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Are You Happy Yet?

If not, the problem may lie in how you define the term. By ANDREW DELBANCO Photograph by KEITH CARTER

couple of weeks ago, I picked up a new magazine called Simplicity, whose premiere issue features "a quiz to test your happiness quotient." To help improve your score, it offers a Web site, www.simplicityonline.com, dedicated to creating "a virtual universe that's not just about making your life easier, but also more euphoric." When I got home and checked the mail, I found another interesting artifact: a brochure promising happiness from a few spurts of a new "stud spray" (derived from "bushy herbs" favored by Bulgarians and Brazilian tribesmen). Pump some under the tongue, and -- presto! -- you'll "Go From Zero to Hero."

The happiness business is booming in America, and it seems to have entered a new phase of hype and strain. Driven, like every going concern, by consumer demand, it has been a big business at least since Thomas Jefferson dropped the final term from John Locke's enumeration of human rights -- life, liberty, and . . . property" -- and replaced it with what would become the motto of the new nation: "the pursuit of happiness." But even though Jefferson proclaimed the truths of the Declaration of Independence to be "self-evident," it has never been entirely clear what Americans mean by happiness. Like love, it is a word that evokes for each of us some private memory or hope that cannot be fully disclosed to others. Yet it is also a word with a public history, one worth retrieving.

Lately the pursuit of happiness has become a mainly private activity. Americans take mood drugs to fire up the happiness circuits of the brain and go to the gym to release happiness endorphins. Phrases like "job satisfaction" and "personal growth," by which we assess our careers and marriages, have become part of the language, while terms like commonweal, and even citizenship -- in which there lingers a residual sense of public good and private obligation -- sound archaic.

This succession from public to private notions of happiness is the culmination of a long historical process. In early America, especially in New England, the idea of personal happiness was close to incomprehensible. Even the word itself was rare, except in its adverbial form, as in "happily humbled"; expressions like "peace of conscience" or "comfort of heart" were more common. Happiness required deferral. It waited for death to dispel the sorrows of life. The place where it would be fulfilled was heaven, where petty rivalries would be swept away by the flood of God's love, and where human souls, released from mutable bodies, would achieve perfect harmony through a kind of telepathic closeness with one another. Certain experiences in this world, like communal worship or spousal love, might afford a foretaste of happiness, but it was only in the next world that it could fully be known, and it was always envisioned as a profoundly social emotion.

Andrew Delbanco is the author, most recently, of "The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope."

The exile of happiness to the future life could not, and did not, last. Under pressure from Enlightenment rationality, religion acceded slowly (more slowly than in Europe) to what Garry Wills has called the "displacement of man's hopes from the hereafter" to the here and now. As a result, "a note of possible heresy in the way men had begun to talk of happiness" crept into public discourse. Locke used the term in a spirit of lamentation rather than commendation, as if he were describing creatures no more likely to reach their goals than dogs chasing their tails: we "think ourselves happy. . . . But as soon as any new uneasiness comes in, this happiness is disturbed and we are set afresh on work in the pursuit of happiness." This was an arduous, treadmill idea of happiness by which human beings are eternally condemned to anticipate the loss of present pleasures and to live in a perpetual state of craving. "Our desires," Locke wrote, always "look beyond our present enjoyments and carry the mind out to absent good." Earthly delights like sex, good food or pleasing circumstances merely taunt us with their brevity and give way to renewed longing. Yet by the time Jefferson included "the pursuit of happiness" among the rights of man, the phrase had become a psychological and a political, rather than a theological, term.

But if the consolatory force of religion had diminished, the need for some conception of happiness that was immune to time had not. What could take its place? The Scottish moralist Francis Hutcheson -- another influence on Jefferson -- stated in a sentence the consensual answer to this question: "The surest way to promote his private happiness" is for a man "to do publicly useful actions." Jefferson and his contemporaries believed that happiness could be attained only if and when one could look back on one's life and see that it had had good effects on the lives of others.

To believe this was not merely to wish that virtue should be its own reward. It was to make a universal claim that human beings are born with a "moral sense," an impulse to altruism that atrophies if it is not exercised. People, as the cybernetic metaphor now has it, are "hard wired" to do good in order to enhance their own happiness. In its 18th-century version, this theory about the inner life paralleled emerging scientific theories about the outer world: it said that a happy person existing alone without exchanging the energy of benevolence with other people is inconceivable, like a celestial body orbiting around nothing.

As expansive as it may have been in some respects, this neoclassic ideal of virtuous citizenship was also scandalously limited. Despite Jefferson's revision of Locke, property (which chiefly meant land) remained the precondition for happiness: it protected against the temptations of corruption, freed the self for inquiry and contemplation and, through the mechanisms of inheritance, fostered a sense of connection to the past and to posterity. Most Americans were simply left out -- city dwellers, wage earners, debtors and men of commerce who depended on what Jefferson called the "caprice of customers" for their livelihood. Women did not qualify because they were barely allowed to own anything. And slaves, by definition, were forbidden to own even themselves.

Achieving happiness has become an overwhelmingly personal, private, even solitary undertaking.

Aware that these restrictions posed a threat to their egalitarian ideals, Jefferson and his successors spoke of women and slaves as if they, too, were capable of a certain kind of happiness -- but it was an inferior type akin to the frivolity of childhood. Slaves, as one United States senator later put it, are "happy, content, unaspiring and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations." After slavery had been forcibly abolished, a Georgia editor remarked without compunction about impoverished rural blacks, "I do not think that poverty disturbs their happiness at all." One of the startling features of the history of happiness is the brazenness with which people in power have assured themselves of the happiness of the powerless.

Ultimately, the Jeffersonian ideal of what might be called landed happiness could not be reconciled with the deprivations of those on whose labor and service it depended. Once the Civil War had destroyed what remained of the landed gentry, old civic and paternalistic notions of happiness gave way before the new spirit of free-market capitalism. In many respects, this system proved a boon to happiness, by creating a society of previously unimaginable prosperity. But based on the idea that self-interest ultimately works for the collective good, it reversed the relation between self and community with which the country began. Public happiness was once deemed necessary for private happiness; today, private wants come first, and public needs have become an afterthought.

This modern idea of happiness had been presciently described by Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States early in the 19th century. Well aware that the Old World's static class structure could stifle human aspirations, Tocqueville admired the zeal with which Americans sought to achieve whatever material comforts they witnessed their friends and neighbors enjoying.

But as Tocqueville saw, the competitive pursuit of wealth requires the stamina of youth and can be haunted by the fear of age and death. "Men easily attain a certain equality of condition," he wrote, "but they can never attain as much as they desire. . . . They are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights, they die." Americans, he found, were afflicted by a "strange melancholy . . . in the midst of their abundance."

Today the notion that "abundance" and freedom ensure happiness no longer meets much articulate resistance. Of the few remaining countercurrents of discontent, some take the form of bitter irony. An example is Todd Solondz's deliberately repugnant 1998 movie, "Happiness" (shelved in the Dysfunctional Families section of my local video store), in which men live miserably from ejaculation to ejaculation while women torment themselves in the frantic pursuit of love. Or they take the form of New Age therapies like those recommended in the Dalai Lama's book "The Art of Happiness," which shares the best-seller lists with the latest manuals for achieving hot sex and renovating the weekend house. Or -- as in the Simplicity Web site -- they take the form of a technologically assisted return to pastoral purity. The old imperative that personal fulfillment depends on active engagement with helping others also survives -- in families, churches, charities, service professions like medicine and teaching and support organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous. And now and then it flares up in the words of a maverick politician. But in most forms of public discourse it has become a muted platitude.

Achieving happiness has become an overwhelmingly personal, private, even solitary undertaking. It is understood to require an infinite array of choices and the power to move among them as if you were sampling or grazing your way through life. But abundance and freedom can bewilder as well as liberate, and many Americans -- not just evangelicals -- are reverting to William James's view that "happiness in the absolute and everlasting is what we find nowhere but in religion." And while the premise on which Jefferson's pursuit of happiness was based -- that some human beings must be masters and others slaves -- has properly become outrageous to us, his conviction that happiness can best be found in selfless service remains a driving motive in many lives.

Religious and civic pieties have often cloaked cruelty and hatred, and there is no reason to believe that people in the past lived consistently by the principles they avowed. But it is not merely nostalgic to respect earlier conceptions of happiness. Maybe those who held them were onto something in suspecting that when people spin faster and faster in the pursuit of merely personal happiness, they become exhausted in the futile effort of chasing themselves.