Not-God (47 page)

The years between 1971 and 1974 also saw the initial shaping of the post-Wilson outcome perhaps most important for A.A.’s long-range future. In the absence of its strong-minded co-founder, how would Alcoholics Anonymous preserve its pluralism, the openness to difference that a conviction of unity invited? Inevitably, a kind of unity was lost with the death of so central a figure. How compensate for that deficit? An annual meeting of delegates, one-half of them newly chosen each year, seemed ill fitted for such a task. In diverse ways, members of Alcoholics Anonymous differ. A.A.’s vision indeed paraphrases Tolstoy: all drinking alcoholics are alike; each sober alcoholic develops a sobriety that is unique. Much of A.A.’s history up to the time of Bill’s death involved the acceptance, the embrace, and the practice of locating “the joy of living” in that discovery.

But how balance the unity required for recovery with the diversity that flowed from that same recovery? Sober alcoholics come in different sizes and shapes, backgrounds and colors, as well as languages and cultures and levels of education and employment: not surprisingly, they tend to develop many different ways of interpreting and practicing A.A.’s simple program. How conceive the Second Step’s “power greater than ourselves"? What should be the format and frequency of meetings? These and a hundred other questions needed to be addressed by individuals and individual groups, but could not be answered for A.A. as a whole. But how preserve that line, and adjust it if necessary, in the absence of the one who had drawn and so long guarded it?

The preliminary answer followed Wilson’s practice of opting for the airing of differences. The 1971 delegates furthered General Service Conference openness by making specific provision for unhurried “gripe sessions” at the Conference itself.
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That practice and the continued custom of the open-ended “Ask-It Basket” worked well at such gatherings but had little impact on the generality of A.A. groups and meetings. By 1974, the Canadian regional trustee chosen to deliver the Conference keynote implored:

Matt N.’s logic hinted A.A.’s solution: just as unity ensured recovery, service guaranteed unity. The following year’s silver anniversary General Service Conference thus met aptly under the theme: “Unity: Through Love and Service.”
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“Unity,” of course, did not mean uniformity. Jack M., editor of
The A.A. Grapevine
, suggested one benefit of “squabbles” in his report to the 1975 General Service Conference. Answering his own topic-question, “Can the
Grapevine
avoid controversy?” Jack pointed out that A.A.’s Tradition referred to “outside controversy.” “A magazine would be terribly bland if there was never
any
controversy. In A.A., there are as many opinions as there are alcoholics. We welcome diverse points of view.”
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Declarations and themes may guide practice; they rarely shape an entity so informally construed as is Alcoholics Anonymous. In the years that followed, a kind of dialogue emerged between A.A.’s New York General Service Office and its grass-roots membership. As the ultimate coordinators of activities as diverse as publishing Conference-approved literature and serving as a clearinghouse connecting Loner members, arranging international conventions and regional forums, and dealing with anonymity breaks, G.S.O. represented an extension of Bill W.’s operational leadership. Members curious or troubled about goings-on in A.A. once wrote to Bill. After 1971, many of them wrote to G.S.O., the operational arm of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc.

In their efforts to serve A.A. unity, G.S.O. staff quickly found themselves serving the same anomalous function as had Bill Wilson. The chief responsibility of the guardian of unity was to assure openness to and tolerance of diversity. Grass-roots A.A. groups, composed as they were of alcoholics, had from the time of Clarence S.’s 1939 removal from Akron to Cleveland tended to want “New York” both, on the one hand, to leave them alone and, on the other hand, to confirm that their particular way of holding meetings or whatever was the “right” way, the “real A.A.” way. Literally thousands of Bill W.’s letters walked the tightrope of gently explaining that
each
A.A. group was autonomous, that the role of General Service was neither to confirm nor to condemn but only to serve as a clearinghouse so that the experience of all groups could be available to each group.

At times over the years since Bill W.’s death, that continuing dialogue nevertheless also seemed to reflect a kind of fear on the part of G.S.O. staff and perhaps an increase of rigidity among at least some A.A. members. As earlier generations of letter-writers had expected of Bill, some correspondents demanded too much. The November 1971
A.A. Grapevine
, for example, in the same issue that began running the series of Wilson’s articles explaining A.A.’s “Twelve Concepts for World Service,” reprinted a
Box 4-5-9
reminder that “G.S.O. Is No Censor.” As the piece plaintively protested:

Despite that awareness, or perhaps because of that concern, the effort to avoid offending has tended to issue in blandness. Recognizing that no individual could possibly replace Bill Wilson, those charged with carrying on his activities so eschewed even the semblance of such an attempt that the result has frequently been a form-letter approach that inevitably seems devoid of character. Letters not composed by individuals tend to lack human spark, and so to move from the reading of Bill’s letters to the perusal of G.S.O. correspondence is to confront the reality that Alcoholics Anonymous has not proved immune to the insight that defines a camel as a horse designed by a committee.

No group can ever replace any individual, and the General Service Office of Alcoholics Anonymous has maintained Wilson’s commitment to pluralism — the awareness that A.A. unity involves a diversity that keeps the fellowship’s doors open to the wide variety of alcoholics who need its program. In the mid-eighties, this commitment found expression in two memorable forms.

The 1983 Conference’s keynote speaker — again, a Canadian trustee — addressed the topic under the title “Salvation from self:

Three years later, retiring G.S.O. senior advisor Bob P. — director and trustee for six years, office general manager for a decade and chief writer of A.A.’s forthcoming extension of its own history since the publication of
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age
— gave what 1986’s
Final Report
termed “a powerful and inspiring closing talk” titled “Our greatest danger: rigidity.” His words merit quoting at length:

Bob P.’s words likely fell on receptive ears. Five days previous, the delegates had addressed the question Are we becoming too rigid? in workshops on “Letting go of old ideas.”
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More than most A.A.s, delegates to the General Service Conference had the responsibility as well as the opportunity to recognize the need for both unity and diversity within Alcoholics Anonymous. Conscious of themselves reflecting the hammered-out consensus of their regions, the conferees during the brief week of their meeting discovered how diverse were the points of view they represented in their shared pursuit of A.A. goals and protection of A. A. principles.

Each year’s General Service Conference in its own way rediscovered both the perils and the promise of pluralism — rediscoveries made necessary by the chief reality confronted by Alcoholics Anonymous between 1971 and 1987, the simple and obvious fact of growth. Profound problems inhere in quantifying increase in any anonymous entity as loosely organized as is Alcoholics Anonymous. Yet because A.A.’s method of establishing membership has remained the same, comparative figures demand credence even if absolute numbers might be challenged.
⁴⁶

Three perspectives are available. Between 1971 and 1987 the number of A.A. groups increased from 16,459 to 73,192; the number of A.A. members, from 311,450 to 1,556,316; and the number of individual copies of the book
Alcoholics Anonymous
sold in the previous year from 69,104 to 816,200.
⁴⁷

Of the data available, Big Book sales afford the most reliable indicator because the numbers derive from actual transactions. As such, these figures shed further light. It required thirty-four years, from 1939 to 1973, for total sales to reach one million.
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The two-million mark was attained only five years later in 1978, three million in 1981, and four and five million each a scant two years later, in 1983 and 1985. The six million mark was passed in early 1987, and at the present rate, another million copies will be sold every fifteen months.
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The sales record also indicates that A.A.’s greatest burst of growth occurred between 1971 and 1975, a period during which sales increased each year by over 20 percent. Until the 1986 publication of the paperback
Alcoholics Anonymous
, 1979 was the only other year to show a greater than 20 percent increase.

A.A.’s international spread merits special notice. Bill Wilson’s terminal illness prevented his taking the one last trip he had hoped to enjoy, a tour of Alcoholics Anonymous west of California. Within a year after Bill’s death, however, his widow, Lois, embarked on that round-the-world effort, spending two and a half months visiting A.A. and Al-Anon groups in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Japan, and Hawaii.
⁵⁰
Between that 1971 visit and 1987, A.A. Overseas grew from 66,632 members in 3,559 groups to 30,868 groups embracing 698,271 adherents in 107 countries. Present trends suggest that no later than 1989, Overseas membership will surpass membership within the United States.
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Especially within the United States, A.A.’s growth involved more than numerical increase. Cultural changes, some of them partially influenced by the fellowship’s increasing popularity, shaped the direction and therefore the substance of its growth. Increasing sensitivity to various kinds of disability, an extension and even explosion of interest in varieties of popular psychotherapies, the increasing use of recreational drugs other than alcohol, and a diversely manifested broadening and intensifying thirst for “the spiritual”: to each, Alcoholics Anonymous contributed, and by each was its development framed.

Both the civil rights and the economic opportunity legislation of 1964 — as amended, interpreted, and supplemented by the Alcoholism Rehabilitation Act of 1968, the Comprehensive Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Prevention, Treatment, and Rehabilitation (“Hughes”) Act passed in December of 1970, and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, especially as interpreted by Attorney General Griffin Bell in April 1977 and clarified by PL 95-602 in October of 1978 — together, changed the options available for alcoholism treatment and also moved public practice, if not always attitudes, toward understanding alcoholism as a disability meriting the same consideration as other handicaps.
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A.A.’s role in this spate of legislative attention, although officially minimal in accordance with the fellowship’s Traditions, was substantial in that most who testified for and shaped the legislation were themselves, or were influenced by, A.A. members. These members acted as individuals, but their individual thinking was shaped by the Alcoholics Anonymous way of life.
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In another area, not unrelated to the sudden availability of massive funding for those who treated alcoholism and apparently connected disabilities, there was more confusion. Many outside and even some within the fellowship showed signs of confusing the spiritual way of life that was the A.A. program with the dawning proliferation of “self-help” uplift therapies that the late-twentieth-century entrepreneurial mind found so profitable.

Popular therapies of the mind-cure and “positive thinking” variety have been a staple of American history for well over a century.
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Rather than subverting their popularity, the advent of the depth psychologies ironically afforded practitioners and enthusiasts new scope. By the late 1960s, for reasons linked to the period’s sense that religious faiths had failed, a boom in such therapies began. The contemporaneous turning to other chemical ecstasies — from the un-prescribed use of prescribed medications to experimentation with marijuana, LSD, heroin, and cocaine — was not unrelated to either the therapies of “feeling good” or the implicitly spiritual quest for transcendent experience. Astute commentators readily recognized the “narcissism” that underlay both the drugs and the therapies, but only the most acutely psychoanalytic realized that Alcoholics Anonymous, far from being a manifestation or cause of the craze, afforded perhaps the only cure for both the fads and the malaise underlying them.
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