In the middle of the film Lady Bird, the character who calls herself Lady Bird asks her mother about a pill bottle she found in the bathroom – antidepressants, with her father's name on it. The fact that he's unemployed comes up immediately. Professional success isn't a good way to evaluate a life, her mother tells her. Success is just success. Yes, her daughter responds, but it's success. The word hangs in the air, as though the meaning and value and importance of success were self-evident.

In our society, the AMERICAN DREAM – the idea that, with hard work and commitment, anyone can succeed – can serve as a motivator and a model for a path to happiness. But in the centuries since it began to develop, its meaning has changed, and a lack of success can lead to despair. Its significance has grown out of proportion and for many, like Lady Bird's father, it has become as much a bludgeon as a source of hope.

There is mounting social-scientific research on the effects of unequal success on society. It appears that people who do better than most aren't especially pleased by their success – but when people learn that they are worse-off than average, they tend to resent it. In a society which rewards success disproportionately, nobody feels like they're winning – but many feel like they've lost.[i]

Where did this ideal of the dream come from, and how did we, as a society, come to view it in the ways we do?

When Thomas Jefferson changed the last word in John Locke's phrase, "life, liberty, and property" to "the pursuit of happiness" as he drafted the Declaration of Independence, he enshrined in writing a set of values that would ramify through American public consciousness for centuries. The phrase is still widely quoted but over time the concept of happiness has evolved, and with it our ideas of the "American dream," only ostensibly enshrined in our founding documents. As America evolved, the philosophies that made success only one part of a well-lived life have faded.

The History of the Dream

The Protestant Reformation sent shock-waves through almost every dimension of European life – politically, economically, and philosophically, to say nothing of what it did to theology. Until the Reformation, the Pope was considered God's spokesman on earth; understanding God's will, for most people, involved taking the Pope's word.

But many Protestant thinkers had a different idea: that God is actually speaking to all of us, if only we knew how to listen. Two of the schools of thought that grew out of the Reformation play an important role in shaping the American Dream: Enlightenment philosophies like John Locke's, and the Puritan theology of John Calvin.

Locke and the Pleasures of the Enlightenment

God created humans with the abilities to feel pleasure and pain, John Locke argued, along with many other Enlightenment thinkers. If something felt good, he reasoned, that was an indication (not absolute proof, but a good hint) that it was something God wanted us to do. And if it hurt, then that was probably something that did not please Him.[ii] Human nature was fundamentally benevolent, Enlightenment thinking went - it felt good to do good things for other people.

The clock was a popular metaphor for many Enlightenment thinkers. It stood in for the universe – God was the great watch-maker, and those of us who inhabited the earth were wheels and cogs in His grand machine. If we all just did our parts – using our God-given reason to pursue our God-designed desires, taking care of ourselves and the people we shared Creation with, we would be living out His divine plan. This would, by definition, be good, and we would be happy.[iii]

So the "pursuit of happiness" involved attempting to fulfill one's own examined, rational desires. If everyone did this, it wouldn't just allow these individuals to get ahead – it would be good for everyone. And of course, "pursuit" is different from "attainment." Happiness was not guaranteed. It wasn't a right. The pursuit of happiness, then, wasn't about letting the individual get ahead any way he could. It was an idea for organizing a just, benevolent, and prosperous society.

There were individualistic components to this philosophy as well. The idea was that a good society could be achieved by putting the onus on the individual, trusting him to behave rationally, rather than on an aristocratic system that compelled people to serve the people above them.

Material success was also part of the pursuit of happiness. God had filled the world with the resources His people would need to make themselves happy. He provided the resources with which they could build houses, grow food, and entertain themselves, and other people who would naturally see the value in helping the cogs in the God's machine with charity for those who needed it and cooperation with those who had plans improve the place.

There is a difference between success and profligacy. Benjamin Franklin has long been held up as a model American success story.[iv] But anyone who has been to his home in Philadelphia knows that it was more middle-class house than a mansion. He retired from his printing business quite early and, having established himself as a comfortable and respected member of society, devoted the second half of his life to public service. For him, the pursuit of happiness wasn't so much about extravagant wealth as it was about the pleasures of a comfortable life and the respect of the community from which he benefitted and to which he contributed. (In his autobiography, he writes that that he added "humility" to the list of virtues he planned to practice only after a Quaker friend pointed out that it was really something he could work on.)

In time, however, philosophies changed. The idea that the world was a great machine built for harmonious time-keeping passed, taking with it the idea that benevolence was part of everyone's character. The idea that a society based on the pursuit of happiness would lead to cooperation and well-being for everyone faded, but the competitive, individualistic aspects remained. As Enlightenment ideas waned, the desire to keep up with the Jonses grew stronger.

The idea that it's a good thing to have wealth that goes beyond what we need to be comfortable doesn't enter the picture until much later. For obvious reasons, the Industrial Revolution plays a key role in this, and the rise of the advertising industry grew as a way convince people that they needed things that they didn't. (A complete discussion of this can be found here.)

The Pressures of Protestantism

A second strand of thought encouraged early European-Americans to seek happiness through success – in this case because it demonstrated that God was pleased with them. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, sociologist Max Weber describes a different drive to succeed. The Calvinists who moved to Massachusetts in the 1600's (we usually call them "Pilgrims" or "Puritans") believed that God was omnipotent and omniscient. He had made decisions about everything that you would ever do before you were born – before anybody was born, really – and He was ready to send most of us to eternal torment after we die for our sins. Is case you missed it, the sins we were going to burn for were the ones He had decided we were commit.[v]

So there was really no way to change your destiny and convince God to take you to heaven. Instead, the best you could do was to persuade yourself that you were heaven-bound. People looked for little clues that God favored them. Any hint of doubt in the back of the mind that one was Chosen was enough to prove that massive despair was in order. So enormous emotional self-discipline was required. And since God would probably favor his Chosen with success on earth, complete devotion to work - with the confidence of success - would assuage the fear of damnation.

Few people still accept the idea of predestination. While the theology has changed, the emotional habits persist.  The devotion to success lingers on, even if it no longer connects on to God. What Weber called the "iron cage" or "iron shell" continues. The drive to succeed has become an end in itself, and a sense of meaninglessness or despair can set in when success does not materialize. These are cultural legacies of Calvinism.

The American Dream and Me

So what was once the American Dream has changed. As we talk about it today, what used to be a celebration of God's glory, a sign of God's grace, an ideal to build a society around and a spur to cooperation, has become something very different: an individualistic pursuit, often lonely, often the central measure of a person's self-worth, often impossible to attain.

What do you do if you haven't achieved it?

• First, it's good to remember that success is not a measure of absolute worth, but a product of a particular cultural environment. It's the result of historical accidents – the US being founded after the Protestant Reformation and based in part on Enlightenment ideals - and some of the values that contributed to the American Dream no longer fit in with our contemporary ways of seeing the world.
• Second, subtle messages about success permeate our cultural conversations. If you pay attention, make yourself aware of them. When that happens, you can decide whether these are values you willingly adopt, or ideas that have been foisted upon you without your awareness and consent.
• You might want to think about what a good life for yourself would look like without worrying about the demands of the American Dream.

As this article suggests, these ideas have been imbedded deep into the American zeitgeist, so they're not easy to resist – but awareness is at least the first step.

 

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Notes:

[i] Kolbert, 29.

[ii] Taylor, 237.

[iii] Ibid., 244.

[iv] Isaacson, 4.

[v] Weber had a very specific take on Franklin. My reading has lead me to disagree with him – I see Franklin as more of an Enlightenment thinker than someone with left-over Calvinist ideals.

 

Works cited:

Isaacson, Walter. 2004. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Kolbert, Elizabeth, 2018. "Feeling Low: The Psychology of Inequality." The New Yorker, Jan 15, 2018, pp. 28-31.

Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.