Our Founding Fathers’ gift of health and freedom
Fact checked by Shannon Sparks
The pursuit of happiness is an unalienable right — and not just because the Declaration of Independence says so. This health-inducing, prosperity-promoting tonic is available to all, limitless in supply, with the power to benefit us personally and globally.
Happiness, according to Northwestern Medicine’s HealthBeat newsletter, opens one’s mind to positivity, inspires a can-do perspective for solving problems and achieving goals, decreases the risk for cardiovascular disease, lowers blood pressure, promotes better sleep, improves diet, and reduces stress.
But if the above benefits are what you need to follow your impulse for happiness — aka pursuit of pleasure — you are missing the point of our Founding Fathers and their north star, classical moral philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero, according to Jeffrey Rosen. Rosen is the president and chief executive officer of the National Constitution Center and author of the book The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.
According to Rosen, “Classical and Enlightenment thinkers defined happiness as the pursuit of virtue — as being good, rather than feeling good…being a lifelong learner, with a commitment to practicing the daily habits that lead to character improvement, self-mastery, flourishing, and growth.”
In case you are wondering, Benjamin Franklin believed the most desirable virtues were: temperance, silence (as in, speak only what benefits others and self), order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.
Although the pursuit of happiness was important to our Founders, the field of psychology had another focus — misery and suffering — until Martin Seligman became president of the American Psychological Society in 1998.
Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, “didn’t just concentrate on what could break our spirits and cause us misery,” says Laurie Santos, PhD, who interviewed Seligman on her podcast, The Happiness Lab. “He wanted to unlock the opposite: what could allow us to be more resilient and flourish.”
And thus, Seligman created the field of positive psychology, the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive.
In an effort to answer the question “Can we be happy?”, Seligman made the quest for the good life the theme of his tenure with the American Psychological Society. “Psychologists should be not only interested in what cripples life and how to get rid of it, but rather what enhances life and try to build more of it,” Seligman says.
According to the VIA Institute on Character, which supports Seligman’s work, there are six universal virtues: justice, temperance, courage, transcendence, wisdom, and humanity. Corresponding to each virtue are science-discovered character strengths, which make our personality sparkle and support our pursuit of happiness.
“We find that when people use their highest strengths more, life goes better,” Seligman says in the podcast. Non-suffering, free people choose to feel good, to be engaged, to have good relationships, to matter in the world, and to accomplish things, he adds.
Would you like to know your strengths? Take the VIA Survey of Character Strengths. You can find it at authentichappiness.org. Once you know your strengths, you can apply them to challenges and everyday possibilities. The website has suggestions on how to use them.
Whether optimism leads to happiness or happiness leads to optimism, research shows that optimistic people flourish in life, even when things go wrong. They are persistent, less likely to get depressed, and more successful at their jobs. They are resilient, and people like them better. Optimists live longer than pessimists; in fact, chronic pessimism carries a risk similar to smoking two to three packs of cigarettes a day, according to Seligman.
The Founders “believed that the pursuit of happiness includes responsibilities as well as rights — the responsibility to limit ourselves, restrain ourselves, and master ourselves, so that we achieve the wisdom and harmony that are necessary for true freedom.”
Happiness. There are so many reasons it’s worth the pursuit.
Kathleen Aharoni is a movement and life coach, forest bathing guide, and author of the award-winning book I breathe my own breath! She has served on the faculties of Northwestern University and Columbia College.
