Marrying your dentist, as I did, means learning all sorts of things you never imagined you'd know. Some of them are even useful. Smoking, for instance, will make your teeth fall out, and raisins can be harder on the old choppers than chocolates. But the biggest lesson has to do with technology. What I've learned about this from being around my wife is that there are no Luddites with toothaches.

The Luddites, you'll recall, were disaffected craftsmen who destroyed newfangled textile machinery in England in the early 19th century. Today lots of people fear technology, or at least new technology, and a certain amount of Luddism is probably inevitable in a time of rapid change. But what's striking, as people cope with all of this, is how irrational we can be when confronted with everyday technologies we don't understand. Los Angeles, where my wife practiced dentistry, is a showcase for the phenomenon of "selective Luddism": a big, sophisticated city that hasn't fluoridated its water. My wife's patients there included plenty of people who were open to almost any new idea, yet were deeply suspicious of modern medicine and technology-except, of course, when they had a toothache, at which point they were happy to embrace any substance or technology that brought them relief. I remember much wariness about silver fillings, but hardly a peep about lidocaine.