Should we have a Secretary of Happiness?

Thomas Jefferson would say yes.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the use of “happiness” peaked in 1790; the word showed up in writing more than six times as often as it does today.

The very first self-help philosophies arose from arguments that centered around defining the good life. What is the good life to you? A “happy” one?

Say that to any politician, or an MBA scrambling up the corporate ladder, or an aspiring actor waiting tables in New York’s theater district. We moderns tend to think of the good life in terms of accomplishment, possessions, or recreation. A traditional American would name the stuff of the American Dream: house, car, yard, central air. Stuff, basically.

The ancients, on the other hand, were more into means than ends. One group of Athenians insisted on defining happiness in terms of behavior. The purpose of life was to live well, they said; and by “well” they meant virtuously. Their idea of virtue was not that different from Aristotle’s: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice—standing up for what’s right, applying reason to every decision.

These philosophers and students gathered in the Stoa Poikile—the Painted Porch, a covered colonnade that fronted one of Athens’ largest buildings in the Agora. The group called themselves the Stoics, and they taught apatheia, or apathy: a state of mind free from ill passions. (These days there are drugs for that.)

While the Stoics could hardly be called laugh riots, they weren’t averse to being happy. In fact, they believed that a truly virtuous person was happy. He could be sick, enslaved, or under torture, and so long as he practiced virtue and apathy, his pain and loss—mere passions—would mean nothing to him. He could smile through his agony.

It’s just that happiness was not the point. Virtue could make you happy, but happiness did not define the good life. Virtue did. The good life meant being good.

The founder of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium, had some…original ideas about being good. For instance, he dealt with Lust philosophically by proposing the abolition of marriage. Women would be shared in common, and boys would be educated in sex by having coitus with girls and with each other. A QAnon nightmare, basically.

Shorn of its weirder aspects, Stoicism flourished in ancient Rome; Marcus Tullius Cicero occasionally called himself a Stoic, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his famous Meditations to promote the philosophy. Early Christians picked up Stoicism and leaned into the good-life-as-virtue ethic. The Stoics believed that virtue came from behavior connecting their individual souls with the universal logos.

The early Christians took up the idea. In their eyes, the purpose of life was to connect the soul to God. The good life was the life that led to the afterlife. Happiness was not the point at all. That, they hoped, came later.

One group of Athenian philosophers did see happiness as the whole point of a good life. They met in a garden owned by a man named Epicurus of Samos. While the Stoics sought apathy, Epicurus taught ataraxia, freedom from disturbance. The Stoics believed in ignoring pain; the Epicureans sought to avoid it altogether.

The Stoically minded Christians later libeled the Epicureans with a reputation for drunken feasts, but the philosophers in Epicurus’s Garden served meals that would hardly show up in any restaurant today. They ate a vegetarian gruel, and Epicurus wrote that a piece of cheese would qualify as a feast. Instead of the rumored wild orgies, they entertained themselves with philosophical conversation. Happiness to these people depended on avoiding the kinds of behavior that would lead to pain and regrets later.

The true modern Epicurean has no chains. She avoids owing most of her waking hours to an employer, feels free of interference from the gods, spends little money on painkillers, and lives her life to the fullest in the belief that life is all. When it ends, her atoms will join the rest of the universe.

The ancient Romans had a word for this state of living: liberalis. It meant agency, the ability to act freely. A “liberal” citizen of Rome had no definable job. He wasn’t a slave, or a wife (who, face it, was basically a slave), or even a tradesman. A liberal citizen generally practiced law, politics, medicine, or the priesthood. These were “professions” rather than jobs. While a gentleman might need to work for a living, his liberal status depended on his pretending to have other means—an inheritance or land, and likely some slaves for manual work.

In the eighteenth century, philosophers like John Locke began to think that a liberal life, one free from necessity, might become accessible to everyone in the right kind of society. They saw “happiness” as a public good. The concept caught on. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the use of the term peaked in 1790; the word showed up in writing more than six times as often as it does today. Thomas Jefferson displayed up-to-the-moment thinking when he added happiness to the Declaration of Independence.

I asked Chat GPT to paint a happy Jefferson, and it came up with a drunk Jefferson. But even Epicurus enjoyed a tot of wine.

But while life and liberty stand on their own as natural rights, Jefferson put happiness in a different category. You don’t have a right to be happy. Instead, you have a right to pursue happiness. Jefferson was a fan of Aristotle, and he credited the philosopher with influencing his draft of the Declaration. Aristotle and Jefferson agreed that happiness requires some work on our part, to join our daily selves with our souls. Governments had an obligation to free up its citizens for that pursuit. This meant making sure that everyone had at least an Epicurean-level lifestyle, being provided with their basic needs.

Besides the personal pursuit—which Jefferson believed to be the duty of every right-minded person—he also thought that an entire nation could be happy. Happiness was a public good as well as a private one, and it could be measured. Garry Wills, the author of Inventing America, noted that happiness “was not only a constant preoccupation of the eighteenth century; it was one inextricably linked with the effort to create a science of man based on numerical gauges for all his activity.” Jefferson advised the Marquis de Lafayette to go into French peasants’ huts to determine the softness of their beds—a metric of happiness. He would have loved the modern field of economics.

Soon after, political scientists like England’s Jeremy Bentham came up with the doctrine of utilitarianism, which held that governments were obligated to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. The doctrine evolved into the nineteenth-century philosophy of eudemonism, the study of happiness.

In my new book, I set out to explore the nature of happiness, both private and public. Private happiness comes from habits. Public happiness comes from the idea that government is responsible for the greatest good for the most people for the longest time.

Given that, should we have a secretary of happiness, in charge of setting policies that promote Finland-level contentment? Let me know in the comments.