In her excellent book “American Enlightenments” Caroline Winterer reminds us that 18th century Americans held a different view of happiness than the self-help individualized notion most people cling to today. She writes:
“The happiness of humanity. Crèvecoeur’s words—and Thomas Jefferson’s far more famous ones in the Declaration of Independence, “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”—remind us that the pursuit of happiness was one of the principal quests of enlightened people. But happiness meant something different in the eighteenth century from its meaning today. In our era, an industry of self-help books reminds us that modern happiness is an emotional state of self-fulfillment and personal well-being. Eighteenth-century people would have been puzzled by our narrow definition. For them, happiness first of all had expansive, public meanings. People at that time often spoke of a happy people and a happy society. A society was happy when its people enjoyed the security, stability, and peace that allowed them to prosper. The purpose of government was to create public or social happiness by shielding the state from foreign enemies and internal threats. The opposite of public happiness was not sorrow but anarchy or tyranny. Educated leaders would be the architects of the good government that led to a happy society.”
It’s public happiness, stupid. Its knowing your neighbor can afford her groceries and medicine.
The cos-playing small “p” president spends his nights sending vicious posts on his stupid social media platform. Public happiness is not his thing, to say the least.
I will never give in to the rage machine. Never. Even though I’m a disability activist who’s watching the new eugenics washing through the corridors of power like sea water in the movie Titanic.
