Not-God (31 page)

Twentieth-century American history is the story of four paradoxes of modernity that loomed ever more as contradictions plaguing first Americans, then all moderns. Increasingly, the very triumphs of rationalization and control seemed to reveal only the final impossibility of any ultimate rationalization and control. The thirst and quest for more rationalization and control, however, increased even as each success at them came to be perceived as increasingly empty. The fundamental modern endeavor, the very
identity
of modernity in modernity’s own terms, revealed itself as inherently addictive: the striving always harder for the ever more that always satisfied ever less.

Similarly the tension pulled ever more taut between understanding ultimate reality as hidden within and seeking personal identity that would relate one truly to others outside. The very terms “meaning” and “real” came to be reduced more and more to unreal and meaningless nonsense as the feeling of hollowness within and the sense of artificiality without impelled to an ever more desperately urgent quest for “the natural” in everything from foods to fuels, clothing styles to life-styles, art to medicine. Identity — the sense of
self
as “real” — became through the twentieth century an ever more rapidly receding goal apparently ever less capable of achievement.
³⁰

The third paradox lay entwined in the confusion engendered when moderns were confronted by limitation. The corollary of both the prior dilemmas of rationalization and control and lost identity, it too became an ever more painfully pinching contradiction. When the inherent and insatiable demand for
more
met ultimately inevitable frustration, whither could moderns retreat? An age that had extended “either-or” to “all or nothing” understood pause and compromise only in terms of utter defeat and total withdrawal. Whether applied to the “doing good” of social justice or to the carefully wrought gains of technological expertise, necessarily acknowledged limitation seemed ever more able to issue only the denial of
any
goods or goals. Moderns equated
limited
ability with
inability
, and typically extended their frustration over the immediate lack of practical and technical means to an ultimate negation of social and moral goals.
³¹

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the English Luddites had smashed the knitting machines on which they blamed their unemployment and poor wages. Now, toward the end of the twentieth century, a petulant insistence that if they couldn’t have it
all
, they didn’t want
any
, drove many self-consciously post-modern social theorists to demolish their intellectual and spiritual heritage. Appalled by this new and more terrifying Ludditism, other thinkers lamented “narcissism” or prescribed “caring.” Clearly, the sense of limitation had itself to be limited; but
how
in a culture habituated to denial of the very concept of limitation?
³²

Finally, the paradox of Progressivism that had arisen as harbinger in the very first decade of the twentieth century had eventually to be faced. How was the understanding that modernity meant rationalization and control to be applied to human beings themselves? The Progressives, naively idealistic reformers, assumed that ever-increasing individual liberty and ever-greater social equality were infinitely complementary. Having set as parallel goals in human affairs the ever greater growth of both efficiency and democracy, they presumed harmony between efficiency as interchangeability and democracy as equality. But it did not work out that way, even over the very brief span of the Progressive Era itself. Especially in an America so richly diverse, people rebelled against the equation of equality with being identical. They did not find in such equality the
freedom
that being “American” promised. But what then did the freedom to be fully human mean? If human equality could not mandate human interchangeability, if identical sameness was no true basis for human relationships, how and on what deep basis could humans relate to each other as equal?
³³

These four quandaries, at heart deep paradoxes, crescendoed in contradiction and pinched more and more tightly through the years of the twentieth century. As inherent in the rich concept of “modern,” they grew first and pinched most painfully in the United States of America, the first modern society. The deep and increasing sense of them must, then, be the contextual framework for an understanding of any phenomenon in the intellectual history of the American twentieth century. They thus form the foundation for our deeper understanding of Alcoholics Anonymous.

But Alcoholics Anonymous itself was an occurrence in the intellectual history of the American twentieth century. Not surprisingly, then, its fellowship and program did not merely find in these paradoxes a context. The problems were also A.A.’s own, and as both fellowship and program it spoke to them. The dual message of Alcoholics Anonymous — its proclamation that the human as “not God” was limited but that the human as “not-God” could find wholeness in this very limitation — offered at least a suggestion for the resolution of each dilemma.

Since either claiming absolute control or denying any ability to control seemed equally dehumanizing, Alcoholics Anonymous sought to locate a human control that was appropriate. Because to be human was neither simply
to be
nor merely to be what one
did
, A.A. tried to find a basis on which identity as human could be founded. Because “no man is an island” but others could threaten by their very otherness, A.A. further sought an appropriate basis for human relationships. And, especially, since to be human was to sense limitation, Alcoholics Anonymous worked to establish how that very sense of limitation could itself be limited.

The value of studying Alcoholics Anonymous within an explicit awareness of these paradoxes is twofold. First, for many and diverse reasons, A.A. offered both its diagnosis of the paradoxes and its suggested remedy for their apparent contradictions largely unconsciously. It thus avoided the ideological entrapment that has ensnared so many more loyally orthodox and therefore self-conscious approaches to these problems. Second, Alcoholics Anonymous was both deeply immersed in its culture and at the same time able to stand outside of that culture. Why this was possible and how it was true is the analytic task of the
next chapter
, which will explore the specific source from which the fellowship drew and will examine the precise foundation on which its program built its diagnosis of and prescription for the paradoxes of modernity: A.A.’s participation in a far larger source and longer skein of cultural and critical insight — the history of religious ideas.

A familiar A.A. cliché describes the fellowship’s program as “spiritual rather than religious,” and members of Alcoholics Anonymous tend to enforce this distinction vigorously upon both those who comment on their program and themselves at A.A. meetings. This deep and real concern over its image as “spiritual” bears vivid witness to A.A.’s authentic modernity, especially as a religious phenomenon. The mistrust of religious claims that matured in the Enlightenment has so deepened and spread that, in the twentieth century, secularization has become the hallmark of modernity. Over those same two centuries between the Enlightenment and the present, however, the reaction of Romanticism against Enlightenment rationalism has also become culturally internalized and effectively stylized. Thus, in yet another paradox, moderns readily accept “feeling” even as they resolutely reject “belief” as a wellspring of personal action, at least so long as it does not intrude upon the autonomy of others.

The “Power greater than ourselves” of the “spiritual program” of Alcoholics Anonymous well fits this modern category. Faithful to the pragmatic criterion of truth, most members of Alcoholics Anonymous come to an understanding of their God through His
felt
rather than believed effect in their lives. Their knowledge of their sobriety is not an act of blind faith: it is the embrace of a lived reality. Yet, like the object of faith, that feeling of sobriety is unseen. Insofar as it is perceptible, it is known best if not only by its possessor.
¹

As the historical narrative of Part One has detailed, Alcoholics Anonymous came to its wariness of “the religious” but acceptance of “the spiritual” under the impact of diverse influences that operated both from within and from outside the fellowship. The Oxford Group, A.A.’s proximate parent, was ardently non-denominational although specifically Christian. Alcoholics Anonymous learned from the experience of the Oxford Group both the advantages of independence from the organized religion of the churches and the disadvantages of too militant criticism of those churches. The fellowship perceived its problem as two-sided: it had to remain attractive to the temperamentally non-religious while it avoided giving offense to the personally religious. The experience of Alcoholics Anonymous led it to solve this dual concern by projecting itself as “spiritual rather than religious,” thus avoiding confrontation with the polarizing term
churchy
hidden within the concept of religion.
²

Long before 1935, most alcoholics had had more than their fill of pious admonitions to be good and moralistic adjurations to be responsible. Most often, at least into the 1920s, as the larger history of the misnamed American temperance movement bears out, these overtly solicitous attempts to help had come under clerical auspices. The early experience of Alcoholics Anonymous and especially the stories in the first edition of its “Big Book” testified clearly that most alcoholics who tried such “religion” found it wanting. As sick as they sensed themselves to be, they were most sick of being preached at, and preaching seemed to most the main function of religion in America.
³

Yet from the early time when Albert Scott, Frank Amos, and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., detected in the new-born Alcoholics Anonymous the “primitive Christianity” that characterized the Oxford Group’s self-image, the understanding of A.A.’s own fellowship and program as fundamentally religious lurked never far from this society of sober alcoholics, even as it moved ever further from its Oxford Group connection. This appraisal united the descriptions of ministers of religion sympathetic to Alcoholics Anonymous and of at least one observer (Arthur Cain), clearly unfriendly to the fellowship and apparently hostile to all religion. It permeated the interpretations of a French journalist, an English sociologist, and a respected American psychiatrist. Over the years, other careful students — among them diverse sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists — have as clearly and consistently intuited the key to the program and the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous somehow to be “religion.” For all the problems inherent in the connotations of the term, such diverse unanimity cannot be ignored simply because of A.A.’s own insistence that it is “a spiritual rather than a religious program.”
⁴

Members of Alcoholics Anonymous sensed the problem, as the attempted distinction between “spiritual” and “religious” testifies. But their often expressed disappointment with the churches reveals that — in more common usage — the more proper distinction lies between “spiritual”
or
“religious” and “churchy.” “We are only operating a spiritual kindergarten,” Bill Wilson often claimed, but he never hesitated to speak on that basis “about faith … and the bearing it has in my case on the question of whether we humans live in a universe that adds up to a sense of justice and love.…” Wilson insisted that “good theology ought to ask every man’s question: Do I live in a rational universe under a just and loving God, or do I not?” He pointed out that “theology doesn’t seem to answer this any more.” And so, despite the fact that this quest seemed to be precisely what “many A.A.’s … seek in churches, … in all probability, the churches will not supply the answers for a good many of us.”
⁵

A.A.’s disappointment with organized churches and their theology was rooted in more vivid experience. “The record of the missions who had tried to salvage alcoholics through a complete Christian teaching …” did not impress Wilson, who thought that “some of these theological propositions were tremendous obstacles [to sobriety].” By contrast, “The spiritual worked.” Hundreds, if not thousands, had suggested that the program of Alcoholics Anonymous would work better without the religion. “In almost every case,” Wilson reported, “they haven’t had much luck.”
⁶

Sensitivity to both the non-religious within the fellowship and the professionally religious outside of it led Alcoholics Anonymous to resist identification as an expression of religion. The plea within was for “open-mindedness.” It infused A.A. from Dr. Bob Smith’s stress on “tolerance” to the final substantive paragraph of the Big Book’s appendix, “Spiritual Experience”: “We find that no one need have difficulty with the spirituality of the program.
Willingness, honesty, and open-mindedness are the essentials of recovery. But these are indispensable
.”
⁷

The other concern was over those professionally religious. Mindful of the sad experience of the Washingtonian movement, which had anticipated many of the ideas of Alcoholics Anonymous, the fellowship was especially wary of seeming to have “opinions on outside issues” that were patently the claimed competence of the clergy. Bill Wilson, like Dr. Carl Jung and Aldous Huxley, had intuited a religious component in alcoholism itself: this was why the spiritual approach of Alcoholics Anonymous “worked.”