“We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal. That they are
endowed with their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—” (U.S. Declaration of Independence)
In my junior high school civics class we were made to memorize those words. Ever since, I have mulled over the phrase “the pursuit of happiness.” Our culture not only permits but also encourages us to chase after whatever gives us pleasure, or in modern jargon, whatever turns us on—but within limits. In an earlier era those limits were well known by all. From lyrics of a pop song a half-century ago about dancing: “I get ideas,” yet those ideas were not always acted upon. Ever since then, however, liberty has taken a new twist.
For many of us, the 1960’s have still left their heritage of rampant freedom and expressions of radical defiance of social and moral norms. It called itself the Age of Aquarius, a time for shedding the confining garb of duty to country, respect for authority and compliance with the standards of morality. Protests, sit-ins and love-ins were the radical acts of the new rebels. Liberty took on a new meaning—the freedom to burn flags, shut down universities, and convert a pleasant grassy meadow of Woodstock, NY, into a muddy, raucous pigpen where humans acted in ways that would startle hogs. That era defined our nation in a way that is still evident in the present political division between the Blue states, mostly liberal and mostly framing the nation’s ocean borders, and the Red states, the central heartland states, to a great extent conservative.
So-called sexual liberation hatched a variety of excesses and perversions for which the nation has paid a huge price. Gay rights protests aside, AIDS was the unhappy outcome of many homosexual acts. Christianity has been rocked by the clergy scandals involving pedophilia. Society has yet to decide what to do with men deemed incorrigibly addicted to child molestation and worse, the murders of innocent children. As I write, the news tells of a father who in an act of rage stabbed to death his nine-year-old daughter and her friend, who had the courage to try helping her girlfriend, the killer’s own child.
The renowned scholar of religion, Joseph Campbell, posited as the goal of all human beings to follow our bliss. It elevated happiness to a spiritual remove, sounding something like the results of reflective meditation—and indeed it may be so. After one is through with looking for love in all the wrong places, learning the hard way the difference between having and being, choosing the illusive security that this democracy morphing into plutocracy dangles before us as the recipe to happiness, learning the true value of values, then we may start to talk about bliss.
Unfortunately, all too few arrive at bliss. We are let to believe the prevailing assumptions underlying our culture that the purpose of life is to consume, indeed it is the mark of a good citizen, because the economy depends on buying what one does not really need and may never use. It’s the patriotic thing to do. Besides, it gives credence to the myth that one can pursue and eventually overtake happiness with money, as in the caustic remark that the one who dies with the most toys wins. The label “consumer” doesn’t offend us. If that is our belief, life will be little more than getting and spending, exalting then trashing even more idols from the areas of entertainment and athletics to feed the insatiable cravings of an empty life. If this describes who you are, then bliss is not for you. Be content with the pursuit of happiness, even though it continually eludes you.