This is the second of a three part series looking at "happiness and hedonism". The first - Thank God you are Australian - looked at the why 'thanksgiving' is an antidote to consumerism and material envy.

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Nearly all Australians are hedonists.

In fact, I am confident you will have hedonists sitting in your church’s pews this Sunday who call themselves Christians and are very moral people.

This line of thinking is so pervasive that we probably all adopt a hedonist perspective for certain aspects of our lives.

As co-author of the latest AMP-NATSEM report - The pursuit of happiness: life satisfaction in Australia, Rebecca Cassells, rightly observes: "happiness is the goal that most Australians strive for".

This should come as no surprise. The 'pursuit of happiness' is the guiding principle of our entire culture. It justifies the drive for wealth creation and the focus on economic growth.

Shock finding: Australian are becoming more conservative on marriage

One mistake when preaching against hedonism is to equate it with 'selfishness'. This will just let your listeners off the hook because very few people believe they are amoral, egoistic pleasure-seekers.

Contrary to the way I often hear it spoken about in sermons, hedonistic thinking does not always produce what Christians would see as 'immoral' behaviour.

Andrew Norton, Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, has been charting Australians changing attitudes to sex.

As most of you would already suspect attitudes to premarital sex and homosexuality have become more liberal over recent decades.

What may surprise you is that Australians' attitudes to extramarital sex have actually become more conservative in the same period.

Norton has a little bit of difficulty explaining these apparently contradictory results. He rightly links the liberalizing trend to a decline in Christian adherence.

So why are Australians also moving towards a more conservative or 'Christian' view of fidelity in marriage?

Norton has only identified one half of the puzzle. The answer is that most Australians have replaced Christianity with a faith in 'social hedonism' - or what students of philosophy would technically call 'classic utilitarianism'.

All three of Norton's findings are entirely consistent with our society's growing commitment to social hedonism.

Or as Norton puts it, Australians have come to believe "that prevailing laws and norms caused huge misery to gay people and their partners in sham marriages".

(Likewise a belief that 'try before you buy' would ensure long-term happiness has helped boost widespread social acceptance of defacto relationships and pre-marital sex. In contrast, I suspect infidelity is increasingly being associated with divorce and the misery felt by those betrayed rather than seen as a path to freedom from loveless marriages.)

The point I am making is this: social hedonists don't merely care about their own self-interest but in the 'happiness' of society as a whole.

Australian 'social hedonism': what it means in practice

Liberal societies like ours are built on the maxim attributed to Jeremy Bentham: "the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation".

This “greatest-happiness principle” found its deepest and most influential articulation in John Stuart Mill's classic work Utilitarianism.

To cut a long story short, what Mills added to Bentham's formulation was a qualitative view of happiness rather than a quantative approach. For Mills, happiness is the intellectual and moral satisfaction that blossoms when one follows the disciplined path of virtue rather than amoral pleasure-seeking.

From Mills theory flows the contemporary concepts of 'well-being' and 'life satisfaction' that are most often used to evaluate public policy in Australian political discourse. These terms are long been used to frame major social research such as the AMP-NATSEM report and so have become the accepted benchmarks for assessing right behaviour. 

And so at the AMP-NATSEM launch luncheon my fellow guests found it easy to accept the findings of 'happiness research' that critiqued the limits of consumerism, for example.

Most Australians already suspect money cannot guarantee anything more than short-term happiness because they see their longer term well-being tied to their relational capital: strong community connections, faithful marriages, respectful children and deep friendships.

Joining the theological dots

As you would expect from a thinker grounded in Victorian Christianity, the social hedonism of Mills smells a lot like Proverbs: it is biblical wisdom sans God.

In fact Mills was the intellectual inheritor of 19th century Christian ultility theory, which he tried to shake free from its grounding in the Proverbial 'Fear of the Lord'. 

And this is where the contemporary conversation about 'happiness' demands a Christian perspective. It should be an open door for Christian apologetics. But in a conversation that has already equated the Christian ethic with 'misery', I fear Christians are unable to engage in this conversation with the depth required, struggling to explain what the Bible means by concepts such as 'sin'.

Discussion points

A better starting point might be to ask:

"¢ What exactly do Australians imagine when they picture a 'happy life'?

"¢ To what extent is this picture dependent on being free from death and sin?

"¢ Is 'sin' more than injustice and misery inflicted by fellow humans?

OK over to you. What do you think the Bible says to social hedonists? 

NEXT TIME : Is Christian hedonism heretical?