People are happier when they live in strong communities – but balancing the importance of community connections with individual desires can be challenging. Over the course of American history, that balance has swung between emphasizing individual liberty and promoting equality, with different ideas about the value of community changing along the way.
Early on in American history, the idea of being good to others was thought to be an essential, fundamental source of happiness. Many Enlightenment philosophers like Francis Hutcheson and Samuel Parker believed that benevolence was built in to human nature. Showing kindness to others felt as satisfying any other instinct. Justice was seen as its own reward and community was its natural result.
There was a more practical aspect to this as well. Nature was cruel and capricious; if our colonial forebears were to thrive – or even survive – they would need to work together. Lacking the technology to guarantee a year's worth of calories from every farm or protection against marauders and the weather, they formed social contracts that improved their lives. Benjamin Franklin, for example, organized the men in his neighborhood into a community fire department which may not have saved every house, but it prevented small fires from becoming conflagrations. Happiness, then, came from benevolence, comfort, and a sense of community.
But That was Then
Over time, Americans' ideas about happiness have evolved.
Instead of forming mutual aid societies as Franklin did, contemporary Americans tend to rely on a social safety net that often feels like it runs by itself: there's a line on your paycheck about your contributions to Social Security, and when you retire, payments just sort of automatically appear. Instead of carving order out of nature, most of us live in houses that other people built and work in environments that other people control. So instead of working to establish a livable system, we often find ourselves in an order that was already in place when we got here. Developing a working community is no longer a life and death; for many people, getting ahead and individual achievement have become more important.
And since the Enlightenment, Americans' visions of human nature have changed many times over. For most of us, benevolence is no longer at the top of the list of human imperatives.
In a 180 degree turn from the Enlightenment, most self-help books today emphasize the idea that happiness is an individual pursuit, not a shared social project. One of the main themes of Positive Psychology, for example, is the idea that happiness comes when we interpret our worlds in ways that make us happy. We should change our minds, they suggest, rather than changing our worlds. In The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirski argues that only 10% of our happiness comes from our life circumstances; a full 40% is based on interpretation. (The rest, she says, in genetic.) In her run-away best-seller, The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin argues that making herself happy is actually a sort of social service: when other people are around a happy version of her, they become happier themselves.
So by the 21st century, the pendulum has swung. There is a strong trend toward the idea that happiness is a job for the individual instead of the community.
But there has been some push-back. In America the Anxious, for example Ruth Whippman points out the fact that, when people pursue happiness by themselves, they loosen their connections to other people. (As a side-note, this is one of the best books I've read about happiness.) Barbara Ehrenreich takes things a step further. In Bright-Sided, she argues that, by promoting the idea that everyone is responsible for their own personal happiness, we end up blaming people for not being happy. In doing this, we ignore our responsibility as members of a society to make happiness possible for other people.[1]
Arguments for a Just Society
Ehrenreich and Whippman have a point. There is good evidence suggesting that happiness is not strictly an individual problem; it's also a social one. In The Spirit Level, social scientists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that, on a very large scale, inequality leads to unhappiness. They show that societies in which social mobility is easier, and the gap between the rich and the poor relatively small, are just happier than the rest. They're not just saying that the poor and underserved are happier. They're saying that everybody is happier – including the people at the top – than they would be in a less egalitarian society.
For a variety of reasons, in a variety of places around the world, the stresses that come with inequality appear to lower quality of life and lessen the sense of community. In societies with a big gap between the rich and the poor, for example, crime rates are higher. While the rich are almost always less likely to be victimized than the poor, in unequal societies there is more potential for crime at all levels.
Furthermore, Wilkinson and Pickett argue, living day-in and day-out in an unequal society produces an adversarial mindset. When people habitually see one another as higher or lower on the pecking order, social control over those below, and the desire to rebel against people higher up, become important. In more egalitarian societies, their research suggests, the focus is more on cooperation and mutual aid.
The idea of working toward a just society in itself can be a source of happiness. Volunteering, activism, and social engagement can often serve as a source of meaning and satisfaction in both the people who benefit from the volunteering and activism, and engagement, and for the doers themselves.
Even if we're not the fundamentally benevolent creatures that Enlightenment-era thinkers like Hutchison and Parker thought we were, they had a point that still stands today: belonging to a community can be an important ingredient in happiness, and, in many modern western societies, that isn't possible without the respect that comes with equality.
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[1] Ehrenreich is a member of a group called The Negateers ("The Negateers joined forces in 2008 to fight the tyranny of positive thinking and the cult of omnipotent agency," according to their not-very-well-visited Facebook page.) Some Negateers argue that, instead of looking to fix systematic discrimination or consummately unfair situations, positive psychology puts the onus on the individual instead.