So much has been written about happiness

So much has been written about happiness: how to be happy, how to measure happiness (including a Gross National Happiness ranking).

With the 250th anniversary of the United States’ Declaration of Independence, more should be said about happiness being so foundational in that declaration and shaping American culture. Specifically, the passage refers to three inalienable rights: life, liberty, and happiness, with the last one almost a capstone: you have life, you have liberty, and the two allow humans to pursue happiness.

It was the Greeks, particularly Aristotle, who first wrote about the importance of happiness, eudaimonia, with Aristotle declaring that happiness should be the ultimate goal of all endeavors. The French revolutionists who eventually toppled the monarchy preceded the American Revolution and mentioned “general happiness” as the aim of society in a document produced in 1783.

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The US Founding Fathers (yes, the mothers are never mentioned), Thomas Jefferson in particular, pushed for happiness as a right. Several countries were influenced by the US, incorporating happiness as a constitutional right, notably Japan, probably imposed by the US during the American occupation after World War II. South Korea also makes happiness constitutional, as does Turkey and Thailand.

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In the US itself, this right to happiness was used in the struggles against slavery and for same-sex marriages. (A side story here: the case heard by the US Supreme Court, which finally abolished the ban on “mixed race” marriages, was Loving versus Virginia, involving a white man and a black woman in the state of Virginia. It was indeed a case about loving and the right to pursue marriage. In the 1930s, there was a case in California that involved a Filipino man and a British-American woman, whose marriage was challenged by the California legislature. The couple won their case, although in a roundabout way—I would need an entire column for that love story, which I did write about many years ago.)

In the post World War II era, the concept of happiness as a right expanded internationally, becoming part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I’ve wondered why the Philippines did not include happiness in our 1935 Constitution. Maybe it was considered too abstract, maybe too frivolous for a prim and proper Catholic country. Happiness? ¡Qué horror! Imagine too, the debates that would have come about to find the most appropriate Filipino word for happiness.

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Then there’s Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh, who led their war for independence from France, which had occupied Vietnam since the late 19th century. When Ho declared Vietnamese independence on Sept. 2, 1945, he quoted the US Declaration of Independence’s passage referring to the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to justify Vietnam’s call for independence. Interestingly, he also referred to the US granting “independence” to the Philippines, then an American colony.

The US never replied to Ho. About 20 years earlier, Ho had also written to US President Truman asking that the US recognize Vietnam’s struggle for independence, but the Americans never replied at that time. Not only that, the Americans sided with the French to launch the bloody “American War” (Vietnam War was the term used by the Americans) that took thousands of American and Vietnamese lives. (The Philippines joined an American contingent to fight the “Vietcong” and lost nine Filipino soldiers.)

And now, as the US commemorates 250 years of independence, we find a bloody trail of brutal wars, with the US violating many of the principles that it fought for including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

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We’ve seen, too, how the “pursuit of happiness” has been nothing short of corruption, with the current President, Donald Trump, being sure to go down in history as one of the worst. History classes in America would do well to revisit Jefferson’s wise words: “He must be virtuous too, for without virtue, happiness cannot be.”

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