Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness - Self-Evident Truths
By SocratesLife and our right to it is clear cut and dry. Only through the exercise of due process in an open and rigorous constitutionally-defined legal system may an individual’s right to Life be denied. Under the right to Life, some basic things appear to be assumed. For example, it is expected that air and sunshine and rain will be free, on God’s schedule. No one should ever want for these basic ingredients, which make food possible. The food itself will require some work, but the most basic elements which support life can not be restricted. If you can breathe, you will. If you want sunshine, you can go outside and enjoy it.
Liberty is similarly clear-cut, if perhaps slightly less so. Even as early as 1645, Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop observed “a great error in the country” regarding the concept of Liberty, noting that it is a two-fold concept. There is a natural Liberty, and what Winthrop called a civil or federal Liberty. By the term “natural Liberty,” Winthrop references man’s now-corrupt nature, and notes that man shares this Liberty in common “with beasts and other creatures,” since “man as he stands in relation to man, simply, hath Liberty to do as he lists. It is a Liberty to evil, as well as to good,” and its maintenance and exercise “tend to make men grow more evil, in time to be worse than brute beasts.” The civil or federal Liberty Winthrop notes is based in God’s covenant with man, as that covenant is replicated in “the politic covenants and constitutions amongst men themselves,” and may thus also be termed a “moral Liberty.” These two concepts of Liberty are diametrically opposed, as the natural Liberty “is that great enemy of truth and peace, that wild beast, which all the ordinances of God are bent against, to restrain and subdue it.” The civil Liberty, says Winthrop, is the Liberty we “are to stand for, not only at the hazard of our goods, but of our lives, if need be,” for it is “of the same kind of Liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.”
This civil form of Liberty of Governor Winthrop’s 1645 address On Liberty in part informed the rights identified in our Bill of Rights. These are the Rights which are universal to a free people who exercise self-government - free speech, freedom of religion, freedom to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances, freedom of press, the right to bear arms, to be secure in our persons, houses, papers and effects against unwarranted search and seizure, to a speedy trial and to face our accuser(s), the right against self-incrimination, to be free of cruel and unusual punishment, etc. These are the set of rights which fall under the heading “Liberty.”
The Pursuit of Happiness is a very different animal, is it not?
What does the Pursuit of Happiness mean to you? The portion that is highlighted is merely meant to indicate that when the question is asked, those two words are often added on, seemingly innocuously enough. The result often appears to be that what may arguably be the keystone of the identified, God-given rights, may be the most poorly understood. The Pursuit of Happiness will invariably mean different things to different people, depending upon their degree of affinity for philosophic and critical thought. The question might be better asked, “What did the Pursuit of Happiness mean to the committee which drafted the Declaration of Independence?” From where did they acquire such a notion?
To answer that question, we must read John Locke’s 1688 Essays on Human Understanding, in which he formulated man’s inalienable God-given rights as “Life, Liberty, and Property,” for we are told that John Locke was influential to our founding. This assertion of Locke’s influence on our founding is not entirely incorrect, but it is distressingly misleading. Just at first glance here, we can see that Locke’s formulation does not appear in our Declaration. It is also not a coincidence that the formulation of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” immediately follows the assertion of “these truths to be self-evident,” which we hold. This is a recognition of a method of controlling debate exercised by the empiricists, such as Locke, by way of axioms, definitions, and postulates which are accepted a priori by all participants. “You can debate anything you like, so long as we all agree on these basic a priori assumptions,” is not something we appreciated. The Declaration of Independence included our response, “You want self-evident truths, do you? Try this.”
Let us examine John Locke’s formulation of Life, Liberty, and Property, from his Essays on Human Understanding. We see by this formulation that Locke sees Liberty arising from Life, and Property arising from Liberty as the highest principle of God-given right, and thus the highest principle of Locke’s Natural Law. To Locke, government has no other purpose than the preservation of Property, for the very reason that men enter into society is the preservation of their Property.
“To secure our Property, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the men who own that Property.”
I’m certain that I read that in our Declaration of Independence. Somewhere….
One cannot help but wonder - if John Locke was so influential to our founding, why did we need founding?
John Locke, who sat on William III’s Venetian Board of Trade. From that position, Locke did everything in his power to prevent the colonies from gaining the manufacturing and agricultural capacity required to achieve and defend Independence. From that position, Locke nullified colonial laws from Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, even Virginia and Carolina which restricted or banned the importation of slaves. John Locke wrote the Fundamental Constitution for Carolina Colony, which explicitly recognized and protected the practice of chattel slavery, so on that basis, he was something of an expert on Carolina’s constitution. He also was a major stockholder in the Royal African Company, with £600 invested (not adjusted for inflation), and he made a significant portion of his fortune in the slave trade. No conflicts, there. From the Board of Trade, John Locke recommended the revocation of all colonial charters, to bring them under the direct control of the crown, to be forbidden from manufacturing any finished goods. Such a wonderful fellow, is John Locke!
It seems that if Locke had been such an influence, we would have stayed on with the crown. We were their Property, after all. “Subjects,” I believe was the term they used, but it amounted to the same thing.
In a refutation of Locke’s 1688 Essays on Human Understanding, his posthumously published New Essays on Human Understanding, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) presented the formulation of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” which is found in our Declaration of Independence. Leibniz intended by this work to open a debate between the empiricists (represented by Locke), and the rationalists (represented by Leibniz). Unfortunately Locke died in 1704, just as Leibniz was completing it. So he shelved it, knowing he would not get his debate. It was found after Leibniz’s death, and published in the mid 1760s. It really is a shame we did not get that debate. What did Leibniz understand by “the Pursuit of Happiness?” Leibniz was a fascinating fellow. For Leibniz, to be happy was to love. Of course, it is not that simple. What is love? According to Leibniz, to love is to count another’s Happiness as one’s own. Immediately it appears we are in danger of a circular argument. What is another’s Happiness? There is a glorious reason for that apparently circular argument, if you explore it. We will see it again, elsewhere.
For now, though, let us try a different approach. We are mortal; our time in this universe is finite. What, therefore, will be the effect of our existence on humanity? How will we be remembered by future generations, who may or may not know our names personally? Some few individuals will secure a certain immortality in the sense that hundreds or even thousands of years from now, their names will be remembered. Plato, Cicero, Eratosthenes, Archimedes, Pythagoras, Johan Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig von Beethoven, Johannes Kepler, Carl Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, Albert Einstein to name just a few, are likely to be remembered for ages for their contributions to various fields. George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, John Jay, Samuel Adams, again, to name a few, will almost certainly join them. In many cases, though we may not know their individual names, we are nevertheless grateful that they existed. Ultimately, we can see that what we are asking is, “How do we define our morality?” Perhaps also, “When do we express our talent?”
Do we not find the truest Happiness when we can go to our graves knowing that we made a positive difference for the future? When we are sure that future generations will be grateful for our contributions, even if they never know our names or thank us personally for it?
Americans once had a certain culture where, for example, a man who worked on the Hoover Dam would, later in life, take his grandson to see the project, and describe what it is; what went into it; how it benefits the community, the county, the state, and the country; and explain his role in its construction; and challenge the youth to do better.
Isn’t that the American Dream? Is it the notion that “the sky’s the limit;” that there will be continuous growth and progress; that standards of living will climb ever higher for each generation; that our children and grandchildren will know and enjoy better lives than we did, even as their numbers also continue to increase? “Go forth, be fruitful and multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it.”
The ancient Greeks had four different words for love. Eros, Philia, Storge, and Agapē. Eros is the basest; it derives from desire and pleasure. Philia is affectionate love, shared between friends as a bond of brotherhood. Think “Philadelphia” - the word, not what the city has become - and you’ve got the idea. Storge is familial love, as between parent and offspring and siblings. Agapē is that highest form of love, often considered that of God for man and of man for God. Does anyone else see the circular reasoning of this definition? Not that there is a problem with that, in this case. God loves man, yes? How, then, does man love God, if he does not also love what God loves? Is it possible for us mere mortals to feel an imperfect and incomplete form of agapē? Do we dare to ask the question in reverse? Is it possible to love and worship God properly without doing so?
What of our founders? Did they love us? Did they find Happiness?
“Let us love one another. For God is love.”
The Pursuit of Happiness is the “glue right” which holds them all together cohesively. It is the most important right God granted us. Life and Liberty make the Pursuit of Happiness possible; the Pursuit of Happiness affords Life and Liberty meaning and purpose. Great, we enjoy the right to Life and Liberty. Why? For the simple, one might even say, “self-evident” reason that we are human, Imago Dei. It is the very reason that our founders chose a republic, which protects individual Liberty, as their preferred form of government. God, in His wisdom, located this power uniquely within the individual human mind. Discoveries of scientific principle are made by individuals, not in committee. Truth does not give one whit what the consensus is. Truth laughs at consensus, most of the time. Only individuals advance human knowledge and the human condition, and what might be called “the frontier,” through these discoveries.
We posses, also as a gift of our Creator, the unique quality of willfully expressed creativity, demonstrated in our economic practice, by which we Pursue that Happiness. That gift of creativity is the quality which qualifies us for the description “made in His image and after His likeness.” What else could? Our dimensions, proportions, or some other physical property? Our appetites, desires, or some other feature of or arising from our biology? No, it could only be creativity, willfully expressed, as a poor reflection of His true Creativity. Our creativity is expressed in our demonstrable cognitive access to the domain of these principles, and our use of those principles in our economic practice. For example, we take raw material resources and, through the interaction of the skilled labor of an individual mind knowledgeable in physical principles, that material is transformed into something which never existed before, and never would have existed without our intervention as His moral, mortal agents participating in the ongoing act of creation. This creative power is the source of wealth. Through this process a profit is generated, physically, which is measured as an increase in our power to exist in nature. It is that physical profit which gives the currency value. “Economy.” Even as it shrinks - even as it begins a process of collapse - they tell us “the economy is growing at a brisk pace!” as if they hope we won’t catch on until it’s too late to do anything about it. Unfortunately, that gamble might actually pay off, judging by all present appearances. Why shouldn’t it? The gamblers have (mis)educated the population on economics for generations, now. We still (generally) accept their (foreign) monetarist premise that money has intrinsic value, and represents actual wealth. Our economic performance is measured by the kind of people who will walk down a street and challenge each other to eat a random pile of canine excrement for $30,000 a plate. At the end of the lunch break, they feel terrible, but they console each other by saying, “Yeah, that tasted awful. But, at least we added $60,000 to GDP!”
Obviously, a very important part of government’s purpose is the protection of private property. However, there is a reason that it was not included by our founders - first, it was found by the committee which drafted the Declaration to be a man-made right, not a God-given one, and second, the Pursuit of Happiness and the principles of Imago Dei and agapē on which it is based were found to be far more compelling, as they lived it by their actions. In the first instance, it is difficult to believe that the hunter-gatherer condition entertained any real notions of private property, when each member of the tribe was dependent upon every other member for his or her survival. Who will deny to the youth of the tribe the meat of the kill on the grounds that they did not participate in the hunt? The man who does try is likely to be killed on the spot as a threat to the whole tribe’s survival. The youth will hunt for the tribe one day, but they will probably have to eat a few meals, first. Successful hunting and gathering led to population growth. Population growth necessitated the development and introduction of agriculture to sustain that population. This development is when the concept of private property entered man’s social practice. “If we had committed to remain in a hunter-gatherer condition, the whole globe would not be sufficient to maintain one-tenth part its present population,” and that observation was made already in the mid-eighteenth century by a student of Leibniz, Emmerich de Vatel, in his 1757 The Law of Nations, when there were still fewer than one billion individuals on the earth.
Property is thus an essential right, without which civilization could not justly function. It is critical that it be upheld to the fullest extent possible. The case for it as a gift of God was found wanting by the committee which drafted the Declaration of Independence. Where do we find John Locke’s influence in American history, then? In the Confederacy, not to put too fine a point on it. But, that is another discussion.
So, what does the Pursuit of Happiness mean to you?
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