Building Bridges to the Pursuit of Happiness

While the Declaration of Independence proclaims three inalienable rights, today I want to focus upon the right to the pursuit of happiness. If government is instituted to safeguard this right, what may we expect government to do? What more might we expect society and ourselves as individuals to do to safeguard this right for our common humanity?

I am aware that many people believe that it is impossible to define happiness, that it is a totally individual and personal concept. (Some would probably question whether happiness is an attainable or even desirable goal. "So, who's happy?") However, I'd like to use the ancient Greek definition of happiness as a working definition.

"The exercise of vital powers
along lines of excellence
in a life affording them scope."

I have liked this definition ever since I read it at the impressionable age of 15. It stresses active development of talents rather than passive consumption. It holds us responsible to pursue quality in what we do. It recognizes that the social order has a role to play in providing scope for the excellent powers its members are striving to develop.

What do you think? Is this an adequate definition? Does it leave out anything important? The most obvious alternative definition is Freud's:

Love and work

The Greek definition can be said to include work, but what about love? I think we can even stretch the Greek definition to include loving, as a vital power that should be exercised excellently. You might say that the Greek definition includes loving but not being loved. Isn't that also necessary? Or is it better to seek to love than to seek to be loved? Will being loved automatically result if one loves excellently? Can one love if one hasn't been loved as a child?

If you will, let me work with the Greek definition for now, but we can keep this missing piece in the back of our minds for later.

Have you thought about how bold it was to proclaim, in 1776, that all are created equal? That ALL have an inalienable right to pursue happiness? The ancient Greeks themselves would have said only free citizens, not slaves, had the possibility of happiness as they'd defined it. Perhaps some slaves with valued skills and enlightened masters might also have attained it. For centuries afterwards, the teaching was that this kind of free choice and scope were only possible to an aristocracy, that it's attainment by the few depended, in fact, upon the toil of the many. If this was seen as unfair, the answer was either that happiness was an unworthy earthly goal anyway, and was to be attained only in the next life (or next rebirth) or that the 'lower orders' had a lower conception of happiness and could be happy fulfilling the duties of the station in life to which it had pleased God to call them, with perhaps the occasional festival or Colosseum circus thrown in.

But the Declaration of Independence says--everyone!

Of course, the Declaration did not spring forth from nothing in 1776. There is a fascinating history of the economic, religious, political and intellectual developments that led to the 18^th century flowering of these conceptions of the Rights of Man (yes, and of women), but that history is not what I want to talk about today. Instead, I would like to look briefly at one bit of the history of the young U.S. republic and then jump to where we are now. That bit of history is the development of public education, and this is where our second reading, excerpts from Gray's "Elegy", comes in.

Early in our nation's history, people proposed that a republican government should be in the business of providing education to its citizens. Jefferson considered his efforts in founding the University of Virginia far more worthy of remembrance than his having been our third President. Many of you probably learned a little about Horace Mann's efforts to start public elementary schools in Massachusetts, and about how this movement spread to other states. And some of you may have heard the rationale: "that nation that expects to be ignorant and free, expects what never was and never will be." But what you may not have heard, and what I found fascinating when I encountered it studying the history of public education, is that every legislative debate cited the passage from Gray's "Elegy" I read. Here's a little of it again:

Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre: ...
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

I remember falling in love with the poem the first time I encountered it. I read it as a poetic expansion of the slogan of the campaign for the National Negro College Fund, which I also loved--"A mind is a terrible thing to waste." And this is exactly how the early 19^th century Americans read the poem and why they cited it as an argument for public schools.

Gray himself may not have meant the poem that way and his more conservative readers did not take it that way. After all, it also contains the phrases: "not alone their growing virtues, but their crimes confined"… "far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife"… "the paths of glory lead but to the grave. Well and good, but in the end, I love my countryman and myself for having misunderstood Gray, if that's what we did. More likely, the popularity of the poem was due precisely to its being capable of both interpretations. It was written, after all, just when people were consciously grappling with the issues of what were our inalienable rights and how far equality should extend.

If we return to the history of the development of public education, we find that there were different ideas about how much it was to accomplish. Jefferson's argument for a public university envisaged that "20 geniuses shall be raked from the rubble annually." This is an argument for not wasting high talent if it is found among the poor but hardly sounds like a commitment to education as a way to help all people pursue the right to happiness. The arguments for public elementary schools may have cited Gray but they also made far more utilitarian arguments for a minimum level of education-the avoidance of an ignorant electorate being one; the provision of enough literacy to foster economic expansion of the young country being another. Sound familiar?

Let us jump forward to the present, then, and consider the current debates over education and disadvantage. Like the public service ad I reproduced on the cover of today's order of service, people tend to make the utilitarian argument that we are not training enough young people with enough skills for the good of our communal future. Today's ever more automated society demands more skills and skills of a higher order. The simpler jobs get automated and we have ever more sophisticated power tools instead of 1000 strong men with shovels. We have in the last 50 years made real progress in removing barriers based on race and gender. We are a fabulously wealthy and creative country. How sad, then, if now that we really should not need "ten that toil where one reposes," now that we should be able to share life's glories-we are seeing part of our population become ever more marginalized. The proportion left out may be growing, not shrinking. I suggest that they are not in a position to pursue happiness-defined, as I said, as the development of vital powers along lines of excellence. This situation saddens and worries me. What might these people-or at least their children-have become? What stunted lives will they lead instead? Do we want to pour so many potential talents down the drain when they might have served us all? Won't some of the thwarted turn to crime and more, in their unhappiness, make the lives of those they meet less happy?

If we as UU's care about the "inherent worth and dignity of every human being," I think we should care about this issue. Is there anything that can be done?

I suggest that one piece of a solution is a campaign to spread awareness of my Greek definition of happiness and, I would hope, to build agreement that happiness is based on the development and use of one's abilities more than upon the acquisition of money and things or upon passive consumption and spectatorship. Is this a crazy place to begin? There already is a consensus among child development experts and educators that this is what children need.

To take just one example, the American Academy of Pediatrics recently urged its members to tell parents "NO TV for the first two years of life." I don't think it's impossible to spread this conception of happiness, and its implications for child rearing, to more parents. Obviously it's more difficult to spread the word that for adults also, consumption and spectatorship are not the path to true happiness. Do we expect the mass media to commit hari kiri? But let me venture two suggestions:

We aren't doing very well at persuading people to become enthusiastic learners and to help their kids to learn by making economic arguments-maybe we'd do better if we worked on helping them see this as a path to personal happiness.

We aren't doing all that well at getting support from the advantaged for programs to help the disadvantaged by talking economic self-interest either-so perhaps we'd do better there too if we talked about happiness.

But you may say that we don't know what to do.

No, there is no pill that will give dreams and aspirations to those who don't have them, and some of them we will never reach. I've told you before about the administrator at Shaed Elementary, where many of the Beacon House children attend, who cried in a moment of frustration, "What these children need is a whole new set of parents!" Further, brain development research increasingly suggests that certain kinds of deprivation in the first 3-5 years of life may be pretty much irreparable. One such kind of deprivation is not being loved. (See, I told you I'd bring that up again.) We may well be faced with a choice between writing off a certain percentage of children or taking very authoritarian measures against their parents.

But we do know enough things that succeed that we could be working to get them used more widely. Endangered Minds, a book by Jane Healy that I've been reading, cites a New York City preschool that serves both wealthy Upper East Siders and a contingent of classmates from a nearby welfare hotel and has been able to make big differences in some lives.

"If we get them early enough", says the director. "We've saved a lot of lives. I think of Matthew, a homeless child I worked with a couple of years ago. He was one who came from a loving family, but they had so many problems-both parents were in treatment for drug addiction. Matthew made fantastic gains when he was with us-he is in kindergarten now and I just learned that he's being tested for the gifted program. We got him early, and his parents tried their best to help. When kids are older, though, or when the environment at home is too awful, it is so much harder."

I would offer the closer-to-home example of a family that Beacon House has worked with: there are seven children, one of whom is a teenage mother; both parents have struggled with poor health and I suspect with addiction at some point, but several of their children are avid readers and nearly all are trying hard in school as well as being helpful members of the BH community. Let me quote from Lisbeth Schorr's Within Our Reach, cited in Jane Healy's book:

Poor parents often "have an especially high-even passionate-regard for education and view it as the most promising means to improve their children's futures" but have little idea how to help their children do well

If there is even a spark of such dreams in the parents, there is surely much we can do to fan it.

It isn't even always necessary to intervene at an early age. I could mention Mr. Smith, who works in South East DC-as a developer, I think-but has kept his eye out for promising teens and helped several study for and pass the Microsoft network engineer certification.

Nor should we necessarily concentrate all our efforts on the most severely at risk. Montgomery County recently published a pamphlet called Aim High to encourage parents to prepare their children for the county's honors and other advanced offerings and make sure they took such classes, instead of settling for the basics. The pamphlet was created for minority parents, out of concern that this was the group least likely to know about the options and most likely to have its children overlooked and underestimated by school staff, but the advice in it is good for all parents. Indeed, the author of Endangered Minds offers compelling evidence that many well-off and well-intentioned parents are preparing their children very poorly for the acquisition of higher-level learning.

If you find appealing the definition of happiness as the development & use of vital powers, what are some of the things YOU could be doing?

• Reading to and with at-risk children. I'll be doing that some early mornings at Beacon House this summer and a team from UUCSS and two other churches will be doing it one Saturday a month next fall. If BH is too far away, there are several other programs that need volunteers. Ask your local public schools or check library bulletin boards.l
• Providing books or money to buy books. I was overwhelmed by how thrilled the children at BH were by the books we were able to give away to them as a result of the YRUU book drive to which so many of you contributed so generously. In May our Saturday reading program gave away another round of books and arranged for smaller children to get personalized books about themselves, and again, the children were delighted. These are kids who've never owned a book of their own. And now they do.
• Playing math games and doing hands-on math as part of BH's Saturday math academy.
• Helping high school students with math & science and perhaps research papers by telephone in late afternoon or evening. This is my new brainchild that I hope to be piloting at Beacon House next school year. It's already happening in a very small way-we have to figure out how to expand it. Will you join the X-team?
• Volunteering in programs that mentor parents who want education for their children but don't know how to help. I confess that I have had reservations about whether any suggestions I might give could be heard-would even be right-across divides of race and privilege, but there are programs that work. I'm very good at reading aloud-perhaps I could inspire others.

If you don't have the time to volunteer or don't have the skills (but don't be so sure you don't), there are a lot of other things that would help.

• Simply speaking up, at PTA and other public forums, for a conception of education that emphasizes the joy of pursuing excellence. And going on to advocate this kind of education for as many as possible.
• Lobbying for support of more and better early childhood programs, and for better training, higher expectations, more respect and better pay for teachers.
• Donating money to pay others who work with at-risk children (or to pay better the ones who already do). Hugo Price, then head of the Urban League, told a room full of affluent supporters that $1000 a year from every well-off person who cared about the future of needy children could put a caring adult in the lives of each one.
• Lobbying for expansion of and more funding for public programs that do work. This would include Head Start (particularly its parent-involvement part, which sometimes gets more lip than real service), good after-school programs and other kinds of enrichment that maintain the gains made in Head Start, and more.

If then, all are truly endowed with an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, perhaps we should all be involved in building bridges to that pursuit. Will you be a strand in the cable of such a bridge? Buy some of the stones? Advocate for more bridges? Support emotionally those who do the building work? Hold a child's hand as she crosses the bridge?