despoil as they pleased. But the more we learn about how life works on this planet, the more we appreciate the folly of that attitude, not to speak of how it has endangered our own future and that of the Earth. So, it is hardly a reach to open the circle of our concern to the circle of all life. Whose are we? We are the Earth’s, and we have a responsibility to its flourishing.

How much deeper can we go? Here we enter the realm of theology. How would it be to see ourselves as integral to all that is, woven deeply into the Web of existence? We reach a boundary where words no longer serve us well. We can speak of God, the holy, or perhaps just the mystery out of which all things emerge. Whatever it is, we are not divided from it, cast out to drift alone. There is somehow, somewhere the half of a torn Valentine heart offered to us, inviting us to “be.”

My wife, Debbie, tells the story of taking part in a summer workshop where participants were asked by the organizer to write down what they thought of when they thought about happiness. Most of the participants brought up peak experiences: childbirth, weddings, athletic successes, and so on. She, though, was among a minority who pointed instead to less dramatic occasions: being with friends for a simple dinner, or out hiking on a beautiful day.

This brings to mind Carl Sandburg’s image: leaving the philosophers “who teach the meaning of life” and the famous executives “who boss the work of thousands of men” to find true happiness in a family of immigrants gathered under a tree on a riverside with their children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

Happiness, perhaps, is less complicated than it’s been made out to be. Pursuing that which brings about our own flourishing need not be the impossible object that Alexander Pope imagines, but it will demand of us that we take stock of the threads of connection that bind us.

These days, I must tell you, I have a different feeling about family gatherings. Perhaps it’s my own aging or the losses I’ve experienced in recent years, but those people, even the ones I haven’t seen for years, are now precious in my eyes. I am acutely aware of how little time in the end we are given to be with those with whom we are connected.

And so, should I be asked on such an occasion, “Are you happy?” I’d be inclined to look over the room of these people I know and have come to love and respond simply, “I am.”