Not-God (29 page)

Finally, because of the nature of the data on which Part Two is based and the type of interpretation that it attempts, a caution is in order against reading exposition as advocacy. Having found in the historical study of Alcoholics Anonymous a coherent world view — the vision of fundamental human not-God-ness — I have tried to define and to explain that implicit but over-all philosophy as clearly as possible. This is any writer’s obligation to his subject, and it implies two corollaries. First, as has been noted above in another connection, no one A.A. meeting or A.A. group or item of A.A. literature will evidence all the points treated — and I do not mean to imply that they
should
do so. Second, the congruity of the A.A. world view with, or its deviation from, my own philosophy and values are not meant to be argued in this book. Neither such congruity nor such deviation has provided either a criterion for inclusion or a guide to interpretation.

The task of interpretation to which Part Two addresses itself is divided into three parts in the three chapters that follow. Chapter Seven establishes and describes the larger context and meaning of American history in which Alcoholics Anonymous came into existence and developed. After an opening discussion of the meanings of “spiritual” and “religious” as these terms were understood by early A.A. members, Chapter Eight explores the larger history of specifically religious ideas as they are reflected by Alcoholics Anonymous, with special attention to American expressions of them. The final chapter examines the precise significance of Alcoholics Anonymous within these contexts, striving first to define and then to interpret the message proclaimed by Alcoholics Anonymous to its larger culture.

It is the writer’s hope that the message of Alcoholics Anonymous — “not-God” — is clearly defined, examined, analyzed, and enabled to be heard by this book. Only the book’s readers can make it come to pass that this message — if appropriate — be heeded.

So long as its founding members — especially the charismatic Bill Wilson — lived, Alcoholics Anonymous was in the process of formation. Even after their deaths, development as well as growth continued. Sheer time and proven effectiveness have enshrined A.A.’s Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, but the essentially unorganized nature of the fellowship works against any absolute rigidities. However dogmatic or inclined to absolutism any A.A. group may become, any two or three alcoholics who disagree with such a turn may depart and by meeting for the purpose of sobriety form their own, new, A. A. group. So Alcoholics Anonymous grew and so will it continue, despite complex problems such as those of “other problems” and “special groups.”
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Yet even among those who prize such essential openness, some stages of formation are more significant than others. By its very sensitivity to and definition of its “Coming of Age,” Alcoholics Anonymous itself carefully marked off the years that in the fellowship’s own awareness were the most formative. Those years, from 1935 to 1955, saw A.A.’s program for both alcoholics and itself hammered out and set forth in the fellowship’s formulation of its Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions and the publication of its key books,
Alcoholics Anonymous
and
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions
. During those first twenty years, A.A. membership grew from two to 133,000 and attained international diffusion. These phenomena in themselves offered adequate evidence that further growth and development would be significantly different. Signally, as one of the most important acts of its coming of age, Alcoholics Anonymous in 1955 accepted itself as a historical entity and thus as formed enough to
have
a history.
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The twenty years from 1935 to 1955 span three decades. “The thirties,” “the forties,” and “the fifties” are our customary categories, however tortured their interpretation must at times be because the obstinate realities of history rarely present themselves in such neat packages. Yet for our purpose here, the three decades that embraced Alcoholics Anonymous in its self-consciously formative stage offer interpretive as well as convenient labels, especially in popular memory and understanding.
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The 1930s were the “Depression Decade.” As some of its alcoholics at decade’s depth reached their realization of personal “bottom,” the culture reckoned its own deflation “Great,” both as Crash and Depression. At their bottom of Crash and Depression, Americans struggled to understand these phenomena in order to rise from them. In their understanding of how their plight had occurred, many arrived at insights similar to those of their alcoholic compatriots. They looked back on the decade of the twenties as a false and artificial “high,” deeming that their downfall had come about because of high-flying speculation — because of blithe forgetfulness if not denial that paper wealth was not real wealth. The people of the thirties also revolted against the 1920s as a decade of privacies. Some harkened readily to leaders who offered them a sense of unity, if only against so largely mythical a common enemy as “Wall Street.” Others sought new bases for more practical unions in enthusiasms as diverse as the C.I.O. and the Civilian Conservation Corps, the bonus march and Townsend Clubs. Internationally, however, Americans of the 1930s clung to their imagined isolationism — or thought they did.
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In the 1940s, this last isolationism gave way to a temporarily repressed but deeply craved dedication as the attack on Pearl Harbor brought home the war that ended the Depression. This new crusade aimed not to “make the world safe for democracy” but, at least in a hindsight aware of Nazi atrocities, to preserve a world safe for humanity. The war was won, but how victory came posed new threats. The strange coalition between capitalist and socialist nations, the absolute demand for unconditional surrender, and the awesome dawning of the atomic age brought triumph, but the triumph was tainted first by unrealistic expectations and then, inevitably, by newer and deeper fears.
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Strange paradoxes marked the decade of the fifties. Americans moved within its brief span from almost paranoid fears over internal subversion to a life-style of denial masked by complacency. A revival of interest in religion — or at least in the churches — issued not in profound theology nor even in revived interest in the social gospel, but in deeper complacency. Sociologists observed this first, and their specialty briefly threatened to unseat psychology as the religion of the unchurched who found comfort in understanding such a turning to faith as an ethnic rather than a spiritual phenomenon.
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Despite a root assumption that international confrontation would bring about all-or-nothing apocalypse, the 1950s also witnessed at least the dawning of a new realization. The experience of Korea, coming so soon after a victory of unconditional surrender forced by nuclear holocaust, prompted at least a few to accept that at least at times, at least some goals — and means — could be “limited.” It was a sense that was to expand in the decades that followed. But at first its acceptance was stunted, as the majority of Americans so freshly conscious of both the necessity and the precariousness of freedom were reminded of the perverse uses to which the concept of limits could be put. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision that racial equality could
not
be limited issued an implicit challenge to engage in profound re-thinking about both equality and limitation. Most Americans, caught in the web of denial spun by racial chauvinism, fears of nuclear cataclysm, and suspicion of Communist intrigue, declined the invitation.
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Most people long continued to refuse it, but meanwhile at least the alcoholic Americans who in greater and greater numbers were joining Alcoholics Anonymous were learning
something
— on a more personal but not therefore less profound level — above the treachery of denial, the reality of limitation, the true basis of equality, and the addictive nature of any attempt to rationalize away these realizations — by drinking or any other means.

Our historical sketch has but glimpsed only America. Alcoholics Anonymous claims, and to some extent enjoys, worldwide diffusion. Yet in more than one sense both the A.A. fellowship and its program are profoundly “American.” Two of these senses are relevant to our discussion here: the origins of Alcoholics Anonymous and the usual understanding of America.

Bill Wilson, in reflecting on how Alcoholics Anonymous had begun, often and fondly stated that “it all started in a consulting-room in far off Zurich, Switzerland.” The role in A.A. history of Dr. Carl Gustav Jung — the great psychiatrist’s admission of his own helplessness to cure Rowland’s alcoholism and the advice that flowed from that acceptance — was, of course, important. Yet it was only remotely so, as Wilson exerted hindsight in striving both to understand and to undergird his own insights. Far more obvious and more proximate were the American foundations of the fellowship and its program.
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Despite its name, the Oxford Group was an American phenomenon. At heart, Frank Buchman remained throughout his life an American collegiate evangelist. A sophisticated sort of Dwight Lyman Moody, he preached conversion to those whose understanding of religion, he felt, verged too closely to that of H. L. Mencken. Both Buchman’s seizing upon the name “Oxford Group” and his constant reaching for larger international impact can be understood as springing from his eagerness to avoid the charge of American provincialism. Some Oxford Group insights, derived as they were from Buchman’s Pennsylvania Pietist background, stretched beyond the mainstream of early twentieth-century American religious thought, but the Oxford Group’s own general unawareness of this only further marked it as “American.”
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Only late in his career and under the specific influence of increasing psychological sophistication did Bill Wilson reach back to establish a connection between Alcoholics Anonymous and Dr. Carl Jung. Earlier, for many years and in appropriately diverse ways, A.A.’s co-founder and early members launched their claim to intellectual respectability from their real relationship with the thought of William James. The Harvard philosopher-psychologist’s book
The Varieties of Religious Experience
had in fact influenced Wilson at a critical moment, and early members of Alcoholics Anonymous habitually recommended this book to any who complained of difficulty with “the spiritual side” of their program. William James, whose name will be forever associated with “pluralism” and “pragmatism,” possessed adequate Americanness to pass on this quality to any who followed his thought — and to pass it on especially to those whose largest link with his philosophy lay precisely in their application of pragmatic pluralism to religious insight.
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In addition to these American-rooted origins, the early growth and spread of Alcoholics Anonymous could hardly have been more “American,” however diversely and often confusingly that abused adjective be used. Traveling salesmen riding the rails in search of prospects; the early-sought tie to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and through him the connection with Ivy Lee and Harry Emerson Fosdick; reliance upon
The Reader’s Digest
and successful publicity in
The Saturday Evening Post;
the co-opting of journalists and popularizers such as Jack Alexander, Philip Wylie, and Paul deKruif: in a score of ways, Alcoholics Anonymous was at least by association as American as baseball, apple pie, hot dogs, and the Fourth of July.
¹¹

Clearly then, Alcoholics Anonymous was an occurrence first in the history of ideas and their implementation in America. But what, beyond geography, is “America"? It would be foolhardy to claim to answer where so many have stumbled, but most people readily agree, even if variously, that one meaning of “America” is “modern.” And A.A., with very little notice, has uniquely confronted the problem of the modern even as it has shown the way to sobriety to a million men and women.
¹²

The United States has been hailed as “the first new nation,” with reference less to its economic system than to its pattern of economic growth. Attention to America as model of the modern emphasizes the nation’s political example of democracy and especially American dedication to that hallmark of modernity, secularization. Whether the ideas that compose the only unifying Americanism possible in a population so diverse and a space so vast derive from John Locke or from the Scottish Common Sense Realists, the United States is the one political entity founded as
new
in the age of the Enlightenment out of commitment to the living out of Enlightenment insights. Whether the modern era began in 1609 or in 1789, with Copernicus and Galileo or with the writings of the French Encyclopedists and the philosophies of Descartes and Kant, American development as the pattern of the modern has so entered modern assumptions that modern minds seem bereft of analytic power if deprived of this model. A later generation may escape the model, but the unfolding equation “Enlightenment=American = Development=Modern” must suffice for us. It is the framework within which one can best understand the second key facet of the Americanness of Alcoholics Anonymous.
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The deeper meaning of the Enlightenment-Modern approach — its own development — has become clear especially in the twentieth century, which advertises its self-consciousness of modernity in its very claim to be “post-modern.”

Both the key starting-point and the goal of the Enlightenment, expressed in one word, was
autonomy
— the essential independence of each human individual. Every person, as rational, was to use his own reason to set and to achieve his own goals. Reason rather than authority guided to both truth and happiness. The centrality of autonomy, of individual independence, and of personal responsibility only for and to oneself may be seen in two key Enlightenment thrusts that followed from that insight’s own commanding metaphor of growth to become the dominant assumptions of all modern thought. The first was the exercise and extension of rationalization and control as the purpose of human life; the second was the embrace of ultimate relativism as the necessary corollary of accepting as ultimate the human-as-autonomous.
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