First they came for the large glasses of wine, and I did not speak out

Alcohol is on notice

‘This promising intervention for decreasing alcohol consumption across populations merits consideration as part of alcohol licensing regulations.’

-E. Mantzari et al, ‘Impact on wine sales of removing the largest serving size by the glass: An A-B-A reversal trial in 21 pubs, bars, and restaurants in England’ (2024)

The modern State is bossy, and presents itself as being bossy for good reason. This is in the end simply a manifestation of what Botero, writing in the 1580s, called ragion di stato, meaning ‘the knowledge of the appropriate means for founding, preserving and expanding…domination’. Our State justifies itself - founds, preserves and expands its domination - on the basis that it cares for us. Almost everything about our current predicament derives from this basic dynamic.

I have written about this phenomenon before, at length (such as here and here), but it has two features that I have not emphasised very much so far, and which bear some reflection. The first is that, almost definitionally, the modern State’s self-justification is based on political legitimacy inhering not in the population, but in ‘the wise’: the technical experts who, through their superior learning and insight, discern what is best for us, and develop the means to realise it. This gives universities, as the seat (purportedly) of superior learning and insight, a special prominence.

The second feature is that it doesn’t matter whether the State actually makes life better, as long as it can provide us with a plausible account as to how it is doing so. ‘The wise’, in other words, do not actually need to be genuinely wise, as long as they can provide us with a convincing narrative.

Both of these features were strongly in evidence in a recent story which proliferated across the internet, and which concerned a recent study about the effects of removing the option to buy large glasses of wine (i.e. 250ml) from the menu in pubs, restaurants and bars. According to the BBC, this study showed that restricting customers’ options to small- and medium-sized glasses of wine ‘cut drinking’ by a whopping 7.6%.

More on the small print later; let’s focus for a moment on the comments of the lead author, Professor Dame Theresa Marteau, as reported to the BBC - giving, as they do, a particular insight into the way ragion di stato (or ‘political reason’) works at the coalface.

Two remarks here are particularly instructive. The first is Marteau’s stated ‘focus’ for her research group: ‘whether or not we can reverse-engineer our environments to see whether we can reduce our consumption to improve everybody's health’. And the second is her stated ambition in the long term: to ‘shift our social norm’ and thus reduce the amount of alcohol drunk in general, rather than just when in a pub or restaurant.

What you will notice here is the calculating and mechanical way in which society is understood, and government’s role in relation to it is conceptualised. Society is thought not to comprise a natural phenomenon in its own right, with its own norms and practices which emerge from the behaviour and decision-making of its members. Rather, it is understood to be the State’s ‘field of action’ (to use a Foucauldian term): government acts upon society, through the manipulation of its ‘environment’, in order to ‘shift’ its ‘norms’ - as though, indeed, society is in itself a kind of chattel or beneficiary, which the State carefully manages so as to ‘improve’ certain of its characteristics (in this case, its alcohol consumption habits and, thereby, its health).

And what you will also notice is the role that the academic in particular occupies: it is the wise academic (not the politician, and certainly not the public) who in this model knows what is best, and the academic who develops policy in order to achieve it. The academic sets the goal (‘improve everybody’s health’) and the academic also decides how this should be brought about (through ‘reverse-engineering’ and the unconscious ‘shifting’ of norms with regard to alcohol consumption). The politician’s job is to achieve implementation; the public’s job is to be passively nudged, manipulated and cajoled - not to choose.

Marteau’s motives are no doubt sincere, but her study therefore tells us a great deal about the role that universities have come to play in the process by which the State ‘founds, preserves, and expands domination’. The past century has seen an extraordinary growth in the scale of higher education across the developed world - and most of it has been State-funded. We should hardly be surprised then if the incentive structures facing academics should have moved away from the pursuit of truth per se to the pursuit of projects which further the State’s interests. And since the State is chiefly interested in founding, preserving and expanding its domination - since that project, as I have written elsewhere, is its very essence - then it is perfectly natural that academics should also have become mostly interested in furthering that goal.

There are, as always, both supply- and demand-led factors at work, here. On the one hand, academics are incentivised in all kinds of ways to ensure that their work has real-world ‘impact’. But on the other, academia has come to look increasingly attractive to a particular type of person - the type which George Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier, labelled ‘the Clever Ones’: convinced that they know how to make the world better, convinced that they know indeed what ‘better’ means, and convinced above all that they are the ones blessed with the necessary insight to be given the mantle of achieving that vision - without, of course, ever having to submit it, or themselves, to public scrutiny.

This has become a self-reinforcing cycle, such that most academics nowadays take it to be a truism that their role should involve essentially coming up with ways by which the State (or, better yet, an international organisation) can improve things across some metric which they, in their wisdom, have chosen. Professor Marteau’s comments, and this study in particular, are entirely emblematic of this worldview. Nobody stops to ask whether it is legitimate to decide what is best for the population without consulting them, or to determine policy on the basis of goals which the public have never been asked to vote for; it is simply accepted that to do so is perfectly natural and right.

In this final regard it is useful to consider comments which Marteau herself made in a 2018 piece written for The Lancet, and in which she makes the whole rationale abundantly clear:

The bottom line is that—based on the existing evidence from studies involving feedback using a wide range of biological markers—personalised risk information doesn’t change behaviour. While such information can change how people think about their risks, critically it doesn’t seem to change what they do.

Since this is the case (since, that is, people do not respond to information that has been presented to them in the desired manner), Marteau argues ‘more effective approaches to changing behaviour’ need to be deployed, so as to target ‘non-conscious processes’. She goes on:

Policy makers and researchers need to move away from the idea that changing minds to motivate individuals to resist our unhealthy environments changes behaviour—it doesn’t.

And therefore the entire project of ‘changing minds’ needs to be abandoned in favour of ‘redesigning our environments’. What you cannot achieve through persuasion should be achieved through - let’s call a spade a spade - surreptitious means.

Another way of describing the situation would of course be that it seems ordinary people simply often disagree with self-appointed experts when it comes to the assumption of risk - more on that in a moment. It suffices for the moment to note that political reason, or ragion di stato, is dependent for implementation on the existence of phalanxes of people like Professor Marteau, who are incapable of seeing a nail and failing to imagine it being hammered by the State, and have basically no time for democracy - or indeed individual agency.

These people are, if you like, the true revolutionary vanguard of our times, and seeing the matter in this way puts what the contemporary right often describes as a ‘woke capture’ of the universities in a different light. ‘Wokeness’, as it were, is simply the equality wing of a much more general and pervasive movement that has swept across the universities in the last century or so, in which academics are imagined as being first, expert about everything; second, equipped to identify any and all social and economic problems; and third, possessing of the expertise to solve those problems. What is commonly called ‘wokeness’ is just what has resulted from a certain subsection of academics becoming interested in the topic of how the State can ‘found, preserve and expand domination’ in society on the basis of securing substantive, rather than formal, equality. This is the most visible, but hardly the central, element of the phenomenon.

There are many problems with all of this, but the most salient is one which I have already alluded to, and have indeed also written about elsewhere before: it is contingent on a basic conception of ‘inequality of honour’ between the ordinary individual and the expert. The expert (the academic, or policy-maker advised by academics) is wise. The ordinary person is foolish, weak, or corrupt. And the expert is therefore justified in formulating whatever policy he or she sees fit, as long as it is backed by ‘evidence’.

Everything stems from that fundamental notion. In itself it is undesirable enough. But the truly terrible thing - and this brings us to the second feature of political reason which I mentioned - is that even on its own terms, it is typically false. That is, even if it were the case in principle that being an expert justified one in making policy (I don’t accept this to be so, but let’s grant it for the sake of argument) the awful truth is that very often the experts either a) aren’t actually very expert, or b) are blinkered by prior beliefs. And the large wine glass study neatly demonstrates both of these flaws.

Let’s talk about the study, then. Let’s leave aside for a moment that even if its results were replicable at scale and across time it would only suggest a 7.6% reduction in consumption of wine in pubs, restaurants and bars (i.e. not at home or on street corners where presumably most ‘problem drinking’ occurs). Let’s also leave aside that a 7.6% reduction in consumption in the participating pubs, restaurants and bars was equivalent to four fewer drinks being consumed per day between all customers. And let’s also also leave aside that the 7.6% reduction was not a reduction in alcohol consumed but in wine consumed, and that wine is uncontroversially the healthiest type of alcohol to drink. Let’s also leave to one side the question of whether drinking wine is actually bad for you in the first place, and also the question as to why, if (as the researchers who ran the study suggest) publicans can make the same amount of money from just selling 125ml and 175ml servings of wine, the 250ml glass size exists in the first place.

Let’s just focus on the fact that the result is based on 20 establishments (not 21, as reported by the BBC - one of the participants returned unusable data), almost all of which (86%) were pubs, the majority of which (62%) being in London (typically deprived areas of that city) - and all of which were in the South of England, and that they implemented the change in question essentially for just four weeks (on an A-B-A cycle, with four weeks of normal trading, then four weeks of no-large-wine-glasses, then four weeks of normal trading again).

You don’t have to be an expert in social science research to identify immediately that this is a tiny, unrepresentative sample and that four weeks is nowhere near long enough to plausibly infer anything from the results. And nor do you have to be an expert in social science to smell a rat on learning that 1,778 establishments were contacted by the researchers initially - chosen on the basis of being easily accessible - and those which responded to initial inquiries were then whittled down to 21 partly after being ‘assessed for eligibility over the telephone’ in a call with the research team itself.

In short, this is junk science - an undergraduate research project conducted at slightly larger scale - and nothing can be inferred from it at all. To get persuasive results you would have to conduct the experiment at hundreds of establishments, randomly determined from samples across the country, representing different regions and location types, and different levels of prosperity - and you would have conduct it at different intervals and for much, much longer than four weeks (or a twelve week A-B-A cycle). And even then you would only be able to infer anything about the effects of taking away the option of buying a large glass of wine on wine consumption in pubs, bars and restaurants, not alcohol consumption in the round, and not even wine consumption in the round. There is in other words no evidence whatsoever here to support the proposition that the policy would cause a ‘shift in social norms’, even if one were to grant that this would be a legitimate aim. There is nothing in fact worth noting about the study, really, at all - except perhaps the exceptionally banal point (which is really common sense, evident to anybody who has ever drunk any alcohol) that people tend to drink more slowly the smaller the measure is.

To be scrupulously fair, the researchers make clear that they consider it to be an ‘opportunistic’ study and acknowledge all the problems I have identified. But, also to be scrupulously fair, this doesn’t stop them describing their intervention as ‘promising’ and even suggesting that it means that a requirement not to sell large glasses of wine should be ‘part of alcohol licensing regulations’.

We come back, then, to the point made towards the start of this article: the wise do not actually have to be wise, as long as they can present a case that they are. Actually making life better is not the point. The point is that governing frameworks in modernity justify their existence on the basis of making claims that they are making life better - and this is sufficient, of course, as long as those claims are vaguely plausible. Is it vaguely plausible that putting a requirement not to sell large glasses of wine in alcohol licensing regulations would result in less alcohol consumption and therefore better health? Only if you don’t look too hard, but most people - and most policymakers - will barely look beyond the headline at all.

But beyond the fact that the claim being made is not properly evidenced by the study in question, the wider point is that this approach - in which experts come up with ways in which they will make life better and lobby for the implementation through public policy - is fundamentally and irredeemably misconceived. And this should be evident to anybody who reflects for a minute or two on the nature of the phenomenon. One can only make a plausible claim that one is making life ‘better’ if one has an agreed concept of what ‘better’ means. And we don’t. Indeed, very often purported experts, convinced that they are making some metric or other better, are in important respects making life much, much worse.

The technocrat, you see, can only ever really understand the world in what James C. Scott calls ‘legible’ ways - typically quantifiable metrics, such as the number of people who develop cancer, or overall life expectancy, or units of alcohol consumed. But that is not how life is lived, and it is not what life is actually about - as anybody down at the pub will tell you. Life is partly about having fun with friends and family. And drinking wine with friends and family - even, heaven forfend, sometimes getting drunk! on large glasses of wine! - is, I am afraid to say, fun. This is not to mention all of the other important functions that alcohol serves as a social lubricant - forging friendships, breaking down shyness and other social barriers, relaxing people on a date, and so on. Indeed, it is probably not a mischaracterisation to say that a free, roughly egalitarian, democratic society will be both characterised and partly forged through the general availability of alcohol, which for all its harms (and undoubtedly it has them) has a crucial role in greasing the wheels of everything from business to romance to good familial relations in a society where conduct is not heavily regimented by ritual, custom, or tradition.

Those of us who like good wine, and good beer, and good spirits, might even say a life without those things would be worse than one with them, and that having the choice to enjoy a drink when one chooses is part - a small part, but an important one nonetheless - of what makes life worth living. Some of us might even say that we’re happy to take our chances with the terrible cancers which will proliferate in our every organ as a result of our noxious habit, if the alternative would mean living an extra five years to enjoy the onset of dementia or whatever other awful degenerative condition awaits us at the end instead. And some of us might also point out that human beings have been drinking alcohol for millennia without needing to be micromanaged in doing so, thankyouverymuch - and that we’re therefore happy with letting social norms, rather than the State, determine how much it is acceptable to drink.

The point, of course, is that when it comes to what is ‘better’, opinions differ, and nobody is an expert. Professor Marteau has her opinion about what ‘better’ might mean; others of us disagree. The disagreement is not the problem - everybody is entitled to an opinion. The problem is the ‘inequality of honour’ that Marteau assumes exists between us, and which she takes as license to ‘re-engineer our environments’ behind the scenes as she sees fit. That is at the root of political reason, or ragion di stato, and that is therefore what lies at the root of modern governance. It has also become, sadly, the root of higher education, as we can see all around us. The sacrificing of the pursuit of truth for its own sake has become one important consequence of that; the rise of a totalising ‘nanny state’ has been another.

We now are now going to be forced to consume more and more of the the bitter fruits of this development - as long, of course, as we do not ferment them. As plainly as you have a nose on your face, the drinking of alcohol is slowly but surely going to be nudged, squeezed, and manipulated out of social life. We will be much more miserable for it, but that won’t matter, because of course it will superficially be described as having made us healthier and therefore life better. The future presses heavily down upon us; I suggest you have a large glass of wine tonight while you’re still allowed to, although personally I’ll be having a wee dram of Ardbeg.