Not-God (35 page)

Such shifts in meaning were inevitable and proved even helpful to Alcoholics Anonymous. The first change in the cultural understanding of
alcoholic
— from skid-row bum to over-zealous bore — cast new light on the fellowship’s understanding of anonymity. Alcoholics Anonymous alcoholics needed anonymity as a reminder that they were not God, that they needed to avoid pride, that it was dangerous to attempt to impose
anything
on
anybody
. The formulation of A.A.’s Twelve Traditions enshrined this newer understanding and more profound acceptance of the fellowship’s own social vulnerability.
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The second change in a psychological age’s comprehension of
alcoholic
— from pushy bore to dependent personality — recalled A.A. to its original understanding of the purpose of anonymity. It reminded that newer interpretations of something as basic as anonymity did not cast out old understandings, but built upon the foundation of initial intuition. Significantly also, the new stigma adhered to the fellowship’s members precisely as members of Alcoholics Anonymous rather than merely as alcoholics. Some in the larger society came to see “having to go to those meetings” a more degrading disgrace than alcoholic intoxication itself. Reproach thus subtly shifted from alcoholism, which it was thought a “real man” could conquer, to A.A. membership, which was seen as capitulation to the weaker side of one’s personality. Painfully but opportunely, A.A.s were reminded again of their not-God-ness in recovery: when they shared honestly, they became mutually vulnerable. They might openly acknowledge this at their meetings, but they relied on each other’s respect for anonymity to shield their vulnerability in the larger society where the lack of any sense of shared weakness prevented such honesty from becoming truly mutual and thus healing.
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For the larger society, then, A.A.’s name summarized its message. Especially as a religious phenomenon, there was a special anomaly in the chosen rather than imposed name bearing such connotations as did “Alcoholics Anonymous.” Most religious groups in Western history, from “Christians” through “Protestants” to “Puritans,” “Dunkers,” and “Quakers,” have had their names imposed from outside, as derogatory. A.A. chose its own name, albeit accidentally and surely without thought of such implications. The fellowship’s early members did not understand the conjoined terms as necessarily pejorative. Indeed, to them, being “A.A.s” witnessed to their actual sobriety. Accepting the designation
alcoholic
both alerted to their availability and summed up the program’s First Step admission of powerlessness. The promise of anonymity counteracted the fear of some who might suspect their need for the program yet hesitate to approach it because of possible social consequences.
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Yet for most outside Alcoholics Anonymous, both terms in its name continued to imply disgrace, even if with shifting emphases. The understanding that being alcoholic was a continuing condition, redeemable only by continuing dependence on an essentially tenuous salvation from outside, highlighted A.A.’s Pietist insight that was so alien to habitual American thought: to be human was first to be not God, to be other than omnipotent or absolutely autonomous. The word
alcoholic
proclaimed that there was “sin,” and that it was the enduring state of at least this portion of humankind. This state of “sin” consisted in essential separation from ultimate reality, and the most destructive act of “sin” was denial of the actuality of this separation from ultimate reality. Such denial led to self-destruction through increasing self-centeredness, because ultimate alienation afflicted those who acted as if they were themselves ultimate reality.

Most twentieth-century Americans did not want to hear such a message. Following ancient tradition, they tended to slay — modernly, by subtle social ostracism — the messenger who brought such “bad news.”

But Alcoholics Anonymous was itself American, and therefore it was Evangelical in its Pietism. A.A. understood its message to be not the “bad news” that salvation was necessary, but the “good news” that salvation was available. The fellowship proclaimed the basis of that redemption’s availability in the second half of its name, “Anonymous.” The proclamation concerned a sharing union with others in a mutual acceptance rooted in weakness rather than strength. That alcoholics within the A.A. fellowship were anonymous contained a subtle and religious irony. Despite all their deceptions and denials, actively drinking alcoholics were rarely anonymous. Significant others, at least, knew all too well of their desperate condition, no matter how uncomprehending that knowledge. Anonymity, then, in the sense that others would not know of one’s vulnerability to alcohol, came only with membership in Alcoholics Anonymous and consequent sobriety. To the alcoholic who grasped this, his anonymity to those outside A.A. was a delicious irony indeed.

Within Alcoholics Anonymous, the promise of anonymity made possible the acceptance of oneself as limited. Sharing this acceptance with others who were similarly limited — the price of admission, so to speak — in turn made possible acceptance of self
and those others
as not-God, as men and women made whole by the acceptance of limitation. This realization that sharable strength arose precisely out of acknowledged weakness enabled this new strength in its turn to enrich both self and others in a relationship of truly mutual giving and receiving — each undertaken as the only way of accomplishing the other. Mutual honesty about shared vulnerability followed from acceptance of self and others as other-than-perfect. It led in its turn to the shared honesty of mutual vulnerability that enabled at least a reaching toward ultimate reality and the touching of ultimate reality at least in human relationships.

From this sense of sharing, this sense of participation in ultimate reality in and through others, sprang a profound realization of alcoholic equality. And from this awareness of equality flowed a liberating sense of true freedom. Among others who openly acknowledged their not-God-ness, there was neither need nor inclination for any alcoholic to play God. Each alcoholic could simply be — be who he was and what he was, limited, and so able both to exult in the strengths that arose from his own weakness, and at the same time to be enriched by the different strengths that flowed from others who could not threaten because they shared the same weakness.

Anonymity testified to this shared equality and its consequent freedom. Those outside the fellowship, the culture in general, saw in anonymity only a witness to the weakness of shame and fear. The members of Alcoholics Anonymous, however, saw beyond that. In testifying to their acceptance of equality in vulnerability, anonymity reminded them of their freedom to be themselves.

In thus teaching and living out the insights that knowing the truth makes free and that great love accepts vulnerability, Alcoholics Anonymous unconsciously witnessed to its incorporation of the first century Christian vision that had inspired its Oxford Group parent. Because the witness was unconscious, A.A.’s members could insist that their program and fellowship were “spiritual rather than religious.” Yet the nature of these insights concerning truth and freedom, love and vulnerability, was such that even in secular and modern garb they firmly located Alcoholics Anonymous as a significant phenomenon in the history of religious ideas in twentieth-century America.
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   The heart of Evangelicalism consists in the
announcement
of salvation as
gift
from God. By “Pietist” is meant the religious intuition struck first by man’s
need
for salvation, by the transcendently
other
goodness and power of the divine. There has been, I contend, no adequate expression of this Evangelical Pietist insight in the mainstream of American thought since the death of Jonathan Edwards in 1758. The special affinity of Alcoholics Anonymous for this Pietist sense is testified to by several phenomena: for example, the continuing use among especially mid-Western A.A.s of Oxford Group devotional books; the popularity among especially West Coast A.A.s of the writings of Meister Eckhart.

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   A respectful parody of the A.A. program, a paraphrase heard often at meetings directed at newcomers, may help clarify the point. Based on the first three words of the Second Step, the parody runs: “We came, we came to, we came to believe.” Human activity, that is, comes first; but the specific human activity that leads to sobriety is the alcoholic’s surrender to the fact that he or she needs Alcoholics Anonymous.

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   Some have suggested that rather than “anti-intellectualism,” a more proper term here would be “wariness of intellectualization.” Many psychiatric thinkers understand “intellectualization” as a mechanism of defense by which a person avoids confronting a reality by instead analyzing it, thus establishing a certain distance that denies involvement. Alcoholics Anonymous is surely aiso wary of such “intellectualization,” and A.A.’s cautions concerning “rationalization” can be understood in this way — but not completely. Precisely because it is a phenomenon in the history of religious ideas, Alcoholics Anonymous also manifests
anti-intellectualism
in the philosophically technical sense of that term that will be explored here.
    My understanding of “anti-professionalism” and “anti-intellectualism” here and in the following paragraphs follows essentially that of Richard Hofstadter,
Anti-intellectualism in American Life
(New York: Random-Vintage, 1966); for “anti-professionalism”
cf
. especially Part IV, “The Practical Culture,” pp. 233-296. For those who find objectionable application of these terms to Alcoholics Anonymous, a point and a caution:
Read
Hofstadter’s treatment of “The Evangelical Spirit” and “The Religion of the Heart” with awareness of the historical context in which it was written (early 1960s).
Hear
Hofstadter’s own caution against careless extrapolation of his point: “… I have found it desirable to discuss the anti-intellectual implications and the anti-intellectual consequences of some educational theories of John Dewey; but it would be absurd and impertinent to say, on this account, that Dewey was
an
anti-intellectual” (p. 22).

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   It is this writer’s impressionistic conclusion, after careful listening to many A.A. speakers in a variety of settings and interviews with both alcoholic and non-alcoholic — volunteer as well as professional — workers in the alcoholism field, that deep acceptance of this “truism” is more widespread than open avowal of it might suggest. As might be expected, there does seem to be some negative correlation between acceptance of it and level of formal education. The root insight behind the truism is the same as that which underlies A.A.’s ancillary program for families and friends of alcoholics, Al-Anon. Al-Anon’s “First Step” is the same as A.A.’s: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.” The conviction is that until the potential helper admits
his or her own
powerlessness over the alcoholic’s drinking of alcohol, no help is possible. Acceptance of “Only an alcoholic can help an alcoholic” arises from the belief that, in general, only a self-admitted alcoholic is prepared to make such an admission. Yet as is clear from the very existence of Al-Anon and its relationship to A.A., it is not deeply held that a non-alcoholic cannot make such an admission — at least under A.A. tutelage.

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   Sight of the wellsprings of this insight became lost not so much within A.A. as in the more secularized therapies derived, often unawarely, from it. The roots of such manifestations of apparently rootless anti-intellectualisms as Encounter marathons and EST. of the whole touchie-feelie fad in group dynamics, may be found in the Evangelically Pietist perception of reality mediated to them by Alcoholics Anonymous. Concerning this mediation, the most perceptive treatment does not advert explicitly to A.A.: Thomas C. Oden, “The New Pietism,”
Journal of Humanistic Psychology
12: 24-24 (1972); adverting to A.A. less insightfully but more thoroughly is Nathan Hurwitz, “Peer Self-Help Psychotherapy Groups,” in P. M. Roman and H. M. Trice (eds.),
The Sociology of Psychotherapy
(New York: Jason Aronson, 1974), pp. 84-138.

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   This was one criticism of Jerome Ellison:
cj
. above, p. 145. The criticism ignores or forgets that the “Keep It Simple” stress in A.A. originated with Dr. Bob Smith, early A.A.’s most educated and only medically knowledgeable member, and one whose earlier experience within the Oxford Group surely convinced him of its importance.
Cf
. above, p. 32 and note #72 to it.

The other claimed root of Alcoholics Anonymous was medicine. Roughly parallel to A.A.’s historical concern over “religion” and “the spiritual” ran the consistent problem posed for the fellowship by its understanding of alcoholism as in some way “disease.” Bill Wilson and others sensitive to this problem attempted to finesse it in two ways. First, they generally avoided the quasi-technical term
disease
, using in its stead some synonym such as “malady.” Second, they stressed “the threefold nature” of alcoholism — physical, mental, and spiritual; indeed, they based the whole rationale of their program upon this latter understanding.
¹

If the word
disease
presented a problem, it was not first and foremost A.A.’s problem. As Dr. E. M. Jellinek observed in discussing the cliché that “alcoholism is a disease,” acceptance of this truism was fine, and just about everyone agreed with it. The difficulty arose, Jellinek pointed out, because there existed no agreement about just what “alcoholism” was, nor any real consensus even among doctors about just what constituted “disease.” Given such confusion, it was fortunate for the serenity of Alcoholics Anonymous that it treated the problem of alcoholism as disease as an “outside issue.” A.A. thus on principle escaped direct confrontation with the problem as the fellowship itself lived out its Tenth Tradition.
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