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Every person under the sun must eat to live, and in that sense we are all blameless and glorious consumers-as at a feast lovingly prepared by a grandmother. There is nothing wrong, and much very right, about consuming to live. Hence Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard speaks winningly from the Jewish tradition of "consecrated consumption."

What worries some people is that the affluent, technologically advanced West seems more and more focused not on consuming to live, but on living to consume. (I confess at the outset to being one of these ambivalent creatures, fat but troubled in paradise.) The problem with consumption, and the consumer capitalism that has pushed it to feverish historical extremes, is the fact that it has become so all-consuming.

Even Americans-citizens of the premier "nation of consumers" (Richard Tedlow)-recognize problems with the extremes to which we have taken consumption as a way of life. Recycling containers, nonexistent ten years ago, now stand sentry outside every home in my suburban neighborhood, bearing testimony to one of the most obvious problems.

We are sensitized to the ecological damage of an intentionally wasteful society fostered by "planned obsolescence." Perhaps some environmentalists indulge in hysteria and hyperbole, but however overstated their warnings may be, there is no denying the murky brown clouds of smog hanging over Los Angeles, or Lake Michigan beaches closed to swimmers because of raw sewage seeping into the lake.

A problematic feature of consumer capitalism is the inescapable barrage of advertising-its coaching and coaxing of multitudinous desires. The New York Times has estimated that the average American is exposed to 3,500 ads per day. So inundated, we are hardly aware of how pervasive and invasive these images and messages are.

Their force struck me last winter when, in the course of researching the subject of consumption, I spent three days at a Christian community devoid of televisions and radios, and removed from billboard-besieged highways. Arriving back at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, I felt assaulted by posters and billboards hyping svelte, suave men and incredibly coiffed, airbrushed women-even though a few days before I had passed them by without a second thought. Deprived of these stimuli for half a week, the ads seemed hollow, artificial, even unnatural. I heard myself mutter, "This is not the way things are supposed to be."

But consumer capitalism is much more pervasive, and much less obvious, than smog or billboards. Look harder, and you can see it at work all around-shaping attitudes, bending behaviors, grinding an endless series of lenses through which to see and experience the world in a particular way. You see it at the medical clinic, where doctors must pump a certain number of patients through their doors to meet the required profit quotas of Health Maintenance Organizations. You see it on the calendar, defined not so much by holy days as by a string of commercially hyped holidays. You see it at the ballpark, where owners and players sour even devout fans with their struggle over already exorbitant salaries and box-office revenues.

I asked Lendol Calder, a historian in New Hampshire who devoted his doctoral dissertation to consumerism, "When did you first begin to notice the depth and breadth of consumerism in our culture?" He recalled a Christian camp for college students of several nationalities. A get-acquainted exercise divided campers by nationality, charging them to choose a song representing their culture, one that all could approve and sing to the rest of the assembly. Most nationalities reached consensus, practiced, and were ready in 10 to 20 minutes; nearly all the groups chose folk songs from their native lands.

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October 7 1996, Vol. 40, No. 11