If Andrew Bacevich is right that our consumptive habits are the cause, not only of resource depletion and environmental degradation, but of our far-flung military adventurism, then the unpleasant conclusion seems to be that we need to start consuming less.

Here’s an article (via Book Forum) about, among other things, a professor in Western Pennsylvania (just down the road from where I went to college at a less prestigious state school) who’s urging people to do just that. And he doesn’t mean just greenwashing our consumerism with “eco-friendly” products. He ties it in to an actual downshifting toward a simpler lifestyle and making it possible for people to choose less work in exchange for more free time.

Having just re-read Reinhold Niebuhr’s Children of Light and Children of Darkness, I’m feeling a bit pessimistic about our ability to tame our appetites. Niebuhr points out that, unlike non-human animals, our appetites are virtually unlimited because of our ability to transcend our immediate experience. We don’t just want to be physically sated; we want prestige, power, and in some cases to dominate others. Niebuhr argues that it’s precisely because of our “spiritual” nature that we’re capable of great evil.

The task of politics, Niebuhr thinks, is not to remake human nature, but to channel our self-aggrandizing impulses into socially beneficial directions. It may be that hard realities–energy and food prices, climate change, resource wars–will force us to change our behavior in ways that idealism alone can’t.

At the same time, Niebuhr, who was so right on original sin, tended to give short shrift to redemption. The New Testament, by contrast, portrays a community of people who have been empowered to live differently–not grasping at worldly prestige and security because their worth and being are “hid with Christ.” Can our churches become communities like that? Places where people are fed with the bread of life and so don’t need to fill themselves with the world’s junk food?