Not-God (23 page)

The change was one of addition rather than of substitution. Wilson and his followers never wavered in the understanding that their alcoholic “illness,” “malady,” or “disease” was to be confronted directly. Their aim continued to be “the break-up of the sequence of activities involved in addictive drinking” — in A.A. parlance: “not taking the first drink, one day at a time.” But
sobriety
as understood in A.A. carried a further corollary implication.
³⁶

Confronted with the problems and concerns of “living sober,” aware from often tragic experience of the special danger to alcoholics of such personality pitfalls as grandiosity, resentments, and the tendencies to dominance over or excessive dependence upon others, old-time members began to formulate a significant three-faceted distinction. “Active alcoholism” was the condition of the obsessive-compulsive drinker who continued to imbibe alcohol. From this situation,
two
others were to be distinguished. The first was that of the “merely dry” former obsessive-compulsive drinker who “put the cork in the bottle” yet continued to “think alcoholically;” i.e., to entertain grandiose plans and expectations, to nurse feelings of resentment, etc. In “true sobriety” or “serenity,” one embraced a new “way of life;” i.e., abandoned grandiosity, resentments, and other claims to be “special,” and became aware that one’s only true dependence was on the “Higher Power” — that the
whole
program of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous was to be utilized in
all
aspects of daily life.
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The “merely dry” or “dry drunk” state was precarious, whether as an intermediate stage between “active alcoholism” and “true sobriety,” or as simply a falling away from “true sobriety.” A person in this dry but alcoholic condition suffered much or all of the torment formerly soothed in some way by alcohol, but the accustomed painkiller was no longer an available option, and the fact that “active alcoholism” had been overcome inhibited any perception of “bottom” that could lead to the “surrender” required for “conversion” to “true sobriety.” It was a purgatory worse than hell, for one suffered the torment under the illusion that this was heaven; further, from this alcoholic limbo one passed more usually to the hell of active alcoholism than to the heaven of true sobriety.
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This developing understanding of three rather than two choices permeated the self-understanding of the members of Alcoholics Anonymous more and more deeply in the early 1950s. It explained not only themselves but the successes and failures of others. A newer and somewhat muted two-fold distinction began to emerge: that between “living sober” and “thinking and living alcoholically” — the latter whether actually drinking alcohol or not. Such an understanding of “the A.A. Way of Life” had, of course, been implicit in its Oxford Group origins, but only in 1967 did this precise phrase become enshrined in the title of a collection of Bill Wilson’s writings. In this earlier period, A.A.’s surviving co-founder turned to the task of setting it forth clearly in terms more familiar both to his own mind and to his followers in Alcoholics Anonymous.
³⁹

In 1950, Wilson began to withdraw from active leadership in the ever increasing enterprises of the fellowship’s New York office, declaring his desire to devote concentrated time to several writing projects. Bill began formal work on the philosophically most important of these only in 1952, but he clearly based it on his experiences between 1946 and 1950. The treatise emerged in 1953 as
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions
. This book set forth Wilson’s deepest understanding of the “A.A. Way of Life.” It was A.A.’s New Testament — bringing to fruition the original revelation of the Big Book,
Alcoholics Anonymous.
⁴⁰

Influenced by the events surrounding him, Bill Wilson began and ended his portrayal of A.A.’s Twelve Steps as “a way of life” by stressing the continuing necessity of the total deflation of even a raised “bottom” and the persistence in even the “recovering alcoholic” of childishness, immature grandiosity, and infantile defiance. Between these themes and derived from them, Wilson located an ancient motif. The key to the A.A. Way of Life was — simply — “humility.”
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Humility
. The key to the A.A. program, “the step that separates the men from the boys,” was presented — perhaps surprisingly — as Step Six: “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.” The point was that not only can “
I
” not directly achieve this removal, but even before an-Other can,
“my”
main “activity” can be only the apparently most passive one of readiness, openness. Wilson’s explicit exploration of the meaning of humility bracketed his indirect treatment of it in the Sixth Step. Although “often misunderstood, … genuine humility” was presented simply and classically in Step Five as “realism …, straight thinking, solid honesty.” Especially as “first … consist[ing] of recognizing our deficiencies,” “actual humility” eased “the old pains of anxious apartness.” Thus Step Five which exemplified it “was the beginning of true kinship with man and God.”
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In Step Seven, where “the attainment of greater humility” was presented as “the foundation principle of each of A.A.’s Twelve Steps,” Wilson expanded his favorite understanding of the
glory
of the alcoholic condition as residing in its clear and personal demonstration of the fundamental truth that strength comes out of weakness. Three key elements rapidly tumbled forth from this stark realization of the essence of the condition of the recovering alcoholic: 1) the character and role of “instincts;” 2) the exact nature of the danger in “demand;” and 3) the special pitfall for the alcoholic of the contradictory two-pronged quest for both “dependence” and “independence.”
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In his discussions of instincts, Bill Wilson usually listed the basic human passionate cravings as “security, sex, and society.” Wary more of repetition than alliteration, he at times substituted “to eat, to reproduce, to be somebody” or “money, romance, companionship and prestige” when describing how “the unnatural act [of] pour[ing] so much alcohol into themselves that they destroy their lives” led alcoholics to turn these “basic natural desires” into destructively “distorted drives.” The co-founder accepted human nature as his experience had taught him his was: the basic “instincts” were neither good nor bad — they simply
were.
⁴⁴

What distorted these drives, perverted these passions, was
demand
. “We have been making unreasonable demands upon ourselves, upon others, and upon God.” The danger in demand was two-edged. “Either we insist upon dominating the people we know, or we depend upon them far too much.” “Either we … tried to play God and dominate those about us, or we … insisted on being overdependent on them.” Each demand denied limitation, whether of oneself or of some other. For essentially limited creatures, then, any demand was doomed to frustration.
⁴⁵

To escape the snare of demand, Wilson proposed a profoundly simple solution.
Proper
dependence was the only true
independence
. In the “spiritual program” of Alcoholics Anonymous proper dependence was first upon God. “The more we become willing to depend upon a higher Power, the more independent we actually are. Therefore dependence, as A.A. practices it, is really a means of gaining true independence of the spirit.” But even if secondarily,
proper
dependence was also immediately upon others: “Going it alone in spiritual matters is dangerous.” As the Fifth, Eighth, Ninth, and Twelfth Steps imposed as well as testified, “salvation” in Alcoholics Anonymous consisted in “emerging from isolation” to the “feeling of being at one with God and man,” to “the sense of
belonging
, [the awareness that] we no longer live in a completely hostile world. We are no longer lost and frightened and purposeless.”
⁴⁶

The route traversed in the A.A. Way of Life led from destructive dependence upon the chemical alcohol to a dependence proper to God and appropriate upon others; from honesty regarding instincts to a rejoicing in the strength arising from weakness; from the self-hating confusion of the “bottom” to identity derived essentially from accepting the wholeness of the limitation of one’s being. Only under this realization came the “spiritual awakening” in which was founded “the joy of living [that] is the theme” of A.A.’s Twelve Steps. That spiritual awakening was “a new state of consciousness and being.” It meant acceptance by the A.A. member that “he has been transformed, because he has laid hold of a source of strength which, in one way or another, he had hitherto denied himself.”
⁴⁷

In practice, this theory came from Wilson’s reflection on his own experience, as virtually all the co-founder’s correspondence made clear. In practice also, this theory shaped the history of the fellowship for the next twenty years. That history marked the process by which Alcoholics Anonymous itself achieved the “true maturity of responsibility.”
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For if the careful formulation of its “way of life” was the introverted,
program
-developing accomplishment of Alcoholics Anonymous —
via
Bill Wilson — during the early 1950s, the extroverted,
fellowship
-developing task of A.A. was its self-conscious effort at “Coming of Age” — again, under the at times prickly goading as well as the statesmanlike leadership of its surviving co-founder. The two developments were related. As medical — and especially psychiatric — investigation and thought proceeded through the “disease” debate focusing especially upon “dependency,” one trait especially became isolated as characteristic of alcoholism and the alcoholic: the specific over-dependency of immaturity.
⁴⁹

The diagnosis was one with which Bill Wilson himself could readily identify — up to a point. In the mid-1940s, Wilson had sought out Dr. Harry M. Tiebout and had entered upon a regimen of psychotherapy. Dr. Tiebout, a psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of alcoholics, from early on had supported Alcoholics Anonymous and had referred to the fellowship its first successful female member, Marty Mann. Throughout his long and distinguished career, the Connecticut psychiatrist published a series of perceptive analyses of alcoholism and of the therapeutic dynamic inherent in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Tiebout came to this comprehension largely through his knowledge of Bill Wilson, and his diagnostic understanding was both profound and simple. Drawing upon a phrase attributed to Freud, the psychiatrist pointed out to A.A.’s co-founder that both in his active alcoholism and in his current sobriety he had been trying to live out the infantilely grandiose demands of “His Majesty the Baby.”
⁵⁰

Wilson accepted the diagnosis; indeed, he incorporated it and developed his understanding of its implications in
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions
. But somehow it stuck in Wilson’s craw that even “truly sober” alcoholics be thought essentially “immature.” His correspondence with Tiebout especially was studded with both acknowledgments and denials of this ambivalence, perhaps most strikingly on one occasion in 1951 when — responding to a letter from the doctor accusing him of immaturity in historical distortion — Bill dashed off a heated response which he later directed not be mailed: “This shows more ego than Harry!
Don’t Send!”
In himself at least, Wilson always readily found traces at least of “His Majesty the Baby.”
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But for Alcoholics Anonymous Bill refused to accept so reductively degrading an understanding. Another consideration moved Wilson and the oldtimers around him. A new twist in the post-war age of consumer advertising portrayed the drinking of alcohol as the “grown-up” thing to do. The push to “maturity” and “adulthood” was on from many directions, reflected in clothing styles, entertainment breakthroughs, and a myriad of other cultural pressures. Alcoholics Anonymous could not combat directly an advertising industry that presented the drinking of alcohol as the hallmark of maturity, but it could and did launch an attempt to demonstrate in its own existence that abstinence from alcohol was not in itself a sign of immaturity.
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In Bill Wilson’s understanding, the chief characteristic of maturity was responsibility. From 1950, Wilson turned his attention to demonstrating that sober alcoholics could be responsible — for themselves as well as for other, drinking alcoholics. His second chosen mode of achieving this demonstration was to effect obvious and advertised change in the structure of the fellowship.
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This was the “second chosen mode” because Wilson had found himself caught in a quandary, and his initial attempt to circumvent it had fallen almost disastrously flat and been almost fatally counterproductive. The quandary was that as necessary to the needs of that time as had been the Alcoholic Foundation with its majority of nonalcoholic trustees in the spring of 1938, its original money-raising function had been unnecessary since 1945. In that latter year, Alcoholics Anonymous adopted its tradition of “no outside contributions” and signally informed the 1940 Rockefeller dinner guests that their assistance not only was no longer needed but even would no longer be accepted. Yet the Foundation with its Trustees had continued in existence. As a source and reservoir of good will, they mediated between Alcoholics Anonymous and the community at large. Explicitly composed of a majority of non-alcoholics, the Trustees and Foundation were the most visible witness to the fellowship’s respectability. Such dependence upon non-alcoholics was to Wilson a denial of responsibility and evidence of immaturity. But the Foundation and its trustees could not simply be shed. These men had given much, and most had become close personal friends. Appropriate gratitude, Wilson knew, was also a responsibility of and a witness to maturity.
⁵⁴

Faced with these problems, Wilson labeled the fifteenth anniversary convention of Alcoholics Anonymous which met in Cleveland in 1950 “A.A.’s Coming of Age party.” Prior to the meeting, he used the pages of the
A.A. Grapevine
to exhort delegates to seize this “chance to prove that we
have
reached a stage of maturity… !” Intriguingly, this was done under the title rubric: “May Humility Be the Keynote!” Afterwards, Bill’s and others’ reports of this meeting were sprinkled with examples of and attestations to “maturity;” for example, by an anonymous cab-driver who rejoiced that at
this
convention he had not had to wrestle with drunks; and by
Cleveland Press
editor Louis Selzer, who testified that in his field, at least, A.A. was very needed and welcome. Despite all this patent flackery, the matter proved hardly settled.
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