Not-God (40 page)

That strength arises precisely from weakness is the ancient and first fundamental religious insight. It is also precisely the insight to which, among the myriad of phenomena that dot the historical landscape of America in the twentieth century, Alcoholics Anonymous best if not also alone witnesses with a clarity and simplicity that render its wisdom readily, easily, and vividly understandable by all and accessible to all.
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Alcoholics Anonymous derived from its experience with alcoholics the insight that ultimate disaster occurs when there is denial of the essential limitation of
the human
. The first and therefore most dangerous denial is not that resources or
things
are limited, but that the human itself is essentially limited. If “sin” be understood as that which is essentially destructive of the human, Alcoholics Anonymous points out that the sin of modernity consists not primarily in any denial that resources are limited but first in the claim that the human is ultimate and so, unlimited — the claim to be “God” inherent in “self-centeredness.”

The essential vulnerability of alcoholic and non-alcoholic humans alike is to that “self-centeredness” that A.A. proposes as “the root of our troubles.” The acceptance that self-centeredness
is
vulnerability and that both the self-centeredness and the vulnerability are
shared
must precede any open acknowledgement of sharing honestly in the
mutuality
of this vulnerability. The barely dry alcoholic summoning up the courage to attend his first A.A. meeting reminds himself over and over again that both his vulnerability to alcohol and his hopes that he might transcend this vulnerability can be safely acknowledged there because anyone he might meet at that meeting admits that same vulnerability and that same hope simply by being there. So also, one who would live the joyously pluralistic philosophy of the shared honesty of mutual vulnerability needs first to grasp that because others share his vulnerability to self-centeredness,
their
hope of transcending
this
vulnerability lies in the mutual honesty of each acknowledging together that self-centeredness is weakness rather than strength. This is to say, in an unfashionable but understandable vocabulary, that acknowledging and accepting both self and others as “sinners” who need each other in their very “sinfulness” are necessary to attain the “salvation” of being
fully
“human.” Only mutually honest acceptance that each is self-centered and that this shared quality is vulnerability — weakness rather than strength — only such acceptance can issue in the shared honesty of mutual vulnerability that becomes mutually healing.

Within Alcoholics Anonymous, this passage from mutual honesty
about
shared vulnerability to the shared honesty
of
mutual vulnerability is facilitated by the awareness of the necessity of anonymity. Most A.A.s cherish the irony of the realization that, except for those closest to them who were injured by their destructive drinking, modern American society more readily accepts them as occasionally drunk than as members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Society better tolerated their vulnerability to alcohol when they were drinking than when they are sober, and so their proximate vulnerability has been transfered from alcohol to the fact of their A.A. membership. But this first vulnerability of A.A.s to each other, the fact that they know each other to be members of Alcoholics Anonymous, is only the first step to and foundation for what takes place within A.A. meetings as the members grow in sobriety. Painfully, at first, their honesty grows, and with it their vulnerability as they share more of themselves with others to whom they are bound at first only by their mutual vulnerability to alcohol and to public opinion. They soon sense, however, that as their honesty and thus their vulnerability increase, so grows their sense of being healed, of being made whole-as-human. The experience of Alcoholics Anonymous testifies that the fulfilling sense that all need each other both to receive from and to give to is the reward inherent in the acceptance that the healing wholeness of salvation from self-centeredness comes from the shared honesty of mutual vulnerability openly acknowledged. It is no small reward, especially in an age when the expansion of “me” and “more” as the watchwords of modernity seem to jeopardize all human community.
⁴⁴

Whether or not to acknowledge that self-centeredness — “playing God” — is the ultimate vulnerability remains a decision for those moderns who are not A.A.s to make for themselves. The example of Alcoholics Anonymous, however, demonstrates the benefits of such acknowledgement and of its consequent acceptance that this ultimate vulnerability is mutual as well as shared. The most obvious benefit is that, while living in such acceptance of mutual vulnerability to self-centeredness is limiting,
by it the sense of limitation is itself limited
. An era that preens itself as “post-modern” especially needs this limitation of the sense of limitation. The Age of Limits is post-modern only in the sense that it acknowledges the existence of limits. The Age of Limits remains mired in the modern trap of pushing always and only for “more” and “again,” its inherent insatiability rendering it unable to limit even its own dawning sense of limits.
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The insight that weakness necessarily precedes strength and strength arises precisely out of weakness can check this spiral of insatiability. Alcoholics Anonymous broke the pejorative progression of the concept “alcoholic,” at least for those who acknowledged this limitation and embraced it as the foundation of their sobriety. A.A. achieved this by demonstrating that once not being God is accepted, the not-God-ness of relatedness to others follows an upward, ever-open progression in sobriety. The acknowledgment of essential need to receive from others does not lead within Alcoholics Anonymous to infinitely increasing need to receive, but rather begets the ability to give. Acknowledging and accepting need removes the coercive power and insatiability that need imposes when denied. The recognition and acceptance of
both
self and others as not-God, and so mutually needful, mitigates imposition and demand. Awareness of this
mutuality
of needing others gives rise to a special kind of dialectic that sets limits to
both
the conviction that self is limited
and
the awareness of others as limited. The shared, honest acceptance that limitation, and specifically vulnerability to self-centeredness, is mutual, limits the very sense of vulnerability — the limitation of self-centeredness — from which it arises: this is the heart of the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Within that fellowship, following an A.A. maxim, this insight is utilized rather than analyzed. It is therefore more easily described than explained. But the program of Alcoholics Anonymous conveys the same insight; and, because that program is explained in A.A. literature, a less abstract and therefore perhaps more effective statement of the insight may be found there.

Because of its role as bridge between ancient religious insight and modern psychological age, the A.A. program from both historical circumstance and practical necessity employed the simplest concepts: its language had to be readily understandable by all. Further, as a child of the popular thought of his age, Bill Wilson carried on most of his own “psychological thinking” in popular terms. He thus clothed the A.A. understanding of human psychology in terms of “instincts” and “moods.” Concerning both, the basic quest in Alcoholics Anonymous was to be for balance, for some middle course or happy medium. Attention was directed to the
excesses
of acting out or of denial as harmful. “The charting of a safe path between these extremes” thus became the life task of both the fellowship and the individual sober alcoholic, a life task essential because of the “characteristic intemperance” of alcoholics.
⁴⁶

Although the precise terms varied according to time and circumstance, the basic human instincts were presented by Wilson as the inherent human quests for “sex, security, and society” These instincts were not to be escaped, repressed, or denied; rather, recovery from alcoholism was characterized by their proper and appropriate use as opposed to the improprieties of the drinking days. They needed to be “tempered and redirected,” for active alcoholism had turned these “natural instincts” into “distorted drives;” the task of sobriety was to understand and implement their “true purpose and direction.” In other words, these basic instincts, as human, were also to be accepted and affirmed — but like “the human,” as
limited
.
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Related to instincts were moods; and the bridge connecting the two in the A.A. analysis of human psychology is especially noteworthy in the understanding that alcoholism can be a metaphor for the dis-ease of modernity. The literature of Alcoholics Anonymous delineated as moods four that are readily reducible to two: elation, often expressed as grandiosity; and depression, which as often found outlet in resentments or unjustified anger. Wilson’s apparently unconscious fondness for alliteration triumphing yet again, he declared the bridge between the “instincts” of sex, security, and society, and the “moods” of elation and depression to be “the unjustified demand for domination or dependency.”

“Demand” was the basic bugbear, for demand denied limitation. Insofar as satisfaction of the instincts required the cooperation of others, demand — which to Wilson involved a quest for the absolute — demeaned and distorted others by treating them as either more or less than they were in reality. No single “other” could satisfy the absolute in any demand, and so a relationship of demand inevitably degenerated into either an attempt to dominate that destroyed the other’s humanity (and also one’s own), or a craven dependence that denied one’s own humanity (and also the other’s). In moods of elation and grandiosity, the inclination was to dominate — to demand by imposition sex, security, and society. In tempers of depression and resentment, one tended toward a demeaning dependency: through abdication of the human-as-limited to demand some
absolute
satisfaction of one or more of the same basic instincts.
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In each case, the root flaw lay in the demand for absolutes — in the denial of essential limitation. The instincts for sex, security, and society endured, requiring
some
satisfaction; the moods of elation and depression continued their inexorable swing; and
some
domination or dependence would always infuse any human relationship. “Sin” occurred only when any of these went beyond limits, became intemperate, turned into a demand that denied the essential not-God-ness of either self or others.

What the A.A. program had to say about control and dependence was also profound in its disarming simplicity. Control and dependence existed, but they were limited; and in the denial of
either
of these plain facts lay the deep source of distortion in both human relationships and man himself. The claim to the absolute was thus again revealed as the root evil. The absolute insisted upon, of course, could be either positive or negative. Trouble arose from claiming
either
all
or
no control, pretending either total or no dependence; for to be human was
both
to possess
and
to be limited in
both
control
and
dependence. To deny any of these plain facts was to deny the others; and, quite literally, in the experience of Wilson’s alcoholics, in the wake of such denial all hells broke loose — for both self and others.
⁴⁹

These insights — that accepted limitation affirmed, that the root flaw in human experience lay in demand, and that the possibilities of human control were less than infinite — were not unique to Alcoholics Anonymous, even in twentieth-century America. Indeed A.A.’s own history foreshadowed an interesting convergence in the larger cultural context. The first international diffusion of Alcoholics Anonymous occurred under the impact of World War II. A.A. members in the military services carried their message to other cultures as they sought out other alcoholics in their own quest for continuing sobriety. At first, as sociologists readily noted and the history detailed in
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age
testifies, the Alcoholics Anonymous message found attentive and interested new adherents mainly in Anglo-Saxon cultures: English, Australian, and Scandinavian alcoholics readily embraced the A.A. program. But in the mid-1950s a new development and direction began to unfold. Especially in Southeast Asia, more and more of those chemically addicted whose religious tradition was Buddhist also and increasingly welcomed and undertook to live the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. This development fascinated Dr. Harry Tiebout as well as Bill Wilson, and it led to deeper and more productive analyses in the psychiatrist’s later papers on Alcoholics Anonymous.
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In the late 1960s, elements of American culture itself discovered the religious insights of Buddhism and other Eastern religions. What was first appropriated from Buddhist thought and most clearly attractive to felt American needs were those elements that taught calm acceptance of human limitation and the sanctity of a life lived without demand. This phenomenon calls attention to a special even if thusfar largely only potential contribution of Alcoholics Anonymous to the American context.
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American acceptance of the limiting insights of Buddhist thought is itself sharply limited. Its Oriental associations render Buddhism unhelpfully mysterious to most Americans, who tend to see that faith as alien to their own experience and indeed as seized upon precisely by those somehow “un-American.” Americans are self-consciously proud of their American-ness, and for most that “American-ness” includes at least a marginal affinity for classic Western thought and especially for the Judaeo-Christian tradition. An important contribution of Alcoholics Anonymous thus might arise from its very American-ness and its deep Christianity as these characteristics of the fellowship and its program have been pointed out and analyzed in Chapters Seven and Eight. If a philosophy accepting not only limitation but the wholeness of that limitation is ever to be made effectively available to the vast majority of ordinary Americans, this will likely have to be achieved by a source as pragmatically American yet deeply Christian as Alcoholics Anonymous.