Not-God (41 page)

The spreading diversity of A.A.’s appeal reflected in the increasing variety of its membership testifies, in the late 1970s, that this need not be A.A.’s only contribution. The philosophy of joyous pluralism implicit in the practice of Alcoholics Anonymous allows and even invites more. But it is, of course, precisely of pulls and pushes to
more
that that same philosophy is inherently wary. Different individual A.A. members may carry the A.A. message in different ways to still more different other sufferers, but the categories of the fellowship’s experience remain anchored in its program’s literature. That literature, from historical circumstance as well as out of pragmatic necessity, first and foremost kept it simple. Within the plain, Christian, Western vocabulary natural to it, even A.A.’s simplest message of “not-God” was difficult enough to inculcate. Yet indirectly, the need to teach that same message led Alcoholics Anonymous to provide two services from which other thinkers may profit. Within the context of the history of ideas in America, Alcoholics Anonymous pointed the way to avoiding a fundamental philosophical pitfall and itself restored as basic a philosophical concept.
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The acceptance of limitation, and the consequent embrace of the wholeness of that limitation, constituted the philosophical heart of Alcoholics Anonymous. A.A.’s core concept of not-God seems to leave absolutely
no
opening for
any
absolute. Yet there is — and quite necessarily is, if A.A. is to avoid falling into the very trap of the relativistic modernism to which it speaks — one absolute even in Alcoholics Anonymous. Superficially, this is the absolute of “absolutely no alcohol;” but within the fellowship, even “absolutely no alcohol” is limited in two ways. First, in the twenty-four hour, day at a time, A.A. program, its members do not think in terms of “absolutely” or “never.” Each lives this day,
this
twenty-four hours, without alcohol. Second and more important, even within “this day” the limited absolute of no alcohol is achieved not absolutely, by self, but with and by the help of others — the Higher Power and/or Alcoholics Anonymous.
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More profoundly, the one absolute that allows Alcoholics Anonymous to avoid the trap of ultimate relativism is the absoluteness of the one certainty: “I am not God;” that is, “I am not absolute.” An absolute of “not absolute” may be paradox, but it opens the way to escaping the contradiction inherent in the “absolute relativism” in which much modern thought remains mired. For the fundamentally religious intuition of Alcoholics Anonymous, that the absolute of not-absolute is paradox even witnesses to its truth. In the perennial philosophy expressed by Alcoholics Anonymous, the simple paradox of not-God appropriately reflects the mysterious simplicity of “God.”
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Although for very valid historical reasons the word itself was carefully avoided, the concept embracing the root virtue that Alcoholics Anonymous proclaims and seeks to inculcate is
temperance
. “Temperance” is hardly a novel prescription for drunks, but the term and even the concept had become perverted in the historical context out of which A.A. came to be. Alcoholics Anonymous presented as achievable ideals “emotional sobriety” and “serenity.” What these and their other synonyms suggested and prescribed was, however, in more classic terms, “temperance.” A. A. rendered vivid and striking this prescription of the temperance of balance, of the middle between extremes, by applying it not to the drinking of alcohol, but to the challenges of human life: the instincts of sex, security, and society; the moods of elation and depression; the interpersonal relationships of power over and dependence upon. In this way, Alcoholics Anonymous avoided its culture’s earlier tragic error of becoming intemperate about temperance.
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“Alcoholics,” Bill Wilson often reminded, “are all or nothing people.” Recovery from alcoholism, then — as disease or as metaphor — meant quite simply for Alcoholics Anonymous the living of a
life
of temperance: the acceptance that, in
reality
, one was
neither
all
nor
nothing. A more recent thinker, imbued with the philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous, has formulated this principle — and more — in an arresting insight derived from years of experience treating alcoholics: “The problem of the alcoholic is not that he thinks ‘I am a worm’; nor even that he thinks ‘I am very special.’ The problem of the alcoholic is that he nurses the thought, ‘I am a very special worm.’” To read the literature of modernity is to suspect that the term “modern man” begs to be substituted for the word “alcoholic” in that insight.
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A human theology of
not-absolute
, a human psychology of
temperance:
is it only a religious intuition that can regard these as witness to deep and saving truth? Or might Alcoholics Anonymous be understood not only as the bearer of an ancient religious vision but also as harbinger of and witness to the “End of Absolutes” and as provider of a significant metaphor and a sense of historical continuity to the “Age of Limits"? Serving as harbinger and witness, furnishing metaphors and testifying to continuities: these also are profound contributions to social and intellectual history.
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For the historian, of course, the question is how and why the perennial philosophy incarnated by Alcoholics Anonymous obtained its particular social diffusion at the precise moment of history when it did. The America of the thirties looked backwards in disillusionment on the twenties, which were themselves disillusioned with the Progressives who in their turn had been disillusioned with yet earlier absolutes. The America of the thirties was the America of failed Prohibition and the Great Depression. The America of the thirties itself evolved into as disheartening decades: the forties’ horrors of World War II, the fifties’ anxiety over Communism, and thereafter ever increasing fears of loss of control. In that America, all sense
of temperance
in its classic meaning had been lost. The term became indelibly besmirched by its association with the abortive Eighteenth Amendment. The concept also, in reaction against those fifteen years of “noble experiment,” went as much down the drain as had the spirits destroyed by Volstead Act agents. It is tragically ironic that the same socially traumatic decade-and-a-half witnessed both the final slaying of the respectability of “temperance” and the most destructive drinking of those who would become the first generation of Alcoholics Anonymous.

More happily ironic seems the realization that the message of Alcoholics Anonymous — the not-God-ness of all human endeavor — may be heard as a gentle call for the restoration to the modern human and specifically the American experience of precisely the virtue of temperance. The perennial philosophy understands temperance as a “cardinal virtue.” Etymologically, then, temperance is a hinge. It may be the hinge virtue that allows opening the door to a new, long-delayed age, to a “modernity” unafflicted by Enlightenment arrogance and post-Enlightenment obfuscation. To perform this function, however, the cardinal virtue of temperance had to be rescued from the trash-heap of history. Alcoholics Anonymous attempted that rescue. That it cost so many so much to retrieve for modern American society so little — the bare concept of temperance — provides profound comment on both the felt loss of absolutes and the increasing sense of limitation that marked the history of American civilization in the middle third of the twentieth century.

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   The Tenth Tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous: “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinions on outside issues, hence the A.A. name ought never to be drawn into public controversy.”

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   Helping those who are affected by an alcoholic’s drinking is the chosen task of Al-Anon. Al-Anon bases its approach on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is not a part of A.A., but understands its own chief founder to be Lois Wilson, Bill Wilson’s wife.

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   Stressing this psychological and spiritual aspect is not intended to imply that A.A. ignores the physiological component of alcoholism in its emphasis on “not taking the first drink.”

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   Some who approach Alcoholics Anonymous at times complain that acceptance of its philosophy and especially of this dependence will turn them into “doormats.” The usual response to this within A.A., one that also points up the advantage of accepting A.A.’s “spiritual approach,” is to point out a sentence on p. 83 of
AA.:
“As God’s people, we stand on our own feet, we don’t crawl before anyone.” Most A.A. members claim that accepting their ultimate dependence upon God, and therefore themselves “as God’s people,” not only frees them from the toadying that characterizes the guilt-ridden drinking alcoholic, but also gives them a freedom to be themselves that even non-alcoholics without such an anchor of faith often lack.

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   The precise difference between Alcoholics Anonymous and these other therapies may be conceptualized variously, but the essential point will always be found to reside in their attitude to “dependence.” Therapies other than A.A. were inherently “modern” in the sense explored in Chapter Seven: they aimed essentially to lead clients to responsible personal
autonomy
. The A.A. insight, deriving from the fellowship’s historical rejection of absolutes and consistent dedication to not-God-ness, focused attention not on autonomy but upon the essential limitation of the human experience. A.A. did teach the alcoholic that he is
someone
, but it proposed this insight in a way that accented both concepts within that one word. The acceptance and affirmation of
some
-ness closed the door to any claim of being
either
“all” or “nothing.” The embrace and cherishing of
one
-ness opened to the joyous pluralism of the shared honesty of mutual vulnerability that will be analyzed just below as the essential therapeutic dynamic of Alcoholics Anonymous.
    Although the authors cited do not speak explicitly to this point, the interested reader will find useful to understanding it the materials cited in end-notes #31-36 to the treatment above, as well as the discussion that follows here.

ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS AND “ABSOLUTES”:
“THE SPIRITUAL” AS GROWTH OR PERFECTION

The complex history of Alcoholics Anonymous and especially its origins in the Oxford Group gave rise to continuing tensions within the fellowship. At times, these spilled over into its program. Awareness of such strains led A.A. to emphasize, from the 1946 formulation of its “First Tradition” to the theme of its thirty-fifth anniversary convention and beyond, that its essential
unity
consisted in its singleness of purpose — helping the alcoholic.
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Yet the tensions existed and even endure. These differences arise from within Alcoholics Anonymous and indeed are promoted by alcoholics who specially cherish their membership and affiliation as “A.A.s;” thus they less attack the fellowship and its program than attempt to shape them according to particular inclinations and preferences. Since these implicit critiques of A.A. arising from within A.A. often seek to justify their points of view by an appeal to the history of Alcoholics Anonymous, it is fitting that the present endeavor attempt to place the critiques themselves in historical perspective.

A second motive also impels to this effort: one style of the criticisms, the pull to what with some justice may be termed “the right,” may seem by its very existence within A.A. to threaten the theme that has been proposed as central to Alcoholics Anonymous, the not-God-ness of the wholeness of accepted limitation. After the briefest examination of the opposing tendency, a review that will content itself with noting this critique’s very different relationship to the not-God theme, this Appendix will seek to meet this implicit challenge directly. The whole point has been remanded to this Appendix because its resolution in depth requires understanding the significance to Alcoholics Anonymous of its attitude to “difference” and especially its ambivalence to “the spiritual” — concepts fully clear only after the reader has absorbed all that has gone before.

The implicit critiques are well characterized “tensions” because they strain from two opposite directions. Labeling these is difficult, for virtually all names applicable imply evaluation at least by connotation. Descriptively, the two poles are that urged by those especially wary of explicit theistic religion and that argued by those who derive from their conviction of the centrality of “the spiritual” in the A.A. program the insistence that explicitly religious values — and specifically those of the Oxford Group — be accepted and adhered to by all “true” A.A. members. For convenience but without any intended implication of value-judgment, in what follows, the term “left” will be used for the first tendency, and the name “right” for the second.

Historically, these positions and this tension are rooted in the differences between Akron and New York City in the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous. More recently, however, the clearest written expressions of the “left” point of view have come from Cambridge, England, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, despite the fact that this approach seems most common in the large metropolitan centers of East Coast America.

Throughout the latter half of 1963, Denys W., an aggressively self-defined “Scientific Humanist” writing from Cambridge, England, bombarded Wilson and A.A.’s General Service Office with proposals for a re-thinking of Alcoholics Anonymous and a revision of the Twelve Steps designed to make the fellowship and its program more attractive to and more acceptable by committed humanists. Denys’s letters make clear that he was motivated by the same concerns that had led the “radicals” of an earlier time to urge dilution of the Big Book’s explicitly Christian ideas. Anticipating the objection that any demand for such further attenuation as he proposed would be slight, Denys drew on World Health Organization figures to point out — in blazing capital letters — that even a less than one per cent increase in the number of alcoholics helped would be significant: “½% really means, in ENGLAND AND WALES ALONE — FOUR HUNDRED AND THIRTY chronic alcoholics.…” He further and strongly agreed with his radical predecessors that “responsibility” itself required such an effort, and “that ONLY A.A. can extend its reach to alcoholics who at present, are BEYOND ITS INFLUENCE” — thus unwittingly touching on what was an especially sore point for Wilson at just this time.
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