Not-God (20 page)

“You can do something, but not everything” became the basic message of Alcoholics Anonymous to alcoholics, drinking or sober. This message served simultaneously both to protect against grandiosity and to affirm the sense of individual worthwhileness so especially important to the drinking alcoholic mired in self-hatred over his failure to achieve absolute control over his drinking. Further, this sense of limited control soon became the message of Alcoholics Anonymous to itself. Already in the Big Book Wilson had written, “We have no monopoly on God,” and now, in the period under examination, explicit expression of its obvious corollary quickly emerged: “We have no monopoly on the treatment of alcoholics.” Both messages continued to develop and to deepen in meaning.
⁶¹

The clearest statement of this sense of limited control, for the individual as well as for the fellowship, came in the statement and history of A.A.’s membership requirement. Set forth first in the “Foreword” to
Alcoholics Anonymous
, it ran: “The only requirement for membership is an honest desire to stop drinking.” There was no imposition of nor even request for any action, not even the negative one of not drinking alcohol. No one who presented himself or herself as wishing help could ever be challenged on the right to be there. The fundamental for A.A. membership could thus never be under the control of any other person. Nor need it — nor could it — even be under the complete control of the alcoholic, for the “honest desire to stop drinking” could surely co-exist with a desire to drink — something to which many even long sober alcoholics could, readily testify.
⁶²

Yet asking even this limited control proved in A.A.’s continuing experience to be asking too much. The qualification “honest” or “sincere” was dropped in 1949, at the time of the first publication of the “short form” of the A.A. Traditions. The official explanation revealed A.A.’s continuing openness to learn from continuing experience:

But the deepest living out of the sense of limited control in Alcoholics Anonymous occurred on a more complex level. The tension between Akron and New York A.A. was partially resolved by the publication of
Alcoholics Anonymous
, the withdrawal of Akron A.A. from the Oxford Group, and the deluge of correspondence and new members after the
Saturday Evening Post
publicity. Yet other tensions remained, and as Bill Wilson meditated on the reports of travelers as well as on his own experiences of different styles of Alcoholics Anonymous, the basic rebelliousness of all alcoholics, drinking or sober, forcefully and repeatedly came home to him. Two directions lay open: to move to greater and more rigid organization, structure, and central authority; or to choose the route of always allowing and even cooperating with the greatest openness and lack of central authority possible. Despite his drive to power and need to be “number-one man,” Wilson seems never to have seriously considered the first alternative. His early experience, especially his visiting of various newly formed groups between 1939 and 1941, had taught him — and so Alcoholics Anonymous — an important lesson.

Cherished within Alcoholics Anonymous as expressing this lesson was the fellowship’s famed “Rule Number 62.” Some time in early 1940, the program succeeded in sobering up an alcoholic possessed by a promotional drive greater even than Wilson’s. This worthy, in his enthusiasm, drew up comprehensive plans for three separate corporations to spread the message — a club, a clinic, and a loan office. He submitted his blueprint, outlined in sixty-one rules, regulations, and by-laws, to A.A.’s New York headquarters, requesting a “super-charter.”
⁶⁴

Wilson replied in his usual format: “Even less grandiose schemes of a like character failed everywhere before … [but your] very autonomous group [of course has] a right to … ignore our warnings.” It did, and the result, as anticipated, “was like a boiler explosion in a clapboard factory.” In time, the furor quieted, and eventually the chastened promoter wrote again to New York. His letter said basically, “Well, you folks at Headquarters were right and I was wrong,” but with it he enclosed a card which he had already mailed to every A. A. group in the United States. Designed and folded like a golf score card, it had printed on its outside: “Group [the location] — Alcoholics Anonymous: Rule No. 62.” When the card was opened, a single pungent sentence met the eye: “Don’t take yourself too damned seriously.”
⁶⁵

Under Wilson’s influence, Alcoholics Anonymous clung to this commitment that within it there was to be no central authority and therefore only the most minimal of organized structures. Not always, however, did humor such as that over “Rule No. 62” highlight the humility in its self-restraint. Over the years many outside the fellowship but favorably disposed toward it pressed Wilson and Alcoholics Anonymous to develop differently. Dr. Harry M. Tiebout, A.A.’s first psychiatric friend, saw in the renunciation of authority an abdication of responsibility, and accused both Alcoholics Anonymous and its co-founder of “immaturity” because of their careful avoidance of formalized governance. The Jesuit moralist Father John Ford, a friend to whom Bill often turned for help in clarifying his own thought after their meeting at Yale in 1943, consistently assailed A.A.’s “anarchy,” warning darkly of its consequent deviations and the dilution of the A. A. program sure to ensue.
⁶⁶

Wilson’s replies to such criticism were consistently simple. Alcoholics Anonymous could afford its “almost anarchistic … structure that actually invites deviation, knowing in advance that it will fail, [because] we have the coercives of continuous drunkenness, insanity, and death.” The reasoning underlying this insight was plain. Experience taught that the drinking alcoholic faced three choices: abstinence, insanity, or death. Alcoholics Anonymous had proven itself, by further experience, certainly the best and often the only means to abstinence. A.A. thus had, without
any
organization, sufficient authority and an adequate disciplinarian.
⁶⁷

“For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority — a loving God.…” Bill and A.A. never forgot this idea formalized in the fellowship’s Second Tradition. The disciplinarian was “John Barleycorn.” “Because the penalty for enough deviation is drunkenness and the penalty for drunkenness is insanity or death, we think that this is sufficient. We don’t have to supplement God’s work of correction.… We can simply leave the job to John Barleycorn.…” “Great suffering and great love are A.A.’s disciplinarians; we need no others.”
⁶⁸

Other anti-authoritarian and anti-organizational fellowships have been inspired by a similar vision. The “primitive Christianity” which so many saw Alcoholics Anonymous reflecting had itself, indeed, been such. Earlier attempts to effect a return to the primitive had suffered a predictable fate. Surprisingly, given his background, Bill Wilson was aware of this problem. Especially as he observed the continuing development of the Oxford Group and watched his friend Sam Shoemaker in 1941 follow him out of it because of that cleric’s disapproval of Frank Buchman’s increasing personal dominance, Wilson’s first concern became the pitfall often inherent in personal charisma. Further, for all his drive to be a “number-one man,” the experiences of 1940 had taught Wilson to be wary of his own grandiosity or of anything that might feed it.
⁶⁹

Wilson’s problem, then, became to find a safe course for the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous between the twin dangers of organizational overload and personal charisma. Hazily at first, he attempted more and more to utilize whatever organizational structure was at hand to insulate A.A. as a whole from his own person and personality. More and more as time went on, Bill withdrew from prominence and leadership. Yet at each step, the long-lived co-founder also confronted the hazards of organizational development that loomed from the other side.
⁷⁰

Thus, happy as he was in the spring of 1941 over the success of the fellowship’s growth through magazine publicity and the book
Alcoholics Anonymous
, the troubling experiences to which he was exposed as new adherents ever more frequently petitioned for guidance led Wilson to embark upon a new endeavor: the clear and explicit formulation of what experience had taught and was continuing to teach the fellowship. The appropriate quest had emerged as one for lirnited control. The sober alcoholic was clearly not-God as well as not God: the sober alcoholic was made whole by acceptance of his limitation. The same, then, had to be true of A.A. as an association of alcoholics. It could claim neither more nor less. Alcoholics Anonymous was human, not God: it was essentially limited. But A.A. was also humanizing, for it existed in service to sobriety. In accepting this limited responsibility, Alcoholics Anonymous was also not-God, was made whole precisely by its acceptance of limitation. Any who forgot this risked their own sobriety and, indeed, jeopardized the fellowship’s existence.

+
   The phrases “trusted servants” and “principles before personalities” are from the Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous, to be treated in Chapter Five.

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   The most unsympathetic review was an unsigned one in the
Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases
in September 1940: “As a youth we attended many ‘experience’ meetings more as an onlooker than as a participant. We never could work ourselves up into a lather and burst forth in soupy bubbly phrases about our intimate states of feeling. That was our own business rather than something to brag about to the neighbors. Neither then nor now do we lean to the autobiographical, save occasionally by allusion to point a moral or adorn a tale, as the ancient adage puts it.

“This big, big book,
i.e.
, big in words, is a rambling sort of camp-meeting confession of experiences, told in the form of biographies of various alcoholics who had been to a certain institution and have provisionally recovered, chiefly under the influence of the ‘big brothers of the spirit.’ Of the inner meaning of alcoholism there is hardly a word. It is all the surface material.

“Inasmuch as the alcoholic, speaking generally, lives in a wishfulfilling infantile regression to the omnipotency delusional state, perhaps he is best handled for the time being at least by regressive mass psychological methods, in which, as is realized, religious fervors belong, hence the religious trend of the book. Billy Sunday and similar orators had their successes, but we think the methods of Forel and Bleuler infinitely superior.”

Hardly more favorable, but less impassioned, was the review accorded by the
Journal of the American Medical Association
on 14 October 1939: “This book is a curious combination of organizing propaganda and religious exhortation.… The one valid thing in the book is the recognition of the seriousness of addiction to alcohol. Other than this, the book has no scientific merit or interest.”

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   Long before the Congressional hearings chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy attached a different popular connotation to the expression, alcoholics — who had ample experience with the bottling habits of distilleries — found a special drollness in the fact that an important part of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous required them to “take the Fifth.” The reference, of course, was to the Fifth Step of the A.A. program: “Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

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   According to a letter from Ruth H. (Wilson’s secretary) to Dr. Bob Smith, 11 February 1941, the addition of an Appendix titled “Spiritual Experience” to the second printing of
A.A
. was designed “to try to dispel somewhat the idea many seem to get that in order to recover, or stay sober at all, it is necessary to have a sudden illuminating spiritual experience.”

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   Despite the statement in A.A.’s Eleventh Tradition that “Our publication relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion,” the reminscences available and those interviewed from early Akron and Cleveland all strongly testify that in the early days, at least in their area, “selling the program” was a work of promotion rather than mere attraction. A.A.’s Twelve Traditions, of course, were formulated only in 1946 —
cf
. just below and in Chapter Five — and partially in response to what were seen as some abuses of such an understanding.

+
   For the perdurance of stress on “the spiritual” in Akron and Cleveland,
cf
. Appendix A.

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   The concept of “absolute” will be explored more fully and directly in Appendix A,
cf
. below, pp. 242ff.

1941-1955

After 1941, Alcoholics Anonymous turned its attention to the problems inherent in the burgeoning growth of its fellowship, problems that at times seemed to threaten its program. In each of the three five-year periods that followed, A.A. worked through one particular facet of the problematic realization that it itself was limited, but that its very strength flowed from acceptance of this weakness. Under Wilson’s guidance over these fifteen years, the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous learned to apply its program to itself. And for this fellowship of alcoholics, that process proved no easier than it had been for its individual alcoholic members.
¹

From 1941 through 1945, the primary concern was how to share effectively the rapidly accumulating wisdom of experience without establishing a central authority, the very existence of which might stifle further experience and greater wisdom. The solution devised was the explicit formulation and proclamation of “The Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous” and the beginning of the exemplary living out of these traditions. The example was essential because A.A. soon confronted two new problems: necessary development of its understanding of the concept of “hitting bottom” and the increasing use in the larger society of psychoactive drugs other than alcohol.