Things You Can Do
Take a thoughtful yet slightly goofy dive into ethics with your professor, Peter Owens, to discover some... things you can do.
Things You Can Do
4 out of 5 Dentists Recommend Brushing with Ethics
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What do teeth have to do with ethics? Well, strap in and take a ride through my childhood, the history of dentistry, and several dozen references to 90's children's cartoons to find out!
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10:30 | Analysis of Neanderthal teeth marks uncovers evidence of prehistoric dentistry | KU News
27:25 | Why Smiles Generate Leniency - Marianne LaFrance, Marvin A. Hecht, 1995
38:44 | 2024 Oral Health Surveillance Report: Selected Findings | Oral Health | CDC
I am of the age that when I was in elementary school, seeing the teacher wheel in a six-foot-tall rolling cart with a 24-inch cathode raid TV atop it was one of the most simple joys you could feel. You mean we get to watch TV at school? It simply didn't matter that we knew we were about to watch something educational, because even for those of us who thought of that adjective as kind of a dirty word, would rather watch any TV than do math flashcards or practice cursive. The cart I remember most vividly from my childhood, when I went to elementary school at Trader's Point Christian Academy, was made of black metal and it had doors on the front section, like a little TV cupboard, that were this metallic orangey red. The television itself had a VCR built into it. We'd crane our necks to see if we could tell what tape was sitting on the shelf of the cart. Was it Adventures in Odyssey? Veggie Tales? Superbook? Or maybe something more in line with the subject we were about to study. It could be a National Geographic film on the water cycle, or an episode of PBS's Nova about how lightning happens. It was always fascinating, and even if we didn't love it, but let's be honest, you know I did because I was a little nerdy kiddo when I loved school, it felt exciting and novel to get to watch TV during class. I'm genuinely not sure if I have to share this, but my eight-year-old doesn't really know what cassette tapes are, so it's possible that there are listeners out there who don't know what a VCR is. You used to get movies on these 8x4-inch plastic bricks, about the thickness of a YA novel, that literally had black plastic ribbon on the inside and two circly spindles placed side by side. You'd take this VHS tape and put it in what was often called a VCR, although technically not all VHS players were VCRs, but let's not get lost in the weeds. The machine would read the information on the ribbon and convert it into video format that would show up on the screen. But there was only so much you could fit. Once the ribbon had gone from unwinding on one spindle to winding up on the other, the tape was over, and that was all the stuff that would come on that one. I remember that there were certain movies that famously took two whole cassettes. Wild to think that something that was twice as big as your average smartphone could only hold about two hours worth of information, but hey, it was the 90s. There was a very specific genre of film that you could watch in school, though, and this was the educational video. It would teach you how to comb your hair or how to be polite as a guest at someone's house or what changes to look for when you were going through puberty. The gold standard in these videos were produced by a company called Coronet, and they had titles like Are You a Good Citizen? Let's Play Fair, and Better Use of Leisure Time. They went a little something like this.
SPEAKER_00It's a beautiful day in the grand old United States of America, and in a small town in Normaville, USA, little Jimothy Scribens is just waking up. Hello there, Jimothy! How'd you sleep there, champ? Pretty good? Well, that's wonderful. But remember, today is the first day of school. Are you excited? I know you are. But before you pull on your trousers and grab your books, do you know how to make sure your growing body and mind are prepared for everything a busy day in first grade will put you through? No. Well, put on those horn-rimmed glasses and let's get to work. First, you'll need to comb your hair and wash your face, making sure that you put the soap.
SPEAKER_02To be honest, I'm not sure that I ever actually watched one of these in grade school. My memories conflict with the fact that these particular videos were a bit out of style by the 90s, replaced by more modern videos and topics that reflected the changing times. But between my relatively average, middle-class, Midwestern upbringing and my natural predilection for being the goodest boy who follows all the rules, a lot of these concepts of etiquette, respectability, and social niceties wormed their way into my brain and just kind of live there forever? Which has made it especially difficult to deal with the fact that I've been missing my two front teeth for the past couple weeks. Let's talk about that. Hi, I'm Peter. I'm a professor of ethics and your host for this episode of Things You Can Do, an ethics podcast of approximate regularity, where I take your ethics questions and transmigrify them into meaningful answers so that you can know some things you can do. When I was in seventh grade, I fell on the gym floor playing volleyball, and one of my teammates tripped and fell on top of me. My face unceremoniously greeted the epoxy-coated concrete gym floor and whack, my two front teeth snapped in half. Because the brake wasn't clean and we didn't even find all the pieces, my dentist, Dr. Kahn, had to put a special malleable substance called a composite resin on my jagged incisors to build them back up and shape them to look like normal teeth. Then he used a special blue light to cure the resin into place, bonding the new prosthetic teeth to the existing parts of the originals. Over the next couple decades, I would get root canals, which is where the living nerve tissue of the tooth is removed and the resulting space inside the tooth is filled up to prevent infection and pain. I would have special crowns placed over the old tooth structure to replace the bonded resin. I would break off one of the crowns after getting hit in the mouth by a baseball, and would need to wear a denture, often called a flipper, to replace the crown that could no longer be reattached. You see, when a crown breaks off, it can take some of the existing tooth structure with it. The old tooth, which isn't really alive anymore because of the root is gone, it can get brittle and weak. When the crown breaks off, especially because of dental trauma, the adhesive that's used to attach it can break away some of that brittle old tooth material. If that happens enough times, there's nothing to stick the crown onto. When that happened to my right front tooth, I had the tooth extracted and I wore a denter to replace it. A couple months ago, my left front tooth got wiggly. I could tell the crown was coming loose and I went to my dentist to have it taken off and then readhered. I'd rather schedule it than just have it pop out in the middle of a meal or something, right? But while I was getting it reattached, my dentist told me that this wasn't going to last very long because, like my right front tooth, there just wasn't a lot of existing tooth material for this crown to stick to. And sure enough, she was right. It came off a month later, and then after getting it reattached for the last time, it fell right out of my mouth a week after that. Rip left crown. You hung on as long as you could. In modern dentistry, you're able to replace missing teeth with this really incredible thing called an implant. Basically, the dentist literally drills a little screw into your jaw, and your body regrows bone over and around the screw. Here's a mini moment of grief. This is called osseointegration. The integration part is self-explanatory, but the osseo part comes from the Greek for bone. It's the same as osteoporosis, when your bones get weak and porous, or an ossuary, which is an ancient box for putting bones in in a burial site. Anyway, when that bone grows around the special screw, which can take several months, a crown is affixed to that rather than to any existing tooth structure. This way, it's much stronger, longer lasting, and depends on living bones and tissue rather than dead tooth structure. It's pretty amazing. Because this process can take months and even years, depending on how many implants you're getting and how well your body heals and integrates the new parts, I have to get a new flipper made that has both front teeth. My old one only had one front tooth. But after that, I'll make long-term plans to have the remaining parts of the left front tooth extracted. Then I have to heal for several weeks, and then I have to have my right implant put in, which is a multi-procedure process. Then I have to have a third new denture made, then I have to wait for the left tooth, or you know, the gums and jaw where the tooth would normally be, for that to heal up so that it's ready for that implant to go in. All in all, it means I'm gonna spend a lot of money to make sure that I can make f sounds again, and I'm gonna spend a lot of time missing some really important mouth hardware. One thing I can't and won't do is try to hide and quit doing all the things I like doing just because it's inconvenient to try to talk or eat or socialize without my two front teeth. I know that there is stigma associated with having visibly damaged or unhealthy teeth, and I'm not gonna willingly perpetuate that stigma by letting my actions be dictated by an idea that I fundamentally reject. The idea that having broken or missing teeth correlates to being an unhealthy or morally deficient person. So now that you know all that about me, let's get to our topic today. Our question for this episode comes from me. And me asks, if there's nothing wrong with having broken teeth, why do I still feel so embarrassed about it? The history of human beings and their teeth goes back perhaps 15,000 years. There's archaeological evidence that Paleolithic era humans were attempting to treat dental issues by removing teeth or filling cavities with other materials. Some researchers even think it's possible that Homo Neanderthalists, the hominids who shared the earth with Homo sapiens and who were eventually displaced by them, may have been doing rudimentary dental procedures as far back as a hundred and thirty thousand years ago. For thousands of years, our mouths have occupied a sort of special or privileged space in medicine. Dentistry is thought to be one of the first medical specializations. For whatever reason, we just seem to need to pay close attention to our mouths and tongues and teeth. If you think about it, this makes sense. We use them to eat, to communicate, to express ideas and to tell about danger. We use them for recreation, to sing and shout and make exciting sounds. We use them to do work, to bite and crush up things and grind. Just to think about how many tools that would have been available to your average Indus River Valley family unit that do something like a task that our teeth can do a mortar and pestle, a whistle, a drum, a knife, a clamp, a nail. Our teeth can do a lot of things, but human society moved forward in really important ways when we were able to outsource some of that work to tools rather than trying to crunch up acorns in our mouths or biting sticks in half. The story of modern dentistry as we know it usually begins with a French physician named Pierre Fauchard, who mainly practiced in the first half of the 18th century. He wrote a really important book about the science of dentistry that began to standardize practices that are commonplace today, finding and treating cavities, understanding periodontal disease, knowing the correct placement of the teeth in the mouth, and even dentures and attempts at tooth transplant and replacement. It feels pretty easy for us to think about how teeth are supposed to look and work. It just seems like something that we innately have as members of a society that not only uses our teeth for various things like eating and speaking, but that also is a very visual culture. Research consistently indicates that people with clean teeth and pretty smiles enjoy more social benefits than those who don't. We like to see a nice smile on our weather reporter, or the models that wear the clothes we want to buy, or the politicians that we elect to office. There just seems to be some deep-seated feeling, whether evolutionarily imbued or an encumbrance of modernity, that a nice smile will put us at ease. I want to dive into this a little bit, but first I feel like I need us to zoom out for a minute and think about why we are talking about dental health in an ethics podcast. If you're asking this question, your head is in the right place. As I insinuated earlier, many folks don't really have a lot of choice over their dental health. Sure, we can all brush and floss pretty easily, at least here in the United States, where barriers to access to those tools are relatively quite low. But it wasn't my fault that my classmate fell on me in gym class and I took a tasty bite at basketball court. It wasn't his fault either. That's just the kind of accident that you can't really blame on anyone, right? We've consistently talked about how ethics involves choice, and if broken or damaged teeth isn't reasonably within someone's control, then how does that fit in? Well, think of it this way. There are lots of things that aren't in people's control. The color of their skin, the place they were born, the body they were born with, and the way that body was assigned to sex. But we know that racism, sexism, bigotry, and disability access are all things that take up a big place in modern ethics, even if we don't know anything about ethics. So the ways that we're taught, consciously and unconsciously, to treat people whose teeth look a certain way is a matter for ethics that we're going to take up today. In the modern era in the West, there has been significant social stigma associated with missing or broken teeth specifically, and with individuals seen as unhygienic or unclean or even ugly in general. Several factors go into this. From a practical perspective, we can just understand that there is a correlation between the kinds of folks who do not have money or access to fix significant dental issues on the one hand, and folks who are at the cross sections of oppression and discrimination on the other. In the US, upper class white folks have the best access to dental care because, on the whole, they also tend to be more directly connected to wealth and influence. Poor folks, immigrants, non-white folks, the disabled, these people have historically had less opportunity to be a part of the movers and shakers of society. I'm not really saying anything controversial here.
SPEAKER_05Folks who have historically had fewer rights and opportunities tend to suffer from a deficit in social capital.
SPEAKER_02Is kind of just one of those empirical rules of thumb that the data demonstrates quite consistently. But why should this result in continuing levels of disenfranchisement or oppression or stigma? What I mean by that is, if dental care is better and more affordable than it's ever been, and more people have access to it than at any time in US history, well, why would that result in someone's teeth stirring up unconscious or conscious ideas about who is good or bad, clean or dirty, morally upright or morally suspicious. To talk about this, we're gonna have to go back to our discussion of norms from our mini ethicsode number three. If you didn't catch that one, don't worry, we'll do a short recap here. We said that a norm was an idea in society that helps us make judgments about what sorts of things are unremarkable or commonplace, and what sorts of things are extraordinary, novel, undesirable, or even reprehensible. For example, wearing shoes when you go to a restaurant is a pretty common social norm. You don't really think about it until someone violates that norm, and then you kind of can't believe that there is anyone who would even think about not wearing shoes in a restaurant. Gross! How could that happen? We also have to understand that norms have a sort of social force. If you want to violate a norm, maybe because you think the norm is bad or silly or because it hurts you in some way, you're going to experience resistance to that, even if it just means your own nervousness about doing it differently. The reason you feel anxious about your new haircut or wearing a new style of dress or trying out those new glasses with the loud frames? Well, it's probably because your previous haircut or dress or glasses created this sort of mini-norm. People probably got used to it. It became unremarkable. But what happens when you change it? What if everyone notices? Will they like it? Will it look silly? Will they take you seriously? Your anxiety about changing your appearance is natural, even if you have the most loving and supportive friends and family. And that's because you know that you're changing something. And guess who likes change? Yeah, that's right. Not very many people. When we think about norms at the level of society, we also have to think about the kinds of things that aren't just likable or enjoyable, but also the kinds of things that, when encouraged, lead to really good outcomes for everyone in general. Cast your minds back to our discussions about public health. We remember that we're incentivized to go to the doctor, to get medicine, have yearly checkups, or even do things as simple as drink clean water and eat food that doesn't have poison in it. Why? Well, from the perspective of the state, things go better when everyone is healthier. There's more people doing more and better labor and producing more things more efficiently. But guess what? You know something that societies also have a ton of waste, garbage, junk, sickness, refuse, fool. And it turns out that we have learned various ways to deal with the fact that if you stick a couple hundred thousand people in a really small area, they're gonna make it pretty nasty pretty quick. You need plumbing, waste management, running water, you need street sweepers and window washers and laundromats. Keeping a society clean and functional is a huge task. Carl A. Zimring's book, Clean and White, a history of environmental racism in the United States, is a breakdown of the ways that in the last two centuries, certain groups of people have tended to be associated with the dirty tasks of society. You know that show Dirty Jobs, where Mike Rowe goes and checks out someone whose job it is to collect bat guano or clean out the grease trap of a restaurant? Well, in the 19th century, as U.S. urban centers were coalescing into the bustling metropolises that they are today, there arose a need for all kinds of dirty job doers, from working in slaughterhouses to laundering huge amounts of clothing and bedding. And remember, there were no automatic machines back then. A washing machine or a food processor was a person. It turns out that a lot of these undesirable jobs were ones that immigrants or non-white citizens were happy to take on, often because it meant there was steady work that white folks didn't want, and it often afforded them a degree of autonomy. For example, Chinese and Japanese immigrants became well known for owning laundry businesses on the West Coast in the late 19th and early 20th century. Laundry was seen as a feminine job by white Americans, but an immigrant could make a stable future for themselves in a business that they owned, something that often wasn't possible in the country of their birth, whether due to that nation's laws or their social status. Examples like these led to certain kinds of people being associated with certain kinds of professions, ideas, and lifestyles. And this is how social norms can work sort of perniciously. Just because someone owns a laundry business doesn't mean they're Chinese. But a lot of people lived in places where the laundry businesses around them were run by Chinese folks. It just kind of gradually becomes one of those, well, everybody knows that, right? Kind of situations. And before you know it, you end up with an ethnic stereotype like Asian men are more effeminate than white men. Why? Well, you know, they just are. But in reality, it's because you've seen them associated with labor that you think is for women over and over. They're doing honest work, but you've unwittingly got it in your head that that work is women's work. This is how many racial and ethnic stereotypes begin, but many of them are based in the lived experiences of people of those races. The stereotypes end up becoming warped or damaging because someone uses it as a rule for understanding how to look at the world. Sure, you went to Home Depot and there were a bunch of brown-skinned men speaking Spanish, waiting to be hired for a job, hauling stone or laying brick. But then you see a brown-skinned man speaking Spanish at the store, and you can't imagine that that person could be a college professor or a hospice nurse or a preschool teacher. This is an idea that I'm still working through. That's something that you do as a philosopher. You have conclusions that you work with, try out, test over time. But I believe that at least part of the reason that social norms about innocuous things suddenly overflow into bigotry and prejudice is because our ideas of who certain kinds of people are shrink the more that we only experience those people as associations and not as actual humans. With their own history. Let me tell a quick story. I once went to the Getty in Los Angeles. It's an art museum that's up in the Hollywood Hills. It's a beautiful place. There was this special gallery when I went of photographs that were taken by a young woman who had been in the Japanese internment camps during World War II. Basically, because the United States government was worried that they might support the Empire of Japan against the United States, they removed many people of Japanese descent from their homes and put them under surveillance in camps. It was a stunning and shameful encroachment of the freedom of these folks, many of whom were United States citizens. One photo that struck me most memorably was a picture of an old Japanese woman, maybe in her late 60s or early 70s. She had silver hair and wrinkly skin that folded up around her eyes as she was frozen in time via camera flash, mid-laugh. She was slightly hunched over and wore loose-fitting pants and slippers, and she was playing basketball. Yeah, I remember thinking, wait, do little old Japanese ladies play basketball? Well, the answer to that question is, well, of course they do if they want. For real, how weird is it that I did a double take about that? But the reason to me was immediately clear. I think of old Asian ladies as sipping tea and playing mahjong and taking long walks around the park. I don't think I had ever seen an old Asian lady shooting hoops. But the problem with this situation wasn't that she was somehow doing something weird. Elderly folks like to have fun too. Instead, the problem was that my concept of what old Asian lady could be was too narrow to accommodate this picture that was right in front of me in black and white. There she was, living her life, finding mirth in the midst of maltreatment. She was the real living proof that anyone can be anything. It was simply my imagination about her that turned out to be far too small. You're probably wondering what this has to do with my teeth. Well, we'll find out. After the break.
SPEAKER_04Well, if so, I'm here to help. Hi, I'm Matthias Austin, and each week on the Lord of the Rings AMA podcast, I answer listener questions about Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, and the Greater Legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien, giving as in-depth an answer as I can, while trying to stick to a manageable 30-minute episode. If you've got questions about hobbits, elves, dwarves, or wizards, I've got answers. Check out the Lord of the Rings AMA podcast. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_02Okay, here's my obligatory Patreon plug. But before you skip this part, I wanted to give you a little sneak peek into some of the silly stuff you can experience over there. You'll have access to all kinds of weird goofs and impromptu songs from Pete Plays, including an upcoming Goofy Shorts compilation featuring this absolute banger. You can also see the TED talk I gave Matthias and our friend Tori about Peter Gabriel.
SPEAKER_01The overview. I also don't know the song. No, it doesn't matter. Shut up. This is my presentation. You can hear about my partner, producer of the show Meg.
SPEAKER_02It's me. Uh, with producer of the show Meg uh off camera because she is a cryptozoological marvel. There's even previously unreleased music, like this song you're listening to right now, uh, it's called Mr. Good Boy. And there's even weirder shorts and goofs like my cool guys only video featuring my dog jazz, or a rousing Pete Plays rendition of the screaming sky cowboy. It's all a lot of fun, and it's just a little corner of the internet where we celebrate doing fun stuff just because we can. If that seems like something you're into, head on over to patreon.com slash Pete Plays to learn more. Okay, back to the podcast. Remember how I said earlier that people with nice smiles enjoy a lot of social benefits that those people with broken, damaged, or quote unquote ugly teeth don't enjoy? Well, that's not just something I feel, or that's anecdotally true. There are several decades of research that suggests that this isn't just something we suspect. The conclusions about the empirical data point pretty strongly to the idea that good smiles get an easier time. For instance, and remember you can find all these references in the show notes, people who smile are generally seen as less suspicious and are likely to be treated with greater leniency in conflict situations. Bright, white-colored teeth provoke favorable responses from people, whereas discolored teeth provoke more unfavorable responses. Women, more than men, tend to view their own discolored teeth as a liability in their efforts to date or interact with others socially. Visibly discolored or damaged teeth can be a factor in individuals being judged negatively about their employability qualities, and more recent research suggests it has a negative economic impact over one's lifetime. Self-perceptions of dental aesthetics, that is, how good you think your own teeth look, have an impact in your satisfaction with yourself and your self-esteem. That's a lot of data that backs up the claim that nice teeth can lead to nice outcomes, and not so nice teeth, makes it harder to do things that we all have to and want to do. There's a reason that the four upper and four lower teeth in the front of your mouth are called the aesthetic zone by dentists. These are the teeth that are most likely to be seen when you do normal everyday things like talk and eat and smile. If you're self-conscious about your smile, think of all the ways that you're gonna have to constantly be limiting yourself or hiding your teeth or checking your behavior just to make sure no one takes too good a look in your mouth. And this isn't even getting into the data that looks at how people with broken teeth tend to have poorer outcomes in their personal nutrition, or how missing teeth can make it harder to speak, or can lead to speech impairments that make it difficult or impossible to produce certain sounds. Without my front teeth, I can really only give an approximation of F and V or TH sounds. Respectively, that's a labiodental fricative and a dentolingual fricative. And my S sounds, or sibilants, are muddy and spitty. If you think I feel anxious about spitting on people just having a normal conversation, you'd be right. I was even nervous about recording this episode before getting my new denture because I didn't want it to be sonically unpleasant. If we combine this information about how we tend to feel about our own teeth and about other people's teeth with our conversation about norms from earlier, it's easy to start identifying places where we might have these ideas reinforced. And remember, norm doesn't automatically mean good or bad, but it does mean something that when you deviate from it, it's noticeable. There's an episode of mini kids' shows about losing a tooth or how to brush your teeth, but there's also media like Wren's Toothache, an episode of the not quite for kids show Wren and Stimpy from the 90s about a dog and a cat who lived together. It was somewhat infamous for its shocking and sometimes upsetting depictions. So in this episode, Stimpy, the cat, tells Rend that he should take better care of his teeth. Ren, this high-strung Chihuahua, believing that this is just for children, and human children at that, balks at Stimpy's suggestion and then undergoes 10 minutes of horrifying tooth pain and decay, culminating in having to have all of his broken and rotting teeth pulled out of his mouth.
SPEAKER_03What is that smell? Man, I don't know, man, but it's ruining my meal. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey! We're trying to eat here. And you stand here, airing out your stinky old gumhole! What are you trying to do? Make us boot!
SPEAKER_02I can't express to you what a horrifying impression this made on me through my entire life. I still have a very vivid memory of the images in this episode, and re-watching it for writing this podcast was almost kind of upsetting.
SPEAKER_05You can say that the overall moral is meant to be, hey kids, brush your teeth, or you'll end up like Wren.
SPEAKER_02But I found that, at least for me, it turned into something more like, lazy, unlikable people like Wren have terrible teeth. I know that kind of turns around the moral, but our brains can be tricky that way. And when I go out in public and I think about how everyone can see the gap in my smile, and the little jagged miniature of a leftover tooth is giving its own showstopping number at the front of my mouth, it makes me ashamed to be seen. It makes me think people will judge me, or that they won't have patience for me, or they'll assume that my other hygiene habits are bad. These little moments of reinforcement are all over every form of media. We have to remember that there is no sinister, villainous council of rude dudes secretly conspiring to make people with broken teeth feel bad. Let's return to something we talked about a few episodes ago, what Foucault calls the diffused nature of power. Power doesn't mean I can make you do things, or I'll call the cops if you're bad. Power just means the ability for something to happen. And when a lot of that power is diffused across society, it means that lots of things are possible, like so possible that they happen a lot and are recognizable as such. Consequently, we end up with things like stereotypes. In media studies, this might be called something like a trope, which is kind of like a cousin to a stereotype, but that has a use in telling a story or setting a scene. For example, when you hear, Hi Mates, I do be thinking that we'll have to keel haul this landlover if he don't be divulging the whereabouts of his hidden coin. We have an idea of the kind of person who says that. A pirate with a three-pointed hat and an eye patch and poor hygiene. One set of data about the situation, the particular way that this guy talks, leads toward a conclusion that helps the viewer understand the story without having to have every detail intricately and painstakingly spelled out. It follows the rule of storytelling that's kind of like show, don't tell. Another way this was explained to me was like this. Picture two men in a deserted town standing across from each other while the sun is high in the sky. One of them wears a white hat, and one of them wears a dark hat. You know right away that the kind of story we're about to see is one that's using the genre convention of Westerns. So in media, the way people's teeth looks gives us information about that character or that situation. And the way that the story tells us this is usually by ignoring teeth when they're normal and highlighting them when they're not. Because the fact that they aren't normal adds to the viewer's information about the situation. Sometimes you'll see a character flash a smile that has like a twinkle or a chime to show you what a goody gooderson they are or appear to be. But bad teeth are almost always a part of an ensemble of storytelling data that depict someone villainous, morally suspect, the butt of the joke, or some combination thereof. There are tons of examples. Austin Powers is meant to be a sort of lecherous, overly horny buffoon. Yeah, baby, yeah. And his crooked, discolored teeth add to that characterization. Calvin Candy from Django Unchained has dark, decaying, tobacco-stained teeth to represent his concomitant moral decay, despite his otherwise bourgeois trappings. In Ratatouille, Chef Skinner's jumbled protruding teeth complement his unpleasant nature. Harold in Hey Arnold has a jagged smile with a single snaggle tooth that protrudes upward out of his closed mouth. And I'll remind folks who are around my age that there was literally an episode about how dumb Harold is. I could go on and on with examples of ways that teeth are significant pieces in storytelling, but I think this is something that most of us are aware of at at least an unconscious level. And when we think about it, we're likely to acknowledge that, yeah, seeing somebody with really janky teeth kind of just puts us ill at ease. And I know this because when I have had to teach and umpire with visibly damaged teeth, I was worried that it was going to get in the way of me doing my job, and not just because it was harder for me to talk. When you imagine a college professor, you don't usually think about someone with missing teeth, right? In the same way that you don't imagine a first grade teacher to have a neck tattoo. There's nothing that precludes this, but it doesn't fit your idea of what that person would look like. Similarly, being an umpire requires a keen eye and a judicious sense of rules application in real time. If you see someone bearing personal markers that people associate with fools or the uneducated, it's gonna put you on edge. I contend that I received far more criticism from coaches and fans about my calls when I was umpiring with broken teeth than when they were otherwise unremarkable. I'm a good umpire. My skills and knowledge weren't drastically changed by losing a chomper or two, but others' perception of me changed, as did my perception of myself, which makes me nervous about how others perceive me, which makes me perceive myself differently, and so on and so on. But consciously or unconsciously, that could have given these spectators the sense that they could treat me differently, or that my judgment was less reliable, and that made me defensive and unapproachable. That's not a good combination of moods. I have written and thought a lot about my experiences having visibly damaged teeth. On the one hand, I am really fortunate to have been able to access the care that I've had. Before I met my wife, my previous girlfriend was an incredibly gifted periodontist, and she would sometimes give me a cleaning when I couldn't afford to pay for one. She also extracted one of my teeth for basically the cost of the equipment she had to use, a procedure that should have cost me quite a bit of money, but I was able to get it because of her kindness and generosity. I was fortunate that my dad worked a government job growing up and we had dental insurance to pay for my damaged front teeth, as well as routine cleanings and cavity care. But there were other difficulties. Two other teeth that required root canals put me into debt that I wasn't able to pay off. After my first crown broke, I had to borrow money to buy my denture. And that's not even mentioning the pain and discomfort that come from going between procedures. I have a spot on my lower lip that basically has a permanent scar from where it gets caught in my teeth because my lips don't have my two front teeth to bump up against. I frequently cut my tongue on the jagged edge of the piece of the one remaining tooth. I have a lisp when I wear my denture that I'm pretty self-conscious about, and that I'm usually able to edit out of these episodes. I don't say this to make people feel sorry for me or to get some beautiful angel investor to pay all of my dental bills, but real talk. If you're independently wealthy and my episode on billionaires didn't upset you, uh hit me up, because I won't turn you down. No, the reason I'm sharing this is because if you're listening to this, you might know me as a real person or at least have some sort of connection to me that makes you realize that I'm not anybody special. I'm just a guy. And if me, just some guy, goes through all these things just to get a quote-unquote normal smile that allows me to eat an apple or speak clearly or drink coffee without pain from sores in my mouth, well then maybe you can imagine what it might be like for the more than one in five people between the ages of 20 and 64 with untreated tooth decay, or the one in seven Americans missing at least one permanent tooth. In 2004, then Surgeon General David Satcher, in his report Oral Health in America, calls untreated oral and dental conditions America's silent epidemic. The ethics of teeth is something that we're all going to face in some way or another. And I'm actually kind of excited about the conclusion to this episode because I feel like this time I'm able to suggest some really concrete, embodied, actionable ideas for things that we can do that will make us into better people when it comes to thinking about how the ethics of teeth affect our lives. Here's my proof or argument for some things that you can do when it comes to thinking about teeth. As a reminder, we have some premises, and we use those premises to form a conclusion. So, premise one, treating someone unfairly, especially because of something outside their control, is wrong, even if we do it without really thinking about it. Premise two, being unaware of the ways that we are subtly socialized to think about people with broken or damaged teeth leads us to be more likely to treat those people unfairly. Conclusion? Well, we need to become aware of the negative character traits that we associate with bad teeth, and then do things to counteract that social conditioning. One thing that can help, and that for better or for worse, I've tried to start doing, is to look at the characters in cartoons and other stories with exaggerated teeth. What things are we being asked to associate with that character? What role does that character play? And what role does their teeth or smile play in their characterization? Another thing we can do is learn to acknowledge our discomfort with people's bad teeth. Not like out loud. Come on, dude, we're still trying to be polite. But when your waiter at Waffle House has a crooked smile or visible tooth decay, do you think, yeah, that's probably why they're working at Waffle House? Or do you think, you know what, I bet it can be tough to get the right kind of dental care when you're working for tips and don't get benefits? Maybe instead of thinking about whether their service was good, you just leave them an extra 10 or 20 because, hey, life is hard, right? Or maybe you're at a PTA meeting and this parent with a really prominent snaggle tooth or a broken crown or extreme gum recession, maybe they're trying to make a point. They're trying to get people to pay attention to what they're saying. What if instead of giving in to the unconscious desire to disregard them as less intelligent, we named that feeling in ourselves and then we paid even more attention to what they're saying? Almost as if despite any change of our unconscious bias, swaying our opinion unfairly. Lastly, I think that if we acknowledge that people should not be unfairly disadvantaged for things out of their control, we should think about ways that society can address that. This could mean a lot of different things. Maybe it means that you are more likely to vote for a politician who has a comprehensive plan to address health and dental care disparities. Maybe it means that you donate or volunteer for a service that provides free dental care for children. Maybe it means that you use your money and voice to support things like veterans' affairs, who provide health care and dental services to U.S. veterans nearly free of charge. There are always ways to think about how to expand the values you have into your community. These are the little things that we have to get good at recognizing and leaning into if we want to start uprooting the bias that we've come by, honestly. Now, it's not fair. We didn't ask for these associations to be given to us, and we don't really have any bad guy to blame. But once we become aware of them, I think we can't really put that toothpaste back in the tube. We've got to do the best we can to keep making ourselves aware of the ways that we might accidentally treat someone unfairly or condescend to them, or make them feel like they're less than simply because they experienced something painful that they're reminded of every time they open their mouth. We have the power to make ourselves into people who don't let the circumstances of others' lives and bodies get in the way of us treating them like we ought to. We'll see you next time when we'll discuss some more things you can do. It's written by me, Peter Owens. For references and citations, you can see the show notes. The Things You Can Do intro theme is written by Brantgum. The outro theme, and Around the Sun Again We Go, was written by me. Also written by me were Moon Jesus Juke Jam, featuring Hara Nota and Stationary Sign, and Lucky to Be Lovely, featuring Martin Landstrom and Boil the Ocean. Other music includes Debusy's Girl with the Flaxen Hair, performed by Richard Stoltzman and the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, Chopin's Bolero and C major Opus 19, performed By Arthur Rubinstein, and On a Hunt by Philip Ayers. If you've got a smooth groove you'd love to have featured on the podcast, email me at thingsyoucandopod at gmail.com. For more information about dental health in America, check out this book I've been reading. It's called Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America by Mary Otto. Thanks, listeners, for your patience with my scraggly voice. I was struggling pretty badly with some asthma-related symptoms that made it nearly impossible to record for like two weeks. Maybe I'll do an episode about the ethics of asthma sometime, who knows? Special thanks to Dirk Walker for his voice talents on this episode, doing a very shagadelic Austin Powers impression. Also, thanks to Dr. Mark A. Kahn, my very first dentist, who taught me that I don't have to be afraid of being in the dentist's chair. And to Dr. Juliet Chang, who basically taught me everything I've ever known about teeth. Also, I just want to say a special thanks to my parents. Mom and Dad, you've always taken care of me. Even when I did dumb stuff like break my crown during high school baseball practice, trying to open a bag of field dry with my mouth. I'm proud to keep trying to treat people as kindly, fairly, and justly as you've always taught me.