Happy Pursuits

Dear Children:

The Declaration of Independence is one of those great documents in human history that, at once, lays out a set of ideals that forever elude us and makes a list of specific failings that can be unambiguously redressed.

Among the most ideal of the notions expressed in The Declaration is that of the pursuit of happiness. In the future, we’ll examine what life and liberty rights entail.

Delegates to The Second Continental Congress who approved the document were not vexed in the slightest by the idea. The Virginia Declaration of Rights adopted at about the same time included the phrase and thinkers such as John Locke writing a hundred years earlier were quite clear that this was a bedrock gift of natural law.

To Locke, George Mason, Thomas Jefferson and others who held this truth to be self evident knew the pursuit of happiness to be a right to engage in the trade of one’s own choosing. It was not the province of government, church, family, guild or tribe to decide for an individual what employment he should undertake.

In those days, it was quite common to restrict this right. People took names like Miller, Baker and Wheeler. Sons were granted immediate admittance to a guild upon successful completion of an apprenticeship. Other apprentices were subjected to longer periods of servitude and “proofing” before admittance. A person expected to follow in the family business. This, of course, was for the greater purpose of maintaining a class system based on the idea that certain people who practiced certain professions were better or lesser than persons who practiced other professions.

You get the idea.

But imagine the confusion that resulted: Someone named Baker was shoeing horses and someone else named Blacksmith had the temerity to study law. It was quite an unsettling time. The established social order was turned upside down. People who could lay claim to peerage were reduced to mucking barns and others with the humblest of lineage were laying claim to huge tracts of land and exploiting its resources.

As a direct result, the average person living in North American from long before the Revolution to this very moment was richer by far than the average person living on any other continent. We went from a system of resources rationed according to inherited privilege to a system that rationed resources according to wealth. But, because our poor people were still richer than other nation’s poor folks, we were not guilty of abuse.

Maybe not.

In a time like the present when we have become aware that resources that were once thought to be inexhaustible are becoming exhausted, we need to rethink the meaning of the pursuit of happiness. When services such as health care are grievously expensive, is it fair to ration it on the basis of wealth? When we reach the point where finance drives our economy, can we take pride in production and the creation of wealth through endless subdivision of fleeting assets? Have we found the ugly side of the pursuit of happiness?

I don’t think so. We can still work with it. The idea has served us well. As a matter of fact, you should embrace the gift you have now as a matter of settled law; the opportunity to seek your own happiness in the dignity of work. Work is its own reward made all the more sweet by its having been freely chosen. Naturally there are problems for each age to shape and perfect. We hope you will be part of that debate.

The pursuit of happiness as seen by Mr. Jefferson carries strictures of its own. It holds that no institutions may tell an individual what employment she must seek, to be sure. Yet, nothing in the concept repeals other natural laws that bind us together as members of the family of humankind beholden to each other.

Just remember that he says we are the inheritors of inalienable rights granted by The Creator. He lists the pursuit of happiness among them.

That’s where life and liberty come in.

Much Love,

Poppy