One sign of societal decadence is shying away from clear explanations because they are too easy. So here we go: American universities do well because they have a lot of intellectual and practical resources. British universities perform round about what you would expect for a country of that size and resource level, maybe a bit better. Both societies benefit from liberal goods – positive immigration, individual competition and institutional cooperation, societal tolerance, rule of law, relatively free discourse and the rest. However these kind of explanations do not confer status advantage on the person hewing to them. That is why there are incentives on the right to explain the track record of these socities on complex cultural explanations and on the left to look to historical injustice. The reality is just not interesting enought to be diverting to participants in the The Discourse.

You do not gain kudos by stating the obvious – UK society is fairly tolerant, especially compared to most of Europe, and we all benefit from it. We have problems with economic growth and productivity, to which the solutions are also fairly clear – build more houses and infrastructure, get hold of reasonably cheap energy, make good things like investment cheaper. But that scripture does not help anyone differentiate themselves in the political marketplace, unless there are votes in sounding like a General Dynamics programmed spad-bot 2.0. You gain kudos from saying that liberal tolerance is mask for structural racism or the globalist whittling down of our national uniqueness. Hyperbole is part of the attraction.

The more these goods are attacked as manipulative, unjust or irrelevant, the more they fray and will disappear. It is parochial to think that because the UK has been relatively rich up to now, it will be always be so. It would be psychologically satisfying to say these goods are under attack by both right and left, but they are under attack by the centre as well.

Bad  ideas survive. We were told that Russia was a great power. It isn’t. We were told that Russia had clear red lines and breaking them would lead to nuclear catastrophe. It didn’t. That France and Germany were a bridge to Russia. They aren’t. The failure and complacency of Western analysis is nearly catastrophic for NATO. I want to consider that as an aspect of a common occurrence. Bad ideas continue despite repeated failure. There are businessmen whose refusal to pay their debts is effectively part of the business model. Yet banks and private equity continue to lend them money, in defiance of all microeconomic theory. Why is that? If I don’t lend them money, someone else will.

How long does it take debunked ideas to be removed from the curriculum? It should be immediate. Something we are not good at. Mostly we are encouraged to focus on one idea and reiterate that for the rest of our careers. We are not rewarded for removing bad ideas from the curriculum. Doing so introduces professorial panic. What shall I put it in its place?

Colleagues and myself have studied football fandom and alcohol in terms of what is called the carnivalesque.(Bandura et al. 2023). This is an idea that has been applied quite a bit in alcohol studies. A lot of theories of the carnival have relied on Bakhtin (1984) and the idea that the social order is inverted, with a focus on this spectacular. The model here is the mediaeval festival. The idea is that the carnival involved the suspension of some hierarchies, the inversion of others, and the focus on the baudy and foul language ofbillingsgate. This is a development of the drinking as time out idea with a focus on extreme intoxication.

Intoxication is the practice of learning to separate the individual from their everyday self. Both football and alcohol consumption create a similar social space with qualities of collective effervescence, inversion and so on – and also, following from what Haydock says, this is both validated and seen as a problem in capitalist leisure society. This might explain the tension between football as a form of entertainment and football as a carnival. I’d also use that to highlight our methodological approach – we see supporters as being actively involved rather than passive consumers of the sport, and part of this is the way they gather and celebrate/commiserate.

The relationship between alcohol and football is pulled in three directions: political; commercial; and popular. A sign of the politics of alcohol and football : Alcohol consumption is treated as a health issue, but only outside of football and public space, where it becomes a public order issue. In popular terms football is part of the carnival of social life. It brings people together on an occasion where some rules and norms are suspended. However the carnival can also be quite habitual and mundane. Going to a football match can feel just like a regular habit. The value of it is a renewal of central bonds and identity.

A football match is a great collective act of will. That’s why the worse your team does, the more stubborn your support. The worse your team is doing the greater the will, the greater the belief, the greater the bond between supporters. I know enough Jambos to know the perverse satisfaction that comes through your team once again falling over itself to put the ball in the back of its own net. In that way, fandom them has something in common with gambling. Gamblers do not like winning streak to go on pretty long. Winning is a new experience that is risky and generates uncertainty. It disrupts the pleasure of the zone.

In commercial terms both alcohol and football are great commercial enterprises. They do have some features in common. They both draw on this idea of the carnival but also helpful to the mundane spaces of life. Drinking in a pub might be like going to your living room. Drinking at home might be taking that pleasure back into the domestic space. The commercialised image of alcohol consumption is of spectacular joy when most alcohol consumption is day-to-day. Likewise the image  of football might be all massive commercialised cups and expensive stadiums, but on that is built a pyramid of every day practice. Saturdays and Sundays on the bus. Midweek queuing  in the cold. Now you might think, well one of those is more authentic than the other. But I think both need each other and benefit from each other. The real needs the fake like a gambler needs losing.

Nothing is a silver bullet. Except when it is.

I was reminded reading Nicholls et al (2022) report on drug consumption rooms of the critique of them as ‘not a silver bullet’. This term means a dependable solution to a otherwise tricky problem . It put me in mind of a meeting with MPs where I and others had explained that they were useful, but not in themselves a solution to Scotland’s drug problem. I said that harm reduction services like DCRs are never an end in themselves. The ‘service’ you want to offer is not providing a safe environment for drug consumption. It is having a contact point for users who have particularly disrupted lives where you can talk about other services that they need – welfare, housing, psychological, health etc.  What matters is what happens when you provide that service. Later I heard, ‘they are not a silver bullet’. Does anybody think they are? As Nicholls et al outline, everyone involved thinks they have to defeat this strawman argument first of all.

We should make ourselves aware of why this argument exists in the first place. Nobody used it for Scotland’s needle exchange policy which was vital in fighting the HIV epidemic. Objections then were moral as it was seen as a moral and a technical project. It has come about because our harm reduction thinking has become increasingly technically focused in practice evidence and justification. This is just perfectly reasonable. We could work together with very different moral and political views  to agree on the technical benefits of needle exchange. It was quite remarkable that conservative, and liberal, politicians could agree on this approach.

The problem of relying on the technologically justified approach is that it can ossify over time and displace the wider moral claim you’re making. Everyone starts to expect naloxone to act in this way. We know it is its most effective when it is part of a toolkit owned by users – meaning not a magic bullet.

So we can perhaps work with some different means of understanding:

What kinds of conversations and communities are created and supported through it?

What kind of knowledge came from it?

Does it connect different elements of a wicked problem?

and so on

Nothing is a silver bullet. Except when it is. There are plenty of technological solutions. HIV is now a disease to live with, not die of. Obesity may be preventable. Semaglutide might treat addiction. Yet many campaigns reject silver bullets on principle because the real aim is different – usually to end capitalism in some form. Imagine a party campaigning against child poverty. They are offered a solution – eg here’s a ton of cash. They reject it. ‘No to solutions that do not change society’. We would think them disgraceful, immoral. Certainly we would assume they were not really opposed to child poverty. But that is exactly what happens.

In the social sciences, we have been sometimes reluctant to accept that there can be magic bullets, technological solutions, because we are a bit in love with our wicked problems. If some of these problems have simple technical solutions like the weight loss pill, then it reduces our role to technical administrators. Similarly we refuse the great man idea of history because it gets in the way of our ability to theorise. It is a bit hard to argue now that individuals do not influence history.