Happiness in America

  A Mongolian photographer From the Cream of the Crop at Flickr

The modern world, according to Christopher Lasch, is most of all in futile rebellion against “the ancient religious insight that the only way to achieve happiness is to accept limitations in the spirit of gratitude and contrition.” It is, Lasch goes on, in rebellion against “the central paradox of religious faith: the secret of happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy.”
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For most human beings — most social animals — happiness is something like the opposite of loneliness. There are some people who want to be left alone. But for the most part, studies show that married people are happier than single people, people from large families are happier than people from small families, and people with lots of close friends are happier than people with just a few. Happiness also correlates strongly with faithful involvement in religious communities, active participation in political life, and worthwhile work with others. Happiness usually depends on really developing the attachments — a non-Darwinian would say the personal love — that come from doing what social animals do. No study confirms the individualistic thoughts that love is for suckers or hell is other people.
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According to Alexis de Tocqueville (writing in the 1830s), the Americans have characteristically never made the error of believing either Locke or Darwin teaches the whole truth. The Americans’ religion, most of all, causes them not to understand themselves as merely self-interested individuals or playthings of some impersonal process. The Americans, semi-consciously, reconcile individual liberty and personal happiness by understanding themselves in different ways at different times. They understand themselves as free individuals insofar as they restlessly work in pursuit of the material conditions of happiness, but they find happiness by using what they’ve acquired as parents, children, friends, citizens, creatures, and as men and women (as opposed to abstracted or sexless individuals). It’s as religious, familial, and political beings, Tocqueville explains, that the Americans are happy.

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