Celebrity fun vs scared joy

Easter is the season of rebirth and renewal. It is hard to renew ourselves, not because we are weak and tempted only, but because our pleasure-seeking culture pours scorn on all the old ways of sacrifice, and conceives fulfilment as fun. ‘Have fun’ has replaced ‘Fare well’ as the good wish of parting, and everything on which our happiness depends has been veiled by a mask of instant pleasure.

You don’t have to be a philosopher or a theologian to recognise that pleasure and happiness are not the same. There are wicked pleasures, destructive pleasures, addictive pleasures, despicable pleasures: but there is no such thing as wicked, destructive, addictive or despicable happiness. The happy person is in possession of the chief human good; happiness makes no inroads into our freedom; it brings love for others and joy to all who encounter it. It is as far from pleasure as health is from intoxication. Hence Aristotle’s definition of happiness, as ‘an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue’.

Pleasures are of many kinds; but those most dangerous to us come from consumption. When you consume a thing you also destroy it. For a brief moment you are pleased to hold the thing in your hands, but your pleasure spells its doom. Down goes the hamburger or the glass of wine and in its place there comes the stale feeling of satiety — or, if you have reached the stage of addiction, the slavish craving for more. People have always recognised that to exalt the pleasures of consumption into the goal of human life is to deprive human life of its goal. Yet the great mistake continues. And there are other pleasures too which, while they do not consume their cause, involve a momentary reward the aftermath of which is either staleness or addiction.