The American Dream vs. the Gospel of Wealth

from YES! Magazine:



The American Dream vs. the Gospel of Wealth
Is America meant to be a land of opportunity or inequality? Civic virtue or consumerism? Gus Speth explores three deep contradictions in the American identity, asking: What's next for the American dream?

by James Gustave Speth
posted Jun 29, 2011


Throughout our history, there have been alternative, competing visions of the "good life" in America. The story of how these competing visions played out in our history is prologue to an important question: What is the American Dream and what is its future?

The Pursuit of Happiness: Public Good or Personal Pleasure?

The issue came up in the early Republic, offspring of the ambiguity in Jefferson's declaration that we have an unalienable right to "the pursuit of happiness." Darrin McMahon in his admirable book, Happiness: A History, will be our guide here. McMahon locates the origins of the "right to happiness" in the Enlightenment. "'Does not everyone have a right to happiness?' asked the entry on that subject in the French encyclopedia edited by Denis Diderot. Judged by the standards of the preceding millennium and a half, the question was extraordinary: a right to happiness? And yet it was posed rhetorically, in full confidence of the nodding assent of enlightened minds." It was in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, that Jeremy Bentham would write his famous principle of utility: "It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong."

Thus, when Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration in June of that memorable year, the words "the pursuit of happiness" came naturally to him, and the language sailed through the debates of June and July without dissent. McMahon believes this lack of controversy stemmed in part from the fact that the "pursuit of happiness" phrase brought together ambiguously two very different notions: the idea from John Locke and Jeremy Bentham that happiness was the pursuit of personal pleasure and the older Stoic idea that happiness derived from active devotion to the public good and from civic virtue, which have little to do with personal pleasure.

"The ‘pursuit of happiness,'" McMahon writes, "was launched in different, and potentially conflicting, directions from the start, with private pleasure and public welfare coexisting in the same phrase. For Jefferson, so quintessentially in this respect a man of the Enlightenment, the coexistence was not a problem." But Jefferson's formula almost immediately lost its double meaning in practice, McMahon notes, and the right of citizens to pursue their personal interests and joy won out. This victory was confirmed by waves of immigrants to America's shores, for whom America was truly the land of opportunity. "To pursue happiness in such a land was quite rightly to pursue prosperity, to pursue pleasure, to pursue wealth." ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/the-american-dream-vs-the-gospel-of-wealth