By Francis X. Maier

Pascal Bruckner, the political philosopher, is a classic French intellectual. Raised Catholic and educated in Jesuit schools, his adult thought is thoroughly secular. But he has a keen intellect, a clever pen, and a lively skepticism. And, to his credit, he applies it with vigor to a wide range of sacred cows - including the God-vacant modernity of which he himself is a creature.

One of Bruckner's key targets is the cult of counterfeit happiness that, in his view, rules our age. On the one hand, he argues that religious faith infantilizes its followers. "It is typical of Christianity," he writes, "to have overdramatized our existence by subjecting it to the alternative between hell and paradise. . . .Pass or fail: Paradise is structured like a school."

Can the meager sins of our tiny world - Bruckner asks derisively - earn endlessly disproportionate torment in the next? Yet at the same time, he notes that man's repudiation of God has not produced freedom, but a vulgar universe of advertising instead. In effect, what was liberated by humanity's perceived psychic and sexual coming of age "was less our libido than our appetite for unlimited shopping."

For Bruckner, we've become little more than the "galley slaves of pleasure." Every new distraction, gadget, and tech marvel drives our hedonism more deeply into its own exhausted punishment.

Past cultures accepted suffering as a normal, often meaningful, element of life. Happiness was seen as fragile and transient. Real joy was exceptional. For Bruckner, our age, especially in the West, has turned such thinking upside down. We're expected - in effect, we're commanded by 24/7 marketing - to be happy with the deluge of options presented to us.

When we're not, we're failures; or worse, deviants. "Happy Honda Days" become a sacrament of the consumer holiday season. As a result, despite mountains of contrary evidence in the real world, we insist on a spirit of mandatory optimism; we're "the world's first societies that make people unhappy, not to be happy."

In the end, modernity has "raised human hopes so high that it can only disappoint us." And this provides a bitter revenge for religions: "They may be in bad shape, but what succeeded them isn't doing so well, either."

True, that. Bruckner is strong medicine. No one will confuse him with Mr. Glad Pants. His lack of religious faith looks suspiciously like a case of self-inflicted blindness. And despite (or perhaps because of) his Jesuit background, his grasp of Christianity seems barely adolescent.

But on the final day of an old year and the brink of a new one, Bruckner's thoughts are nonetheless worth considering. Around the world tonight people will be wishing each other a happy new year. Yet the lights will be out in the Maier household by 10 pm. The idea of celebrating a giant electric ball falling at midnight in Manhattan to welcome in another hangover January just doesn't tickle the heartstrings.

So what exactly can "happiness" mean in an age of noise and manufactured excitement - an age, not by accident, rich in anxiety and conflict? And what about joy? We're still in the Christmas season, the very reason for "joy to the world."

For both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, happiness and joy are related, but finally very different things. This becomes clear throughout their fiction and other writings. In Tolkien, happiness is always in some sense selfless. It flows from doing what's right, even at great cost. It's tied to sacrifice, friendship, faithful service, fulfilling one's appointed purpose, and the enjoyment of simple pleasures in the natural world. Lewis likewise saw happiness as a matter of this-world satisfaction, the fruit of success, comradeship, innocent pleasures, and basic comforts.

Note that none of the above easily survives in a culture of constantly teased and escalating appetites. In fact, the happiness of a society - consider the state of our own - seems inversely proportional to the self-fo...