Not-God (38 page)

If somehow, at this point, the alcoholic could be brought to glimpse the reality of his situation — if somehow the alcoholic could be given an insight into the spiritual unreality of his life by breaking through his denial and bringing him face to face with the absolute nature of his dependence upon alcohol — then the alcoholic “hit bottom.” He became able to make the admission of powerlessness and unmanageability that was the necessary First Step to his recovery of real human person-hood. It was at this point that Alcoholics Anonymous sought to reach the drinking alcoholic, and this role that the fellowship and its program played in the alcoholic’s life.
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A.A.’s prescription for alcoholism diagnosed as the denial of
any
dependence in its claim to
absolute
control flowed from its deep awareness of the human as not-God and therefore limited. The human as not-God needed to accept limitation and further to find wholeness in that very limitation. Because he was not God, not absolute, the alcoholic had to embrace and live the realization that
all
absolutes escaped him: the absolute of control because it was beyond him; the absolute of dependence because it was beneath him. The prescription, then, was to accept
limited
control and to acknowledge
limited
dependence.

The alcoholic’s
absolute
lack of absolute control was driven home by A.A.’s insistence on his absolute powerlessness over alcohol. The admitted alcoholic could not imbibe even one drink, for it was the first drink that got the alcoholic drunk in the sense that the first drink by an admitted alcoholic signaled the denial of essential limitation that reintroduced the claim to be God.
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The second part of A.A.’s recommended remedy for alcoholism treated the denial of “the spiritual” inherent in the alcoholic’s denial of
any
dependence — his restriction of “the real” to that which was under his own rationalization and control. For the alcoholic to become “not-God” — able to give to and to receive from others — required accepting the
reality
of others. Since they as human were not subject to absolute rationalization and control, these others participated in “the spiritual,” and thus attested to its reality. Those not God regained reality by entering into relationships with others who comfortably accepted that same limitation. In such relationships, the conscious mutuality of those who cherished their not-God-ness precluded demands for any rationalization and control of others who also accepted precisely that same limitation as the foundation of their positive identity.

In the simple language of Alcoholics Anonymous, this twofold prescription is epitomized in a reminder usually spoken at the conclusion of A.A. meetings: “And whatever else, remember: don’t take the first drink and keep coming to meetings.” “Don’t take the first drink” reminds that the alcoholic is not God. It signals the importance of accepting limitation. “Keep coming to meetings” speaks to the alcoholic as not-God. It alerts to the
wholeness
to be found in limitation. Since to be human is to be limited, wholeness as human is always unfinished process rather than ever achieved condition. The phrase reminds also that this process involves giving to and receiving from others who also accept this truth and strive to live it in relationships of true mutuality.

A.A.’s two-sided message of not-God-ness — of the necessity of accepting limitation and of the wholeness of that accepted limitation — is revealed clearly in its twin prescription of limited control and limited dependence. Both control and dependence were limited because the alcoholic was both not God and not-God. Limited control arises more clearly from not being God, and limited dependence from being not-God, but the two are inextricably intertwined — as they must be from the evident fact that the drinking alcoholic’s effort at absolute control and denial of any dependence were in service to and mutually reinforced each other. The image of the drinking alcoholic seeking human warmth by reaching for a bottle may clarify the point. In Alcoholics Anonymous, the truly sober alcoholic both seeks and reaches for
others
, rather than for a bottle
or
for warmth.

The acceptance that both control and dependence are limited, and the sense that wholeness as human flowed from this dual acceptance of limitation, were so centrally important to Alcoholics Anonymous that its program and fellowship sought to instill these fundamental lessons in many ways. Historically, its message of limited control has been reinforced most evidently by A.A.’s resolute rejection of any claim to any absolute and by its inherent anti-perfectionism. Because these aspects of Alcoholics Anonymous border on complex current controversy, their direct treatment in this book has been put off to an Appendix at its conclusion. Only at that point can all the diverse threads needed for fair evaluation be gathered together and woven into a coherent explanation. Here, it should suffice to remind of the obvious in A.A. history and literature.

A large reason for the departure of Alcoholics Anonymous from the Oxford Group lay in the Group’s insistence upon “The Four Absolutes.” Bill Wilson and the first New York A.A.s found in this emphasis a special threat to alcoholics with their tendency to be “all-or-nothing people.” Its Oxford Group experience early and definitively taught Alcoholics Anonymous the dangers of “going broke on this sort of perfection — trying to get too good by Thursday,” in one of Wilson’s favorite expressions.
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The A.A. program as set forth in the book
Alcoholics Anonymous
enshrined this understanding. At the very climax of its explanation of “How It Works,” the Big Book offered as suggested goal the most that Alcoholics Anonymous claimed or promised: “spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection.” That very description of “How It Works” had opened, after lengthy discussion among A.A.’s early members, with a reminder even to themselves of the necessity “to avoid anything that would look like a claim of a 100% result”:
“Rarely
have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.” The central importance of limited control also strongly influenced the fellowship’s anti-professionalism and anti-intellectualism. Both phenomena derived from the sense that the human is limited, and each reminded of and opened to this fundamental intuition’s corollary of the need for others in relationships of true mutuality.
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Such awareness of the need for others, however, can itself be treacherous, and from this realization flows the corollary of limited control — limited dependence. Forgetting that even others who are needed are themselves also limited can lead to a denial of
their
not-God-ness, and from such denial can then spring the unreasonable demand of excessive dependence upon them. In many ways, problems concerning dependence continued to haunt Alcoholics Anonymous long into its history and its members well into their sobriety. A.A.’s confrontation of the paradox of limited dependence in its portrayal of alcoholism as distorted dependence thus illuminates both Alcoholics Anonymous as therapy and alcoholism as metaphor.

Alcoholics Anonymous achieved its awareness of the dangers of excessive dependence honestly. Co-founder Bill Wilson’s self-knowledge as an alcoholic led him relatively early in his sobriety to keep in careful check his tendency to dominate. With his tendency to dependence and with the manifold and insidious forms in which this trait could reveal itself, Bill had more, greater, and longer-lasting problems. One major insight came in 1947, rescuing Wilson from his depression of that mid-decade. In a letter in which he discussed his withdrawal from Dr. Tiebout’s generally Freudian treatment and his own recent interest in the thought of Dr. Carl Jung, Bill broke off his generally abstract analysis to utter as heartfelt cry the insight that would in developed form undergird his whole approach to Alcoholics Anonymous as “Way of Life”: “Highly satisfactory as it is to live one’s life for others, it cannot be anything but disastrous to live one’s life for others as those others think it should be lived. One has, for better or worse, to choose his own life.”
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Six years later, as Wilson was putting the finishing touches on his final re-working of the synthesis of the A.A. Way of Life in
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions
, the alcoholic author in back-to-back letters to friends laid out clearly his personal understanding and his final resolution of his own history of “dependence”:

The alcoholic’s dependence upon anything but God was limited. Yet the tendency to seek ever more dependence upon creatures would always press, even within Alcoholics Anonymous. A.A. is, after all, a fellowship of
alcoholics —
of those who insatiably quest for
more
. What follows will explore A.A.’s awareness of this danger and how the fellowship confronted this reality under two headings: an examination of what actually happens at meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, and an analysis of A.A.’s implicit response to the charges that were leveled against it of fostering immature dependency.

The typical meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous is a model of the living out of the
shared honesty of mutual vulnerability openly acknowledged
that the historical narrative has pointed out to be the essential dynamic of A.A. therapy. Because the honesty is shared, and because it expresses a vulnerability that is mutual, the dependence involved in this relationship is inherently and essentially limited. Each speaker at every meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous introduces himself or herself (usually by first name only) and immediately adds, “and I am an alcoholic.” Except at “Beginners” or “Inquiry” meetings, this affirmation is the foundation on which the right to speak is based. Its acceptance witnesses to “the desire to stop drinking” that is “the only requirement for membership.”
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Except in small discussion groups where the members already know each other’s stories, it is then customary for the speaker to “qualify.” He or she tells the story of a life disrupted by alcohol: how drinking for the effects of alcohol began, to what it led, how the alcoholic found A.A., and both the joys and the difficulties of personal growth in sobriety. Some stories are mainly of triumphal witness; others concentrate on the problems of living soberly; all
both
offer hope
and
ask for help.

But these stories and even the discussion that contains them at Discussion or Step meetings do not best reveal the very heart of Alcoholics Anonymous. Grasping this requires, appropriately, something extra of the person who would penetrate to the core of the fellowship and its program. He must “come early and stay late.” It is in this free gift of self and time that one best discovers the true dynamic of A.A. meetings, for the
mutuality
that underlies and characterizes every A.A. conversation stands most clearly revealed then. Every A.A. conversation — every meeting of two or three for the purpose of sobriety — begins with one of two usually implicit introductions: “I think you can help me” or “I think I can help you.” At times these are made explicit after formal meetings in such words as “Thank you for what you said — it helped me” and “Did what I said seem helpful?;” but whether implicit or explicit, the essence of A.A. therapy remains clear. Each recovering alcoholic member of Alcoholics Anonymous is kept constantly aware, at every meeting, that he has
both
something to give
and
something to receive from his fellow alcoholics. The lesson instilled has two points: that one is dependent on others, for both giving and getting; and that this dependence is
limited
, for the presenting quality of each other — the one sure thing known about him and the certain reason why he is there — is that
he
is limited and is present precisely for help in accepting that limitation.

Such acceptance and embrace of even limited dependence within Alcoholics Anonymous has been sharply criticized in a culture and an age that self-consciously defines its modernity precisely in terms of its claimed autonomy and independence. The language of a psychological age tends to construct this criticism of Alcoholics Anonymous around the concept and term
maturity
, but the criticism as well as A.A.’s response to it involves more deeply the meaning of
dependence
. Consistently, over time and by widely diverse observers, the essence of alcoholism has been intuited to consist in dependence. For the modern mind, the cure for dependence is independence. According to modern thought, the alcoholic must conquer his dependence upon alcohol rather than merely transfer that dependence to some other object — whether that new object be different oral gratification, a transcendent Higher Power, or other sick alcoholics. To the modern understanding, “full maturity” means
absolute, total
independence; and for the modern understanding, of course, only
full
maturity is satisfactory. The modern mind, inhabited by its Nietzschean will, pushes always for the
absolute
. The not-absolute, the less than full, cannot quench the thirst of modernity, and so the demand for “total” tends to inhere in whatever moderns quest. Quest, indeed, necessarily becomes demand in the context of modernity, and it is precisely this facet of the modern criticism of itself that Alcoholics Anonymous in its turn most acutely criticizes, in the understanding of alcoholism as a disease-metaphor for modernity.
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