Pursuing Happiness, I: Misery and Gin

Five friends were celebrating the arrival of the New Year. The host, a businessman, and his lovely wife provided an excellent dinner, and the their lawyer friend was his usual affable self.  The only sour note was struck by the literary misanthrope they had invited as an accessory to his charming wife.  

The conversation had ranged from recent world events to memories of earlier frolics.  The subject of “happiness” came up, probably in connection with the seasonal greeting, “Happy New Year.  In a playful spirit, the literary gent asked his lawyer friend who, as most lawyers do, has a definition for everything, “What is happiness?”  Instead of reciting some law-book definition, he replied with an example: “When I am sitting in a comfortable chair with a beer in hand, watching a football game, that is my idea of happiness.”

Instead of letting the subject drop with an ironic chuckle, the literary gent, who was interested both in language and philosophy, decided to play Socrates, excoriating the poor lawyer for watching two sets of brutes, when they were not trying to murder each other, were beating up their women and denouncing their country.  The host tried valiantly to calm the discussion by pointing out that only a minority of NFL players were known to have criminal records or had “taken the knee” for during the playing of the National Anthem.  The literary gent was having none of it and became even more “unpleasantly emphatic” until the peace-loving lawyer decided to end the dispute by defending his torturer’s point of view.  The small-town Socrates did not get much further in presenting his case than to point out that the heroin addict may well think he is happy, when he shoots up, but no rational human being among his friends and family members would agree with the assessment.

A few hour later, in the wee small hours of the morning, as he was chewing the cud of repentance, Socrates tried to excuse his performance by attributing it to the severe bout of vertigo that was beginning to overtake him.  It is an inner ear problem for which he was taking daily medication, and like sea-sickness, vertigo has a way of alienating the sufferer who only wants to be left alone to die in his misery.  Upon further reflection, however, the would-be philosopher acknowledge that the truth probably lay closer to the lethal combination of  German gin (Monkey 47) and French Vermouth (Dolin)  he had consumed.  In the darkness, he seemed to hear the voice of Merle Haggard: 

But here I am again mixing misery and gin/ Sitting with all my friends and talking to myself.

Country music songwriters, in this case John Durrill (formerly of The Ventures and The Five Americans), rarely fail to provide the necessary insights into the harrowing conditions of postmodern life.

The main point, apart from being unpleasant, he had wanted to establish was that happiness was an objective, not a subjective state—a position that no one but the affable lawuer accepted, but he might have just been pouring the oil on troubled waters.  As a quondam philologist, “Socrates”  might have begun by pointing out that happiness is simply the quality of something with “hap,” a fine old word that meant luck or good luck derived, so comparative philologists have argued, from a Proto-Indo-European root, kob-, which, so they conjecture, referred to either that which is suitable or lucky.

In the old dormitory bull sessions, if the subject of happiness came up, someone would be sure to use the old trope of the contented cow in the pasture.  The cow certainly experienced something like pleasure, but could a rational human being agree with the cow?  Back in those happy days, only a polemicist would argue for bovine happiness, but in the days of Netflix and Taylor Swift, Prozac and Zoloft, Bud Lite and the NFL, bovinity is surely the desired condition of the American majority.

A great deal of ink has been wasted by historians and political theorists who have tried to find meaning in Mr. Jefferson’s ridiculous preface to the Declaration of Independence.   Piling up absurdity—“We hold these truths self-evident”—upon absurdity—“that all men are created equal”—he reaches the height of folly in his most famous phrases:  “Endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  In defense of the right to pursue happiness, every species of wickedness and foolishness that poor Jefferson could not have imagined, unless he had been reading his contemporary, the Marquis de Sade, have received both protection and subsidies from modern governments.

Wiser heads pointed out long ago that in substituting the pursuit of happiness for John Locke’s third term in his personal trinity (life, liberty, and property), Jefferson was probably reverting to an older, more objective view of human happiness.  Aristotle had undoubtedly influenced the Christian view of happiness, particularly his portrayal of a successful life that culminated in the contemplation of the Good.  Jefferson, who had certainly read Aristotle, aligned himself more closely with the materialist Epicurus, whose creed could be distilled down to the principle of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain.  While Epicurean thought can be and has been twisted into a perverse sort of hedonism, he and his followers mainly sought repose, tranquility, and reflection and avoided entanglements in social and political conflicts. 

Epicurean writers like Horace and the poet-philosopher, Philodemus, make the system seem more attractive than it is, but we should bear in mind that both men were, from the point of view of their school, eccentric.  While the master had declared paideia (literary culture) to be a plague, Philodemus not only wrote treatises about literature but was himself a poet, while Horace, who was perhaps the finest craftsmen in the history of Latin poetry, was even a friend and advisor to Maecenas and the Emperor Augustus.  Horace, like Jefferson, was a man of deep and lasting friendships, and Thomas Jefferson, for all his attraction to Epicurus, is unthinkable as an isolated individual seeking only his own contentment: He was a loyal kinsman and a patriotic Virginian, as much attached to family and country as any Aristotelian.