Hugo Schwyzer made an incredibly valuable point about modern hedonism in a post yesterday. Responding to an assertion by “crunchy conservative” Rod Dreher that churches need to “preach more commandments and fewer affirmations.” (Emphasis his.)

Rod makes a mistake, however, when he writes that our problem is that “we love ourselves and our pleasures entirely too much.” It sounds good, but he misses some key points. First off, a great many people who spend a great deal of time pursuing material things do so not because they love themselves too much, but because they don’t love themselves enough. Much of the reckless consumption that characterizes the modern middle-class lifestyle is rooted in a profound anxiety and unease rather than in genuine self-satisfaction. We consume and consume in order to distract ourselves from ourselves, eating when we’re not really hungry and buying what we don’t really need. Folks in that situation don’t need happy little affirmations that everything is fine, but neither do they need stern admonitions about their own sinfulness; heck, deep down they already suspect they’re plenty sinful enough.

...

God isn’t impressed by the truffle you didn’t eat or the orgasm you didn’t have. ... [S]elf-denial is about quieting down our habits of mindless consumption so that we can listen to the real needs of our bodies and our souls. What deep hunger are we masking by overeating? For what sense of inadequacy are we compensating when we consume compulsively? If stopping a familiar coping strategy helps us confront the real source of our pain, then we’re doing the right kind of therapy — uncovering our garbage, naming our problems, so that we can discard them once and for all in the name of love.

The great mistake we make — and I do believe that the right makes this far more often than the left — is that pleasure is the enemy. Pleasure is sinful only when it does one or both of two things: when it comes at the expense of another creature’s happiness or when it serves to hide our own hurts and fears from ourselves.

He said it here.

I think that’s about right. The other day I was talking one of the “other discoveries” parts of the eponymous book The G Spot: And Other Discoveries about Human Sexuality where Whipple, Perry, and Ladas mention how “the search for the best drives out the good.” That notion seems especially appropriate in the context of excess and/or self-denial as paths to deeper meaning.

Whereas a (non-asexual) man striving mightily to abstain sexuality until his wedding night, as much as a woman striving passionately for g-spot orgasm may discover spiritual meaning along the way, there’s also the possibility first that intensity of their obsession might outweigh the potential virtue achieved… as well as of discovering the attainment may not have been worth the loss of that which was foregone to do so.

Consider further what Lis says in comments to Hugo’s post

This post is part of what prompted me to sit down today and realize that my Lenten fasting was doing the opposite of my intention. Over the past two weeks, I became obsessed with finding loopholes, got self-centred around my inner battle, and lost focus on the really important things. The past couple of days, it’s felt like my entire life revolved around Not Indulging In Forbidden Things. I needed a reminder that Lent is about spiritual practices, not material observances.

See the comment in context, here.

Yup. A point overlooked at least as often among faithful conservatives as among godless hedonists.

Oh, and see also Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon raises nother issue with sacrifice as an end in itself.

The louder they wail and moan about how people aren’t sufficiently self-sacrificing to bullshit ideals that serve no purpose, the more extreme they get (like Ken Blackwell just condemning sex outright and suggesting on national television that people who use contraception are animals), the more people are going to be turned off, and the more hysterical the base will get as they get more isolated from the rest of the country.

She said it here.

(It’s obviously not confined to conservatives… see also the increasingly alienating spiral of PETA’s “outreach.”)