HOW DO YOU WANT YOUR

CUP OF COFFEE ?

STRONG?  -  MEDIUM?  -  WEAK?



GRESHAM’S LAW - THAT BAD CURRENCY DRIVES OUT GOOD - HAS BEEN OPERATIVE IN THE LIFE OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS. WEAK AA IS TENDING TO DRIVE OUT STRONG AA.

Page 3

This article originally appeared in the July, 1976 issue of “24 Magazine,” with the author unknown.

AA has been in existence now more than forty years.  There is still widespread lip service in the movement to the importance of working all the Steps and practicing rigorous honesty in all one's affairs.  But as a matter of fact, precious few AA’s continue to attempt seriously and consistently to DO these things on a daily basis - not after their first months of sobriety in the fellowship.

Reversion to a lower, more "normal" level of aspiration is the order of the day. Those who do continue to practice strong AA have to be careful how they talk about what they are doing in AA meetings.  In many places, too much or too serious talk about God is considered bad form.  The same is true about talk on the subjects of confession, restitution, and rigorous honesty - especially where they affect such difficult and sensitive life areas as job applications, tax returns, business dealings, and sex relations.

But if weak AA works - if it produces recovery - what fault is there to find with it? Maybe this is a case where heterodoxy turns out to be superior to orthodoxy.  Why should anyone go to the extra bother of practicing strong AA?  For one very good reason. Weak AA brings about a far less profound life alteration than strong AA does.  In many cases that relatively superficial change is not enough to crack the alcoholic pattern.  In many other cases, it results in an apparent recovery which does not last, but sooner or later eventuates in a relapse into drinking.

What the original AAs were shooting for - and what they aimed their program at - was not mere sobriety.  That would have been the "common-sense" approach, the way of worldly wisdom, the reasonable-level-of-aspiration gambit. But the founders of AA were men moved by inspiration.  They were coming at the problem with the uncommon sense of men under guidance.

The common-sense approach had already been tried and it had failed.  If you set a drunk's level of aspiration at mere abstinence - "'Why don't you be a good fellow, use your will power; and give the stuff up” - it did not work.  The poor candidate for reform was back drinking again in short order.  The discovery that launched AA in the first place was that if an alcoholic were somehow to be rocketed into a state way beyond abstinence, if he were to achieve a real spiritual conversion, an utterly new relationship with God, then permanent abstinence would automatically occur as a blessed and life-saving by-product.  That was how it happened with Bill.  That was how it happened with Dr. Bob.  That was how it happened with most of the first hundred members.  That was how the authors of the Big Book thought it would have to happen with everyone.

Originally, the Twelfth Step read: "Having had a spiritual experience as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs".  Two key phrases were "spiritual experience" and "as the result of these Steps".  The assumption was: no spiritual experience - no recovery.  It was also assumed that there were not a number of different results from working the Steps; there was one result -"the" result - and that was spiritual experience.  To the first members, spiritual experience meant that God had touched your life - directly, tangibly - and turned it around.

Sometime between 1939, when the “Plain Dealer” article was published, and 1941, when the Alexander piece ran in the “Post”, a major shift in philosophy occurred.  No one in AA was much aware that it was taking place at the time, and to this day the process that went on remains almost totally unacknowledged throughout the fellowship.  What changed was the importance of the roles assigned respectively to the recovery principles and the recovery fellowship in AA.

Up until 1939, AA was a small, unknown organization whose success record, though excellent, applied only over a tiny group of cases, and had not yet stood the test of time.  Recovering alcoholics in the young movement relied upon each other and worked closely with one another.  But the principles were the primary life transformers.  The movement as such was not large enough or well enough established that it could be leaned on in lieu of faithful work with the Steps.

After AA became big, after it gained national recognition as a success, a new relationship became possible with it, one which had not previously been an option, and which the founders had not really foreseen.  It became possible for an alcoholic to come to meetings and get sober without undergoing a real spiritual conversion, simply by the process of mimesis, or imitation - by the practice of something no more spiritual than the principle of when-in-Rome-do-as-the-Romans-do.

Here is how AA-by-mimesis worked.  The newcomer was joining himself to a big, successful organization, like the Elks or the Kiwanis.  One of the customs of this particular club was that you did not drink; so if the newcomer liked the people he had met in AA and wanted to stay associated with them, he gave up drinking.  He made AA meetings and AA people the focus of his social life and his leisure-time activities and stayed sober, more off the power of the pack than anything else.

The true nature of this quite other, and quite non-spiritual, recovery option was never clearly faced and admitted within the fellowship.  Instead, an attempt was made to broaden the meaning of the term "spiritual" to include both kinds of recovered alcoholics: the sober-by-conversion alcoholics - those who as the result of working the Steps had had a spiritual experience and become transformed human beings, seriously involved with regenerative life and ideas - and the sober-by-imitation alcoholics - those who had remained essentially the same type of people they had been before coming into AA, except that they had joined a new organization, made a new set of friends, and given up drinking in conformity to their new social setup.

There is only one term in the Twelve Steps that has been changed since the Big Book was first published in 1939.  That term is "spiritual experience" in the Twelfth Step.  A member of my home AA group, who first came into the fellowship in 1941, tells it this way: “When I first came in, they were still talking about 'spiritual experience'.  A year or two later they started calling it 'spiritual awakening'.”  It was at this time that the official version of the Twelfth Step was changed to read: "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps ..."  The term spiritual experience, which had been perfectly acceptable in the early years when the fellowship was small and explicitly conversion-oriented, came to be viewed as too narrow and prejudicial against the less-profound life changes resulting from mimesis-oriented AA, which were coming to be the majority recovery pattern in AA.  An explanatory note was added to the Big Book, as follows:

“The terms "spiritual experience" and "spiritual awakening" are used many times in this book, which upon careful reading, shows that the personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism has manifested itself among us in many different forms.

“Yet it is true that our first printing gave many readers the impression that these personality changes, or religious experiences, must be in the nature of sudden and spectacular upheavals.  Happily for everyone, this conclusion is erroneous.

“In the first few chapters a number of sudden revolutionary changes are described.  Though it was not our intention to create such an impression many alcoholics have nevertheless concluded that in order to recover they must acquire an immediate and overwhelming "God-consciousness" followed at once by a vast change in feeling and outlook.

“Among our rapidly growing membership of thousands of alcoholics such transformations, though frequent, are by no means the rule. Most of our experiences are what the psychologist William James calls the "educational variety" because they develop slowly over a period of time. Quite often friends of the newcomer are aware of the difference long before he is himself. He finally realizes that he has undergone a profound alteration in his reaction to life; that such a change could hardly have been brought about by himself alone.  What often takes place in a few months could seldom have been accomplished by years of self-discipline.  With few exceptions our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves.

“Most of us think this awareness of a Power greater than ourselves is the essence of spiritual experience.  Our more religious members call it "God consciousness.”

“Most emphatically we wish to say that any alcoholic capable of honestly facing his problems in the light of our experience can recover, provided he does not close his mind to all spiritual concepts.  He can only be defeated by an attitude of intolerance or belligerent denial.

“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.”

When you compare this statement to that which introduced the Twelve Steps in chapter five, the difference in tone is astonishing.  Chapter five rings with a series of booming affirmations that the goal of the program is a life given to God and the way is an uncompromisingly spiritual one.  In the later-added appendix there is virtually a full retreat from the earlier vigor and un-self-conscious joy in God-commitment.  The stated purpose of this appendix is to reassure people that the spiritual change accompanying an AA recovery need not be in the form of a sudden upheaval.  The point needed making and was well made.