"What is the American Dream?", James Gustave Speth

It's almost a cliché now that consumerism, or the mass consumption of consumer goods, is not the key to happiness. The question arises, though, what is? And what did the colonists really mean by "the pursuit of Happiness" in the Declaration of Independence? The latter is the question answered in "What is the American Dream?: Dueling Dualities in the American Tradition", an entry on the Center for a New American Dream's blog.

Speth traces Jefferson's use of the phrase "pursuit of Happiness" back to

... two very different notions: the idea from John Locke and Jeremy Bentham that happiness was the pursuit of personal pleasure and the older Stoic idea that happiness derived from active devotion to the public good and from civic virtue, which have little to do with personal pleasure.

Speth himself thinks a third man, James Truslow Adams, introduced a third facet to the phrase in his 1931 book The Epic of America.

I believe James Truslow Adams' vision of the American Dream is at least as compelling as that of Lincoln. Adams used the phrase, "the American dream," to refer, not to getting rich or even especially to a secure, middle class lifestyle, though that was part of it, but primarily to something finer and more important:

"It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."

Yet another interpretation of "the pursuit of happiness" comes from what Andrew Carnegie called "the gospel of wealth". Carnegie tied "improved conditions" for all Americans to "material development", which in turn was due (of course) to the unhindered operation of competition and the free market.

As a nation we've given ourselves over to one understanding of "happiness", the understanding promulgated by Carnegie. Speth thinks there's compelling empirical evidence that this deeply libertarian and individualistic pursuit of happiness through "material development" isn't actually making us happier.

I've never thought of myself as a Stoic but I do find myself increasingly repelled by the modern compulsion to consume. I've had to fend off friends and family who urge me to replace my TV, for instance, it being a (seemingly) ancient cathode-ray tube model. My counterargument is, it still works and it's good enough for my (evidently, comparatively simple) needs. More and more, I see ads on the Web for goods and services I just don't need, and I wonder: what am I missing, that so many other people seem to want them?

Clearly, I'm getting older ... but maybe, just maybe, it means I'm getting a little wiser, too. At least I've discovered that for me, "the pursuit of happiness" requires more than buying stuff. What exactly that is, I'm not sure. I'll keep looking, I guess.

For the rest of you, maybe it's time to reconsider whether resurrecting the overheated, consumption-based consumer sector is the best way to return this country to something like its former greatness -- or the best way to seek your own personal happiness, for that matter. Focusing on consumption at the expense of everything else is, after all, how we got ourselves into our current economic tar pit. It also hasn't made a lot of us happy, has it?