Shakespeare’s Philosopher-Ghosts

Tom McBride

     Ghosts all tell the same story: that what we thought was over and settled is not so; that miscreants can’t get away with their crimes and you can’t cut off and steal someone’s hand without their coming back as ghosts to claim it. The motto of ghosts is what Faulkner once said: “The past isn’t over; it’s not even past.” This is also the typical message of literary ghosts and part of the fun of ghost stories. The premise is that death settles nothing, in a way a comforting idea, and if you throw in the spookiness of ghosts, as long as we readers are safe from them, then the whole thing adds up to a most attractive human experience.

     Shakespeare is no exception. His three main ghosts all have roughly the same function.  Caesar’s ghost comes to Brutus to tell him that killing Caesar has not ended the Roman dreams of empire and that the future emperors are even now gathering to defeat him in battle. Banquo’s ghost tells Macbeth that he may have murdered Banquo but that his sins and his guilt will find him out and that the whole assassination scheme will end badly. Hamlet’s father’s ghost tells Hamlet that a great wrong has been done and that it is Hamlet’s job to make it right. Caesar, Banquo, Hamlet, Sr.: they are all dead, but they are really not, and their murders have settled nothing—the past is not done yet.

      Sometimes this whole thing is also a little embarrassing. Respectable society wants to live in the present and not bebothered by family secrets or shameful back stories. Freud, in his essay on “The Uncanny,” termed this the sort of thing that should remain hidden but won’t. Of course, Freud was drawn to this idea because it reminded him of the return of repressed instincts that should be kept in the psychic closet but always seem to get out. This is why so-called respectable women came to him to cure their hysterical episodes, which stemmed from something traumatic that happened long ago that they would just as soon forget but can’t quite do so, really.

     At first, we may think that Shakespeare’s three ghosts are generally all the same and have identical functions as plot-turners. The past is not over—not even in the past. Yet a closer look shows that there are philosophical distinctions among the three ghosts that are worth a look. Let us start with great Caesar’s ghost.

      We might assume that Caesar’s ghost is an immaterial phantom. How else could formerly living matter rise from the dead? Think again. We don’t need his ghost at all in order to know that what Caesar represented, alive or ghostly, has never died. This is the dream of empire, of conquest, of control and influence over vast territory. Even today, the idea has not perished in the minds of Putin and Xi and their followers. We could call this the “recurring ghost of empire,” but wait a minute. If the universe is made of matter, then how does such nationalistic and imperial consciousness get transferred from one human being to another over eons of time—from Rome to Mongolia to Persia to London to Washington, D.C.? The consciousness of empire, whether actualized or not, is hardly the only aspiration, hope, or anxiety so moved from consciousness to consciousness over the centuries—there is also, for instance, fascism, democracy, tolerance, and apocalypse. How does this happen in a material universe? If we are persuaded that the mind is a function of the brain, how do mere concatenations of neurons get us to conscious thoughts of empire?

     Matter can get us to the behaviors of empires—swords and guns—but much less obviously the idea of empire. One solution to this conundrum is the idea of panpsychism: that matter is itself tacitly conscious in some so far unknown and perhaps unknowable way. Only if there is some prototypical level of awareness in neurons, electrons, and quarks can there emerge not only my awareness of wanting empire but also my awareness that it is I who wants it and that I should seek out others who do as well.

     We could otherwise be left with an unworkable choice: that matter itself, left to its own devices, is too incoherent to account for organized consciousness and its inheritance, or that consciousness is itself a ghost, something totally apart from molecules and atoms. Phillip Goff has explored this enigma beautifully in Galileo’s Error.  It seems more likely, and more interesting to posit that Shakespeare’s haunting Caesar is not so much a ghost as a literary device that raises questions about how a material universe can produce what seems like a ghost—the mind’s great intangible awareness of itself. Indeed, when we see great Caesar’s ghost onstage or read him on the page, we are using our material tools of vision and ink (or fonts) and cognitive neurology.

     Caesar then is a Pan-psychic Ghost.

     If we may skip Banquo and Macbeth for a moment and go to Hamlet, we will find that his father’s spirit was a Mystical Ghost. How so? Was Hamlet’s encounter with his father’s ghost a mystical experience? A religious one?

     Modern philosophy helps us with these questions, and it begins with a skepticism worthy of Hamlet himself.  Such philosophy has long suspected what is sometimes called “naïve realism,” or the proposition that when we see X we see it precisely and accurately and wholly. Too much research has been done on misperception for that view to be easily sustained, but above all, there is the notion that natural selection has evolved human animals to see what it is necessary to see for survival and little else. Bats can hear better than we can, and octopi can feel better than we can, and a number of species have stereoscopic vision greater than ours. Perhaps we do not perceive other dimensions because we don’t need to see them, just as octopi and bats don’t need to talk in order to get on in the world.

     It is in this spirit of skeptical inquiry that William James asked (in Varieties of Religious Experience) why we honor scientific observation as a way to find out nature but dishonor mystical encounters as a way to find out God. Mystical experiences, James said, are noetic, passive, and transient: They impart knowledge about the divine; they don’t last long; and those who have them are attentive but not active participants. Was Hamlet’s meeting with his father’s ghost a “religious experience?” Later, Hamlet seems to think so, as he says “there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” James says that knowledge of God, however defined, come via religious experience. You can’t find God in a scientific experiment or in a guess about how someone is going to react when you present bad news or in an estimate of your chances at a gambling table. One finds religion, says James, in, well, religious experiences—mystical, visionary, ghostly ones. Such experiences are life-changing; nothing is the same after them.

     Alastair McIntyre wrote that Hamlet received upon his return from the university, an “epistemological shock”: his father had died and his mother had married his beastly uncle. Yet it is equally true that Hamlet had a collision with a phantom that ushered him into his fate for the rest of his life, just as a religious experience can usher one into one’s life trajectory for the rest of one’s days.  Furthermore—this is the main thing—it is only through this sort of life-altering vision that Hamlet can find out the content and direction of his destiny. This alone justifies the ghost as a plot device to get thins rolling.

    To be sure, Hamlet’s religious experience is not the type we might expect. We might prefer some angel of the Lord convincing us that our life’s mission is to aid the poor. Yet surely Moses had a mystical experience when the Lord appeared to him in a Burning Bush on Mount Sanai and told him that he, Moses, was elected by Providence to lead his people out of bondage. Hamlet was elected to avenge his father’s death and bring justice to the Kingdom of Denmark. It is by no means something that he always wants to do or thinks he should do. But it is his life’s meaning, and it would never have been had it not been for his father’s ghost. And he at least manages to bring Claudius’ ruthlessly unfair rule to an end. Is this not a religious duty also?

     How much of all this is real? Could the ghost have been a psychic projection or delusion? Hamlet worries over this question, too. No matter. Hamlet thinks he has had it, and he behaves accordingly for the remainder of the play. James takes no position on the ontological status of religious experiences but adds that they are real to those who have them and communicate a knowledge that can frequently come in no other way.

     Hamlet Senior’s ghost is a Mystical Ghost. Banquo’s ghost is a Multiverse One. How so? The short answer is that before he became a ghost Banquo represented a profound counterfactual to Macbeth’s moral choices. Let us delve into the significance of counterfactuals via the work of a great modern philosopher.

     David Lewis, in On the Plurality of Worlds, and other writings, argued that the world you and I inhabit is one of very many others. He was trained in a philosophical world in which all answerable questions were presumed to be scientific ones. Metaphysical speculation was a waste of time. But Lewis noticed that in daily practice we speculate a great deal of the time, mostly about alternative scenarios. “I’d better do X because doing Y will be bad for me.” We run in our minds counterfactual outcomes in order to do the right thing, however “right” is defined. Lewis in time came to believe that if counterfactuals have a status in this world, there would be no way to disprove that they do not exist in different worlds altogether. There may be worlds in which it would be better for us to do Y instead of X; or worlds where X and Y aren’t options at all; of worlds where we do not even exist. There can be an infinite number of such worlds. At the same time, there were limits to Lewis’ plurality of worlds, for in all such words he posited that there was causation in space and time. He was a many-world guy but not a promiscuous one. He was also a moral realist, who thought murder was wrong in a real-world sense and not a matter of cultural preferences or social constructions. The wrongness of murder is no more a social fact than is the law of gravity.

     In the world of Macbeth, three prophetic weird sisters tell him and Banquo about their futures. They tell Banquo that he will never be king but that he will establish a line of kings. They tell Macbeth that he will be king.  Banquo does not do anything about the prophecy that pertains to him. He prefers to relax and enjoy, until Macbeth has him killed to make sure that Banquo cannot possibly start a line of kings that will outshine his own rule (which, by the way, will have no successors since Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have no children). Banquo is an index to the fact that Macbeth, too, could have decided to relax and enjoy. The witches tell him he will be king, so why not wait to see if it will happen? Why force the issue with an assassination—a murder (always wrong, in Lewis’ view). Why would Macbeth not have tuned into his que-sera-sera channel?

      It is hard to say why. But the fact is that he didn’t. He decided to take matters into his own hands. A counterfactual would be that King Duncan would die and Macbeth be named his successor, or that Duncan become ill and name Macbeth his successor.

     And indeed, per David Lewis, there are worlds in which that happened. They are not the world of the play. They are different worlds, but one thing common to them all: murder is wrong as a brute fact, not a social one. It is wrong in the world where Macbeth did no murder and the one, that of the play, in which he does. There is a world where Macbeth wins the lottery and one in which he becomes a killer.

     This should in turn lead us to re-interpret, big time, Banquo as a ghost. The standard view is that he reminds Macbeth of his guilt, and indeed Macbeth is terribly frightened of Banquo’s ghost and denies that he had anything to do with his murder (Banquo’s son Fleance got away and went on to found the Stuart line of kings that resulted in King James I, who attended the play). Yet Banquo’s ghost is not only an agent of guilt and potential retribution. He is also a reminder that Macbeth had had another way—a Banquo way—of waiting and seeing if the sisters’ prediction came true. Banquo is a visitor from a separate world: the world in which Macbeth could have been patient and kindly and become monarch after all. IN this deep sense Banquo is a Multiverse Ghost—an index of counterfactual worlds, separate ontological realms that are, alas, totally cut off from our world—and from Macbeth’s.

     Banquo thus expresses the idea that there are multi-verses, decidedly different from one another, but in all of which murder is wrong. This of course does not settle other philosophical questions. Existing as he did in his world, could Macbeth have done anything other than become an assassin? Banquo suggests that Macbeth did have other choices. The answer to the difficult question might well go like this: Had Macbeth preferred to relax and enjoy, he would have made his world different, although there might well be another world in which he chose to kill his sovereign. Thus: we are not trapped in our world but have a role in defining it. We make our worlds, but there are other denizens in other worlds that make theirs, and quite differently. You and I may make our worlds by becoming florists instead of killers, but there will be others, to be sure, where florists become killers; and still others where killers try to hide from their wrongs by becoming florists; and still others in which killers murder only florists. Meanwhile, Macbeth made his world and it was the one he had to live and die in.  

     Banquo visits him from a different world and reminds him that it didn’t have to be this way.

     We are left, then, with the commonly observed function of the three ghosts as expressions of deficient justice (or at least deficient historical judgment) and of a coming squaring of accounts. But the ghosts reveal more, and this more is nothing short of describing who we are as human beings and what we must confront as such. This includes being made of a matter that, however transient as an emergent creature, somehow manages to communicate a continuing cultural consciousness long after we as individuals have been buried with our molecules; a potential for visionary experience that seems to be one of the few privileged ways by which we learn our directions; and an authorship of moral choices that mandate that we live in one world as opposed to another. We are historically conscious beings, mysteriously destined ones, and morally realistic ones. Do these things go together neatly? No. Shakespeare’s universe is as varied and contradictory as is the assortment of his ghosts.

Beloit From A to Z:

Tom McBride

Note: This list only tickles the surface of a Beloit College record abundant with colorful achievements. It will be edited from time to time to become as inclusive as possible. Suggestions are welcome at mcbridet@beloit.edu

A: Aaron. Aaron Lucius Chapin was Beloit’s first president, a Congregational minister praised by Lincoln for helping civilize “the west.” Midway through his presidency, just after the Civil War, he said the new college was growing into what he called “lustsy manhood.”  Folks talked differently back then.

B: Beloit. Beloit, Wisconsin is the home of Beloit College and gave it its name. It was founded in the mid-1840s or about the same time as the college was. It was meant to be a New England village with a college, a green (now Horace White Park) and a Congregational church.  Where did the name come from? One theory: “Beloit” is the sound of a Presbyterian farting in the bathtub, or perhaps in the Rock River.

C: Chad. Chad Walsh taught at Beloit from 1945 to 1977. A renowned member of the English Department, he is best known for having introduced C.S. Lewis to American audiences; he and his wife Eva played a matchmaking role in Lewis’ marriage to Joy Gresham, an event portrayed in the movie Shadowlands with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.

D: David.  David Heesen served Beloit for nearly 30 years as the director of a much-understaffed secretarial pool. A strong Christian evangelical who often opposed Beloit’s morae secular values, he became a beloved friend to many faculty members. He put up a small mirror in his office that said, “faculty: check your teeth before teaching.”

E. Effigy Moundbuilders, who constructed religious and burial mounds in the upper Mississippi Valley about 1200 years ago and whose mounds populate the Beloit campus. Most of the mounds in the Lake Michigan area have been plowed under, but several of them remain at Beloit College, most notably the long Turtle Mound behind the Wright Art Museum. Dean Frank Wong once observed that changing a college’s curriculum is like “moving a graveyard” and added that Beloit is the only college he knew that was built on one.

F. F.S.C. Northrop graduated from Beloit in 1915 and became a distinguished professor of philosophy at Harvard, authoring one of the first books on comparative philosophy, The Meeting of East and West in 1946.

G. Geology. Geology was and is one of Beloit’s most successful science departments, graduating hundreds of earth scientists who now work around the world. For many years it was propelled by the legendary Hank Woodard (“The Chief”), who spoke in a high-pitched New England accent and was never without an almost manic energy; and Richard Stenstrom, Beloit ’57, who was much lower-key but always a champion explainer of difficult concepts about the crust of the planet.

H. Hull. Roger Hull was Beloit’s 8^th president and arguably its most successful, raising desperately-needed funds in the 1980s and heading fund-raising drives that refurbished both Pearsons Hall and the Field House, two historically-compelling structures that had nonetheless fallen on the hard times of the law of entropy.  

I stands for Irrmann. Robert Henry (Bob) Irrmann was Beloit’s most popular professor after World War II. A jolly man ad life-long polio sufferer, he looked a great deal like the character actor Wilfred Brimley and gave stem-winding lectures daily on medieval and Renaissance history. His classes were jam-packed, but he always said his proudest moment was when students gave him a free membership to the Playboy Club in nearby Lake Geneva.

J. Journalists. Beloit has a long tradition of graduating those who went on to become dedicated journalists, among whom the most inspiring was Dan Bolles 56, who lost his life in Arizona exposing illegal racketeering. Killed by a car bomb, he is also the subject of a recent streaming documentary.

K. Knapton. Bill Knapton was Beloit’s most successful basketball coach and, above all, the decisive vote on the official committee that approved the 3-point shot from behind the line.  Every time you see a star hooper hitting a basket from “downtown,” you can thank Bill.

L. Larry. Larry White taught psychology at Beloit from 1984 to 2020. His special field of inquiry, in which he published widely, was the interrogation of children and teens by law enforcement officials and attorneys, and he was featured on that subject in the famed Netflix documentary, MAKING A MURDERER.

M. Maurer. Irving Maurer was Beloit’s 4^th president. A distinguished intellectual minister from Columbus, Ohio, and an affable bear of a man, he steered Beloit through the tough years of the Second World War and once, on a fund-raising trip to Philadelphia, accidently crushed a dowager donor’s toy poodle but was forgiven and left with a contribution.

N. Nief. Ron NIef came to Beloit as its public information director in the mid-90s and invented the internationally-known Mindset List for which Beloit was known for twenty years. It was cited by Time and the New Yorker as a go-to source for cultural trends and got Tom McBride on the Today Show thrice.

O. O’Brien. Kirk Patrick O’Brien, a 1983 graduate of Beloit, was one of its most colorful. An English major whose first love was cartooning, he was known at Beloit as The Potato Head for his Celtic ancestry and went on to become a flourishing cartoonist and art teacher in Virginia. His mother was mayor of Charlottesville and won re-election despite her brilliant and eccentric son.

P. Peterson Martha Peterson was Beloit’s 7^th president and is savior during a precarious time in its financial history. A native Kansan who first established her administrative credentials at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she went on to become president of Barnard College before coming to Beloit and using her considerable connections to right the ship. She was erudite, shrewd, decisive—always a hardy woman of the Kansas plains, on which she is buried.

Q. Q stands for Quiz Shows. The Beloit faculty have rarely defeated the students in on-campus Jeopardy contests. Warren Harshbarger ’78 found himself floundering on Jeopardy in the mid-80s until the category switched over the film, after which he, an expert, cleaned up; while John Christensen ’93, won big on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in the 1990s. His final answer was the right one.

R. R stands for Round Table, the campus newspaper and the second-oldest in the United States. Over the years it has featured the journalistic debuts of such writing worthies as Tom O’Neil, later a major writer for National Geographic and K.C. Johnson, long-time sports journalist for the Chicago Tribune; and also featured such informative columns as “Madame Exotica” and “Vagina Facts.”

S. Sikanddra Spain. One of Beloit’s most able students in the 1970s, she was a devoted scholar and activist in international relations. She was killed tragically young in the 1980s, but lives on at Beloit in the form of the prestigious Sikandra Spain Award, given annually to the Beloit student who most fosters international understanding.

T. Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin, famous Beloit scientist who first pointed out (in the early 20^th century) the dangers of carbon-based energy as a producer of global warming and who wrote one of the greatest scientific essays of the 20th century, “The Methods of Multiple-Working Hypotheses.”

U. Upton. Miller Upton was Beloit’s longest-serving president after Word War II. A courtly Southerner with a handsome granite face to go along with his six-foot tall perfect posture, he was a former All-American footballer at Tulane and the dean of the Washington University School of Business. He was a political conservative but academic libertarian who presided over the innovative Beloit Plan that motored Beloit’s prestige and prosperity during the 1960s and early 1970s.

V, Velma. Velma Hamilton was an African-American student at Beloit in the 1950s who joined an on-campus sorority only to find that the national chapter shamefully banned the local, Beloit one for welcoming her. Her mother was a Beloit graduate, and so was her brother Harry, a long-time member of the Board of Trustees, and her niece Lisa graduated from Beloit in the early 90s. The snack bar in Beloit’s sports center, “Velma’s Place,” bears her name.

W. W stands for WAC , or the World Affairs Center, long the home of the English and Classics and Modern Languages Departments and also the center of Beloit’s overseas study program. It was originally the first Carnegie Library building established on a college campus and remains a handsome structure with its understated gray walls and pristine Doric columns.

X. X stands for the “Xes” once lightly painted on campus tree trunks to guide the college’s Frisbee-Golf players where the various 18 “holes” were. X is also the Roman numeral for 10 and might remind us of the many Top 10 Lists made by the college, such as “The Best Bargains in American Higher Education” (Parade Magazine) and “The Most Creative Faculty in the United States” (US News & World Report),

Y. Year One. Year One in the college’s history is 1846, when George Colley walked from Mineral Point to Beloit, a distance of over 50 miles, to get a liberal arts education from the newly-established college. President Roger Hull and a group of students replicated and celebrated this walk in the 1980s.

Z. Z stands for Zielinski, as in the redoubtable Jim Zielinski, one of Beloit’s great admissions counselors and recruiters, who was a past master at cultivating high schools across the nation to find good Beloit “fits.”  He is of no relation to Ukraine’s heroic president, but Jim was and always shall be a hero in Beloit College history, serving from the early 90s to the 2000 teens.

The Mindset List of Shrinking Attention Spans

Tom McBride

In the 1600s the philosopher Blaise Pascal said that the world was troubled because so few of its inhabitants could sit in a quiet room alone for an hour without interruption. By this standard, the world is in trouble indeed. The distinguished journal New Philosopher recently called “Distraction” a leading issue of our time and devoted a whole issue to it.  Here is a quick & dirty overview of the issue: a conversation starter for the Age of All-Too-Shortened Focus.

1 2015: Citing a dubious footnote in a Microsoft study, leading media publications proclaimed that the average human attention span is now one-second fewer than that of the average goldfish—whose focus lasts 9 seconds.

2 Goldfish have long been known by marine biologists for their excellent memory and learning capacities.

3 A California professor of “info-metrics” has found that average human screen time has declined from 2+ minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds today.

4 More impulsive personalities and those considered “neurotic” allegedly have shorter screen- time focus.

5 The California professor has found that shrinking ability to focus on a screen is correlated with higher blood pressure.

6 Commercials of 60 seconds were not unusual 20 years ago; now they may be as short as 6.

7 Films made only 15 years ago—such as Atonement and Children of Men—had scenes that lasted up to six minutes.

8 Movie scenes today are shorter than they used to be, and so is the average film’s feature length, but this trend may be due to controlling financial risks as much as to a shorter customer attention span.  

9 It has long been an academic consensus that student attention during a lecture peaks after about 15 minutes and declines thereafter—though the charisma of the lecturer may well lengthen the focus.

10 It seems that we self-interrupt almost as often as we are interrupted—even if our task is not disrupted by a phone call or text message ping, we call or text someone ourselves.

11 On the premise that there are so many features but so little time, websites are now locked into a vicious “attention-economy” struggle—where click bait” is of inestimable value.

12 Those who deny that attention spans area shrinking point out that such spans are task-dependent and that there is no good evidence that people cannot focus on jobs that require longer to complete.

13 Switching often among tasks is sometimes termed “switch costs,” leading to more anxiety, less concentration, and more errors.

14 Some management experts advocate that companies mandate certain times of the day when emails can be neither sent nor received: it is easier to go cold turkey collectively than individually.

15 In Ireland and France are “right to disconnect” regulations that prohibit employers from intruding on employees’ time—with emails or texts—once they are off work and this permits them, if they wish, to lock their phones in a drawer until morning comes.

16 TED talks may be no longer than 18 minutes.

17 On YouTube there are at least 10 videos on the intricate philosophy of existentialism—none longer than 14 minutes.

18 Multi-tasking may be an over-hyped and inefficient “skill” unless you are walking and chewing gum at once or singing in the shower.

19 Some research shows that if you are interrupted doing task 1 you will not return to it for an average of 25 minutes but rather move on to task 2 until you are interrupted again and then move on to task 3.

20 Hiding social media apps on your phone so that you have to work hard to find them might lead to lower hypertension.

21 Those giving public talks might note that Americans check their phones an average of 352 times per day.

22 In a 2009 Pixar film called Up, Squirrel the Talking Dog was distracted with pitiful ease by almost anything.

23 Daily news podcasts are quick to point out that they can cover essential information in under 5 minutes.

24 ADHD diagnoses in children increased fivefold between 1999 and 2010; in adults, they doubled from 2007-2016.

25 This List has taken only a few minutes, tops, to read, but in the spirit of our times of reduced attention, the author is loath to make it longer.

The Mindset List of Throwback Technology

Is it possible to go forward and backwards at the same time? The wisdom about advanced technology seems settled: it comes fast; new is always better; it makes us more productive but tyrannizes our time. And so: there is a reaction—a wish to go backwards with THROWBACK TECHNOLOGY. Some of this is a genuine preference for the older technology; some of it is sheer nostalgia; some of it is the design of an old-tech façade with new-tech convenience. Whatever it is, retro is in!  THE MINDSET LIST OF THROWBACK TECHNOLOGY is a fast and lively look at this peculiar paradox.

1 It took seventeen years for the telegram to replace the Pony Express; it took only eight for the digital camera to replace Polaroid.

2 It took nearly thirty years for TV sets to replace radios as a preferred infotainment option; it took only 13 for video compact discs to replace videocassettes.

3 If you think high tech is going too fast, you can purchase an old-fashioned phonograph—complete with Bluetooth technology.

4 It took thousands of years for typewriters to replace quills, pens, and ink.

5 In 1980 every office had a typewriter; in 1990 few if any did.

6 In the current craze for throwback technology, no one has gone back to typewriters, and there seems to be no way to put word processors into typewriter casings.

7 Feeling nostalgic? You can buy a digital camera housed in Instamatic design.

8 If you are still pushing buttons on your remote controls and not using a touch screen, you are holding a soon-to-be-ancient technology.

9 For those who want to revisit their childhoods, you can buy a hand-held Nintendo player, though it will include FAR more games than you could have imagined when you were ten.

10 When the Walkman started including CDs, it seemed that it could never get any better than that.

11 If you are still planning trips via paper maps, what’s wrong with you?

12 There were smart watches forty years ago, including one that doubled as a stop watch, phone book (up to 10 names), and game player—costing only $355 in 2020 money.  

13 Pagers were everywhere in the 90s; nowhere in the 2000s.

14 If you look hard, you can still buy a curved TV screen, but why would you want to?

15 Ethernet as a connection has gone the way of ether as an anesthetic.

16 Few technologies have fought off obsolescence as well as the FAX machine.

17 There’s now one pay phone for every 3300 Americans, but no lines to use one.

18 It took hundreds of years for white boards to replace blackboards, but only 20 years for interactive whiteboards to replace dumb whiteboards.

19 It took 20 years to go from crank auto windows to power windows; 10 years to go from power windows to remote control ones—you only need your key fob now on a hot day.

20 YouTube is the ultimate jukebox, and if you danced to a jukebox, then you also recall when a car’s headlight dimmer was a steel button on the floor.

21 A phonograph is now called a “vinyl player” and you can buy them in hyper-portable designs.

22 Shown a vintage portable record player from the 1950s, a Millennial asked how you were supposed to jog with it.

23 If you’re feeling ultra-retro, you can buy abacuses now.

24 Etch-a-Sketch is back—for your I-Pad.

25 Want to slow down?  You can buy a rotary phone for as low as 45 bucks.

26 You can still send an American “telegram” (or something that looks like one) via regular postal service.

26 Telegram service is still available in Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Portugal, Poland, Israel, and 17 other countries.

26 Cars were fully-carbureted forty years ago; now 40 percent of a new car’s cost is its computerization.

26 Number of internet users twenty years ago: 381 million worldwide; today’s total number of users on FACEBOOK ALONE: nearly 3 billion.

27 To escape the autocracy of the Internet and to find a greater variety of styles Gen Z is going back to the Flip Top Phone: you can make the screen—and the digital universe—go away for a while.

28 Sixteen hundred years ago, the book replaced the scroll–until billions of people began to “doom-scroll down their screens with a masochistic thirst for terrible news.

29 Some folks just can’t help themselves: they miss the feel of paper photos, the sound of a keyboard clicking, or the whirr of a camcorder.

30 A YouTube channel devoted to retro tech has over 300,000 subscribers.

31 If we can photograph everything on our phones, how do we know what’s a truly special occasion?

32 Sony has issued a look-alike 1979 Walkman while Atari has launched a look-alike 1982 game console.

33 When will virtual reality be convincing enough so that we can live in the good old days when Fill-in-the-Blank was president and everything was great?

34 There is a market for “new” record players so that you can hear your grandparents’ treasured old 78 RPMs.

35. Look for lovely curved wooden houses–for calculators.

36 Do new technologies in a retro design just seem—somehow—more permanent?

37 For those of you who just can’t shake the childhood joy of drug store fountain cokes, there’s a cylindrical carbonator to take you back to the days of Buddy Holly, Teresa Brewer, and marble counters—and soda jerks.

38 Talk about retro: In a world where parents drool over their kids growing up to be STEM geniuses, the Rubik’s Cube has become, once more, one of the most popular toys on the planet.

39 So far no one wants to bring back floppy discs, even if they were stored in an elegant oaken chest from the good old days.

40 If a xerox machine can’t also print, scan, and fax, no amount of nostalgia can bring it back.  

THE MINDSET LIST OF MOLAR MECHANICS

Or; Why You Should Hug Your Dentist!

There are two common beliefs about dentists: that they grow rich and that they have high suicide rates. The truth is far more tangled. Although studies draw opposite conclusions about dentists’ suicide rates, there is ample evidence that they are more depressed and anxious, and feel more isolated than do members of the general population. Dental school is costly, and the debt incurred to go there, and then to set up one’s own business, can be huge. Dentists often strain their backs and shoulders to get into treatment positions, and the results can pile up to the point of serious orthopedic agony. Dental patients are nervous, and even the most serenely skilled dentist can get worn out trying to reassure them while holding a drill all day. Lots of Americans have no dental insurance, so dentists face tooth and gum problems that have been put off for patients who can’t afford what they really need. Perhaps worst of all, a dental office is not one that most Americans look forward to visiting and that few want to go back to. THE MINDSET LIST OF MOLAR MECHANICS draws two conclusions. First, after you read about tooth treatments before modern dentistry, you should go out and hug with gratitude your current eyetooth engineer. Second, ancient and medieval tooth treatment would seem awful to those of us in 2023, yes, but at times more effective than you might have thought.  Some of it might have worked—sort of. Even so, love your dentist for being modern. (This list is dedicated to Dr. David Foulkes, renowned D.D.S.)  

1 Neanderthals likely tried, somehow, to manipulate decayed or missing teeth over 130,000 years ago: you couldn’t gum roots and berries just all the time!  

2 Evidence of a tooth replacement with a bamboo peg (tapped into the bone) goes back 4,00o years ago in present-day China.

3 An Egyptian cadaver from 2,000 years ago had some sort of precious metal peg to sub for a lost molar.

4 Some mummies have “teeth” made of ivory—hey, it was good enough for the elephants.

5 The first dentists were Etruscans, who, 2500 years ago, carved false teeth from the denticles of dead mammals.

6 A 1600-year-old Mayan woman replaced her lost incisors with sea shells—they likely looked better than they worked.

7 Ancient Chinese wrapped tiny parchments around painful teeth—they contained prayers that the “tooth worm” might somehow go away.

8 A leading cleaner of teeth across the ancient world was the chewing of roots and twigs.

9 The ancient Greeks, in addition to their excellent pursuit of philosophy and drama, also devised pliers for the extraction of teeth.

10 A couple of other ancient treatments: relieving tooth pain by boiling worms in oil and putting the resulting greasy substance into the ears and correcting loose teeth by attaching a frog to the jaw, tightly of course.

11 The more things change, they more they don’t: Wealthy people in ancient Egypt were more likely to suffer from tooth problems because they were the only ones able to buy sweets.

12 The wealthy of the ancient world often had combination ear and tooth pickers made of silver or gold—the poor had to get along with pickers made of bone.

13 A common medieval belief was that dogs’ teeth boiled in wine made for an excellent mouth rinse: this does not mean that you should re-name your dog Scope.

14 The Chinese invented the first toothbrushes—made of coarse hog hair and attached to bones or bamboo sticks—about seven centuries ago.

15 One and one-half millennia ago some poor and toothless souls thought that a tooth obtained from someone else—ideally a hanged criminal—could be implanted if only there were some way to keep it in the mouth long enough.

16 In 1799 the Spanish painter Goya depicted a famously morbid version of this protocol: the insertion of a criminal’s tooth into a respectable man’s painfully dug—and very deep–gum socket.

17 The Middle Ages, known for great cathedrals and angels dancing on pins, also achieved a notable lack of sugar and therefore a low incidence of tooth decay.

18 1200 years ago, denizens of such places as Galway, Oxford, Paris, and Florence were in happy possession of the diet your dentist recommends today: high in calcium via vegetables and milk.

19 Some teeth still didn’t make it, but your local barber could pull it for you with pliers called “pelicans.”

20 Barbers also had “tooth keys,” shaped like house keys, to loosen teeth before extraction: this was as close as anyone got to an anesthetic.

21 Medieval halitosis was a problem, but pastes and mouthwash concocted from such substances as wine and vinegar, rosemary and sage, often came to the rescue, and sweet-smelling breath was a young lover’s erotic advantage.

22 Dentures were more common among the poor rich (who could afford sugar) and generally consisted of animal bones and the teeth of the freshly deceased.

23 Some folks became a little too zealous, and rubbed their teeth with a powdered pumice stone, brick, or coral: cleaned the teeth at the expense of the enamel.

24 The Mona Lisa has a celebrated sight smile, but it is toothless, perhaps for a good reason.  

25 When she was 64, Queen Elizabeth I had to cancel an appointment with the French ambassador due to a “swollen face,” and when he finally got in to see her, he said he could barely understand her because there were so many more yellowed teeth on one side of her mouth than on the other.

26 In Shakespeare’s day the wealthy made their teeth black with coal as both a cosmetic and a status symbol.

27 In one of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches—The Seven Ages of Man—the last stage is marked by being “sans teeth, sans everything.”  (By the way, in that speech “we rot from hour to hour” is a pun on “we rot from whore to whore.,” as Shakespeare might have had dirty teeth but surely had a dirty mind.)

28 We know nothing of Shakespeare’s teeth, but he was born just in time for sugar to become widely available in Europe and had one of his characters compliment another for using “eglantine and eucalyptus” to freshen her breath.

29 George Washington suffered the agonies of the damned with his aching teeth and inflamed gums and poorly-fitting dentures, and attributed his misery to cracking too many walnuts in his boyhood—but his mercury-based treatment for smallpox probably didn’t help.

30 “Operators for the Teeth” was the first dental textbook published in English (1685), but it no more studied in contemporary dental schools than leeches are used in modern medical ones.

31 Pierre Frauchard, a French surgeon, forged the first specially-dental instruments and founded the first dental society yet he is rarely thanked by history or patients alike.

32 The first explicitly dental “practice” opened in America before the Revolutionary War.

33 While Napoleon was losing the battle of Waterloo, an American dentist started recommending waxen silk thread to use as something called “floss” between human tusks.

34 The 1800s saw the birth of Colgate and anesthetic (laughing gas, sometimes called by its much less sexy name of nitrous oxide).

35 American soldiers during World War II were required to brush their teeth twice a day—couldn’t have tank officers or bomber pilots with toothaches.

36 As early as 1945 an American city (Grand Rapids) introduced fluoride into the water supply, and other cities followed suit, despite some public fears that such additions were Communist plots.

37 By the 1950s kids had stopped boasting about riding their bikes with no hands and started bragging to their mothers that they had no cavities.

38 Today DMFT scores (D for decayed teeth, M for missing ones, F for filled ones) are reported by every nation, with Danish teeth the best of all—those Danish breakfast treats notwithstanding.

39 These days your Molar Mechanic (for a price) can find your cavities with lasers, put invisible braces on your fangs, design your bridges using digital technology, and implant brand new incisors and wisdom teeth.

40 The bad news: you are not a world-historical figure like Queen Elizabeth and George Washington; the good news: your fillings won’t fall out.

“They who lose all teeth have no chairs left in the dining room.” –Anonymous

THE MINDSET LIST OF MILLENNIAL MATURITY”

Respect Is Overdue! 

Perhaps you’ve been watching TV lately and heard a recent college graduate say that he will not take any job with any organization that does not “value” him, and maybe you thought to yourself, “those selfish Millennials are at it again.” But you’d be wrong. Even the youngest Millennial has been out of college for several years now, and the oldest are turning 40. The Millennials were the first generation of digital natives. They grew up with the World Wide Web and social media and selfies. They were almost instantly branded as a discontinuous generation, the first gang of disrupters, with self-centered entitlement and an inordinate love of avocado toast. But what gives when (even) Millennials start to grow up? The following list will tell you. The generation that older Americans loved to dislike is very different now. 

1 Over 1 in 5 Americans are Millennials. 

2 Depending on the demographic, Millennial births range from 1978 to 2000 or 1982 to 1996. 

3 Some Millennials were in college on 9/11 while others were in kindergarten. 

4 Some Millennials were looking for a job during the Great Recession while others were starting to learn algebra. 

5 Millennials were the first generation to be examined under a social media microscope, and they emerged as self-centered, multi-tasking, and in love with avocado toast and lattes that took longer than a milkshake to make.

6 Now that some Millennials are early middle-aged, they take more selfies of their babies and long ago left their parents’ basements.

7 Because they have married late, many Millennials are now squeezed between challenging jobs, aging parents, and demanding young children.  

8 Millennial self-absorption has yielded to the reality of aging and kids. 

9 Tough starting later, Millennials appear to be having about as many children as other generational cohorts of the late 20^th century have had. 

10 They are now entering for the first time the zone of starting to worry about cholesterol and hypertension. 

11 An alarming and mysterious rise in the incidence of colorectal cancer has started to bedevil late Millennials. 

12 Some demographers think the difference between older and younger Millennials is so great that the latter should get their own category—perhaps the Geriatric Millennials. 

13 Older Millennials can remember walking into a computer lab with rows of Apple 2Ls, complete with starter screens of the Oregon Trail—hence the label “Oregon Trail Generation.” 

14 They can recall when household computers were enigmatic and rare. 

15 The term “Millennials” is now 32 years old. 

16 They used to be called Gen Y, until “Millennial” became the dominant meme.

17 They wish they’d bought a house earlier; now they have children and daunting prices and/or mortgage rates. 

18 Once renting for “flexibility,” they are now the largest percentage of those in the housing market and have been for the past eight years. 

19 A Millennial version of the Monopoly board game has turned a house into the “new” New York Central Railroad. 

20 No generation in history has been this old without owning a house. 

21 Older Millennials find that their parents die the same year when they themselves become parents. 

22 To be complete and fair, many Millennials DO like avocado toast., 

23 Geriatric Millennials can vividly remember the sweet sounds of dial-up computer connections, 

24 Millennials in general span lifetimes between Reagan’s first term and Clinton’s second. 

25 Older Millennials are discovering that it’s really, really hard to buy a house if you haven’t previously owned one. 

26 They may well be the first generation to be worse off than their parents., 

27 Once famed for job-hopping, they are increasingly staying put, though it’s too soon to predict gold retirement watches. 

28 Once thought of as revolutionary new workers who wanted flex time, multi-tasking, and working from home, their work habits have become increasingly normal. 

29 They tend to vote Democratic; that doesn’t mean they’re Democrats. 

30 Younger Millennials go to loud bars; older ones go to quiet restaurants. 

31 Once disruptors, they now might become grandparents for the first time when they are near 80. 

32 Famous Geriatric Millennials include Dwayne Wade, Kristen Durst, LeeAnn Rimes, Ray J, and Carrie Underwood. 

33 When the oldest Millennials were born, Charles and Diana were still getting along, Margaret Thatcher was plotting to invade Argentina, and President Reagan was still recovering from a gunshot wound. 

34 When the youngest Millennials were born, Bill Clinton had just met an aide named Monica, the Unabomber was arrested in his Montana shack, and Barack Obama was a senator—in Illinois. 

35 The Oregon Trail Millennials are so old they even remember, albeit dimly, the Cold War.  

The Mindset List of America’s

Greece and Rome

Recently the Mindset List presented its list of “American Biblical Illiteracy.” But the Bible isn’t the only great American frame of reference: language we still use but origins we’ve forgotten. The other great pervasive influence—on our vocabulary, our phrases, our buildings, and our customs—is the ancient world of Greek and Rome. This is the realm of Socrates and Julius Caesar, of Plato and Nero and multiple others. It’s myth and history and architecture and literature. Without the background of classical Greek and Rome, America as it is now would never have existed, Our Founding Fathers knew the classics very well, and we ordinary Americans know a lot more about ancient
Greece and Rome than we think we do. Hence follows this List of how amazingly embedded are these cultures, going back over two thousand years, in American life.

1. A political leader indifferent to America’s fate might as well be fiddling while Rome burns.

• We could build big stadia and call them a funny word like “coliseums.”

• Could months like March, June, and July be named for ancient gods and emperors?

• Not as many schoolchildren these days know how much Gaul Julius Caesar had.

• Most Americans still know that “Et tu Brute,” refers to political betrayal and not to men’s after shave or to the Incredible Hulk.

• Fewer Americans may know that their Founding Fathers knew and admired the ancient Romans, thought voting was an elite privilege, and weren’t upset that only about four percent of citizens were eligible to vote.

• Nuclear energy is powerful and cheap until you have to dispose of the waste—but enough about an Achilles heel.

• We abhor Greek and Roman slavery but don’t ask too many questions about who makes our smart phones.

• Are the Kardashians “sirens,” and where did that word come from?

1. The old Romans had trouble with the question of whether they were a republic or an empire—thank goodness we’ve settled that in America.

1. We’ll always be grateful to Russell Crowe for going from general to slave to gladiator in just a couple of hours.

1. Our sports arenas have a lot of Christians, and on circus days they include lions, but they are generally kept apart.

1. Antony has always gone bust courting Cleopatra, and so did the movie production company that tried to film it.

1. Socrates was a troublemaker forced to drink hemlock, but nowadays they are just murdered in embassies.

1. There’s always been an Aristotle who taught rhetoric and politics and another one who married an American presidential widow.

1. Popular contemporary authors claim that Stoicism can cure your road rage.

1. As two-thirds of us are either obese or overweight, one might say, however erroneously, that Americans are “Epicureans.”

1. As an average of 11 Americans drown every day, Heraclitus was surely right to say that you never step into the same stream twice.

1. Pythagoras’ theorem continues to be one of the few truly beautiful things taught in high school.

• In America, it seems the score is Golden Arches umpteen billion; Golden Mean, zero.

• They’ve always presented Rock of Ages in New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns but never Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

• Thomas Jefferson might have been our only Platonic philosopher king, but he’d just overthrown a king two decades earlier.

• You can buy a toga via Amazon for $29.99 plus shipping.

• Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, and Mars were great Roman gods, and, come to think of it, they might also be good names for planets—Pluto, not so much.

• “I came, I saw, I conquered” might be the sort of thing Elon Musk would say.

• Pig Latin has never died out in America, and it’s easy to learn.

• Every now and then, someone will refer to their car as their chariot.

• Baby Boomer Masterpiece Theater addicts have still not quite gotten over “I, Claudius.”

• A Princeton classics progressor says that the only way to get rid of white supremacy is to stop teaching about ancient Greece and Rome

• Jesus’ demarcation between Caesar and God remains a powerful motive for keeping the American church separate from the American state.

• Once upon a time in America, only gentlemen knew Latin; now only scholars do.

• Eighteen US towns or cities are named Athens; 13 are named Rome.

• An American male who has never gotten over his mother, such as Norman Bates in “Psycho,” is still said to be suffering from the same problem that bedeviled the ancient King Oedipus.

• Overweening American pride remains self-destructive, rather like a young man who is so proud of his waxen wings that he flies too near the melting sun.

• In protesting against 1960s hippies, Merle Haggard sang that among real Americans, “beards and Roman sandals won’t be seen” (“Okie from Muskogee”).

• “August” and “august” (syllable on either the first or second syllable) comes from one of the most famous Caesars (though few American leaders have ever been in august in August or in any other month).

• Resting on one’s laurels is hard for American athletes, who have trouble knowing when to retire, but the old Roman runners did it all the time, or so it is said.

• In the 1960s, a Texas Baptist preacher of great renown said that just as Paul needed to go to Rome to convert Caesar to Christianity, American presidents needed to go to Moscow to convert Soviet leaders to capitalism.  

• A popular translation of “The Bacchae,” an ancient Greek play about the dangers of excess revelry, has a cover photograph of young Elvis Presley, on the verge of being mobbed by his female fans.

• The Parthenon is actually sort of in Nashville.

• The Gettysburg Address is the American version of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, or perhaps Pericles’ Funeral Oration is the ancient Greek version of the Gettysburg Address.

• Socrates called out the Sophists for using misleading and slippery rhetoric—but enough about the American tradition of carnival barkers and demagogues.

• Is NASCAR the American version of chariot races or were chariot races the Roman NASCAR?

• The original Olympics were hot on TV and neither Nike nor Coke sponsored them.

• Americans used to keep pictures of Washington, Lincoln, Jesus, and John F. Kennedy in their homes in the US version of Roman household gods.

• There were no filibusters in the Roman Senate, but its members were unelected aristocrats.

• American readers might get why the medieval poet Dante shows Satan chewing on Judas’ head but can’t quite grasp why he would also be chewing on the heads of Brutus and Cassius, assassins of Julius Caesar, as well.

• The most classically-columned city in the United States is Washington, D.C., and it’s a testament to the appeal and influence of the ancient world on the American project.

• One of the greatest Roman orators was Demosthenes, and the late Senator Evert Dirksen called himself “the Demosthenes of Pekin, Illinois.”

• A Civil War general who wrote a novel about a Roman charioteer (and who later chased Billy the Kid) never lived to see his book turned into two hit movies and lend its name (Ben-Hur) to a tiny village in central Texas.

The Mindset List of Naked America 2.0

In 1964 Vance Packard wrote a book about the loss of American privacy—which he called THE NAKED SOCIETY. He was worried about Americans’ vanishing right to be let alone in the face of photography and newspaper stories. Sixty years later few things are more important than the issue of privacy. Is Facebook a social media company or a surveillance company that sells our personal data to the highest bidder? How pervasive is government snooping on its own citizens? Is privacy a Constitutional right guaranteeing the choice to get an abortion, or is it something dreamed up by hippie liberal judges? What are we to make of a society where you can get as much extra cash selling your individual data as you can for selling your plasma? Are we pitching away our privacy just to get our own website page and a few hundred “friends”? Welcome to THE MINDSET LIST OF NAKED AMERICA 2.0. Here’s a quick and informative look at a society where we might all, in a sense, be living in a nudist colony.

1 The founder of privacy is Aristotle, who declared that a distinction between public and private lives is essential for a healthy human existence.

2 In 1896 two distinguished American jurists, in the face of sensational newspaper stories about ordinary people, argued that there should be a legal right to privacy—or the right to be “let alone.”

3 One hundred years later, the distinguished American jurist Antonin Scalia said there is no constitutional right whatever to privacy.

4 In the People’s Republic of China, face-recognition is so precise that one can be fined for jaywalking weeks after a camera has recorded the offense.                                              

5 In the 1960s and 70s the Supreme Court said the right to privacy is a “penumbra” of the American Constitution—implicit in a document that limits government intrusion.

6 In 2022 Justice Clarence Thomas said the Court needs to revisit the “penumbra” doctrine and throw it out.

7 In 1912 the Republican Party met in Chicago partly because they were offered dial telephone, which by bypassing operators, could ensure privacy.

8 About five thousand party phone lines still existed in the United States as late as the 1990s.

9 Before rotary dial phones became common for nearly everywhere (in the 1960s), operators would commonly listen in on conversations and become an excellent source of gossip—a wonderful side benefit.

10 The number of consumer identity thefts in the United States rose from 4.7  to 5.7 million over the past year, with over half of the victims losing more than 500 dollars.

11 Bullying—physical or cyber or emotional—has increasingly become linked to violations of privacy.

12 The great actress, Greta Garbo, is famously supposed to have said she wanted to be alone, when in fact she said she wanted to be left alone.

13 Research has shown that users of social media want more privacy but do little to achieve it.

14 The Terms of Privacy for most organizations are above the reading level of most users.

15 Long before social media and digital communication, secrecy, eavesdropping, and encryption were obsessions of national spy agencies.

16 Organizations increasingly require more complex passwords in order to promote digital protections

17 A challenge to personal privacy: the richest people on earth now control not land or industries but information—and they want to get richer.

18 You can sell your plasma—or our personal data—to earn extra cash.

19 Another challenge to personal privacy: The American First Amendment protecting freedom of speech.

20 If you break up with your partner on social media, don’t be surprised to get ads on your devices about post-relationship self-help books.

21 If you’re on social media and have agreed to divulge your location data, don’t be surprised to get ads on your devices about My Little Pony Mini-Collections (if you live in Idaho) or pressed makeup powder (if you live in Nebraska).

22 Warrantless GPS trackers on cars have been deemed illegal, not as invasions of privacy but as violations of the 4^th Amendment, which forbids unreasonable search and seizure.

23 To some, Edward Snowden, who revealed vast Federal tracking of citizen data, is the greatest pro-privacy agent since the invention of the password or anti-viral software.

24 Job candidates have had their social media sites checked and sometimes miss being hired as a result.

25 The distinguished jurist Richard Posner has said that the relationship between personal information and economic efficiency is complex but that partial surrender of the former is necessary in order to achieve the latter.

26 The Library of Congress has archived every Twitter post since 2007.

27 Women are more concerned about their digital privacy than men are.

28 Denizens of the Selfie Culture underestimate the dangers to their privacy and their bodies.

29 Every American state has laws against online bullying.

30 Social media bots, of which there are millions, have become more and more human-like and harder to detect.

31 Apple won’t divulge your cookies to others if you forbid it to.

32 AccuWeather got into legal trouble by selling the location data of users.

33 A few of our fellow human beings have sued to get certain things about them expunged from the web forever—this is called “the right to be forgotten.”

34 Long before the internet, there was a presumption of privacy about the interactions of doctors, lawyers, and ministers with their patients, clients, and flock.

35 The four pillars of privacy rest on the right to solitude, intimacy, anonymity, and reserve.

36. The doctrine of privacy has also been extended to personal control of one’s own body—most controversially, abortion as a right to privacy and not an act of infanticide.

37. Vivid examples of places where privacy is non-existent: prisons and hospitals—what the sociologist Erwin Goffman called “total institutions.”

38. It is alleged that non-human animals in zoos suffer from lack of privacy and harm themselves and others.

39. The idea of privacy is varied in its applications, ranging from the right of a shy person not to be called upon in class to the windows of cathedrals being semi-opaque to protect worshipers from eavesdroppers.

40 Top Secret has long been the stock and trade of governments; Trade Secrets the stock and trade of commerce.

41 If you want more privacy on social media, you must attend to Default Settings with care.

42 The paradox of you and me on social media: our profile pages are expressions of our inner selves—but also utterly public.