THAT SHOW BIZ, HOLLYWOOD, fiction and comedy lie and misrepresent the reality of alcoholism was thrown forcefully in my face yesterday, as I had to face again what advanced alcoholism with liver disease is really like. It was through someone who hadn't seen a relative I've been sharing the care of in a long time drawn out death from drinking. She hadn't seen him in a while and was horrified by the skin lesions, the jaundice, the swollen abdomen, the advancing dementia. Like all of us, she'd seen the fictional representation of alcoholism for decades, comic drunks, good time guys and gals as inevitably set against stereotypically unattractive advocates of sobriety or even those who just don't drink. Even when alcoholism is presented as a problem, it's never an honest portrayal of the real consequences of drinking. She's older than I am and probably took in more of the completely false entertainment and media portrayal of alcoholism but nothing had prepared her for the reality right there before her. I have gotten so used to seeing that in two of my brothers and other alcoholics I've known that it doesn't shock me when I see it.
If I could do it, I'd force the media, show biz and alleged information programming, to show the consequences of alcohol use in their full reality. The consequences of sobriety are certainly preferable to those. Instead, they lie about the character of those who practice sobriety, turning sobriety into an unattractive personality trait.
In our discussion after she saw him, I mentioned having encouraged him to try AA, to which she gave the typical trained response of those with college-credentials, that "it doesn't work." The answer to that is that nothing they'd tried had, either. I told her about my brother who tried to get clean with psychiatry for eight years and only got an added addiction to pills out of it. And to have his shrink dump him when he lost his job and, with it, the ability to pay. My brother's rejection had used the excuse that "I don't believe in God or any other higher power," a line provided to him by enlightenment modernism. The reality was that he not only did recognize a higher power, the alcohol molecule, he'd sacrificed his family, his career, his safety and health and, after years of agonizing and dangerous living, he gave his life to it. I won't go into the alleged "secular alternative" to AA because when I looked into it hoping to get him to try it, it turned out to be a Potemkin village false front unavailable in almost every location in the United States while there are half a dozen AA meetings within ten miles of where he lived.
Thinking about our discussion last night, I remembered this passage from a conversation between Walter Brueggemann and S. Alan Ray and think it has probably the best thinking on that topic I can recall hearing. It takes a while to develop the conversation so I'll give you my attempt at a transcript starting a few minutes before the point is reached.
S. Alan Ray: . . . There is no one in this room that does not have the capacity at this instant to summon up very vivid images of Satan and demons, if I ask you do do that. Your pre-modern mind is working just fine, thank you. So, my question is what is it that leads us to do this? Is it a vestige of a pre-scientific era or is it some deeper component of ourselves?
Walter Brueggemann: Well, I think you're right, I think that language is mythic or it's poetic. But I think it's an awareness that the visceral sense we have of evil cannot be categorized in the categories of enlightenment rationality. And so I think that we fall back into pre-rational or pre-scientfic or pre-enlightenment categories because it's the only way that we know how to talk about this force that cannot be reduced to a logical principle or an empirical description. And I think it's viscerally much underneath that. And I think the language of the personal is the only language we know.
I suspect the same thing is true with our personal language of God, that we can't catch what we want to say about God in enlightenment rationality either, and so we revert to poetic pre-scientific language that drives people like Richard Dawkins crazy. But we are speaking in poetic language when we do that.
S. Alan Ray: I agree with you and I think . . . Another way to tackle this is to take the observation that Reinhold Niebuhr offered us about the mystery of evil and some of his reflection on evil. That, really, it is a mystery. And he says at one point, I think in The Nature and Destiny of Man, it's a mystery almost equal to the mystery of our redemption, of our being as people. It's very close to it. And reflecting on this existence of evil in the modern period that I think we're dissatisfied that evil is a mystery to be endured rather than a problem to be solved. I think we are now-a-days all about how we can reduce the mysteries of the world to problems and the tackle them with our various tool kits. Right? Our tool kit of solving problems. And it occurred to me that this tool kit's tools are rather broad. Once you reduce evil to a problem you can take up the tools of exorcism, if you have a tradition that uses that. You can take up tools for countries that are mired in poverty, for example. The evils of poverty and seek to eradicate it. I'm not advocating a quietism that does nothing, please understand me. But if we think that evil is a vestige or an accumulation of lots of bad deeds, then we put them in the category of phenomena and we can begin to know them and understand them according to our rules of understanding phenomena and then develop techniques for addressing them, trying to eliminate them. Part of our frustration, it seems to me, is . . . or shocked, perhaps, is a better word, for the Holocaust, for example. Or catastrophic events like 9-11 is that we're brought up short to again realize the mystery of evil, rather than just the prevalence of bad deeds.
I'll break in to note that the visitor to my relative was mystified about what she saw in front of her. She couldn't fit it into her thinking or her expectations about what was a not atypical consequence of decades of alcohol use. She kept trying to attribute it to other things and she couldn't understand why he couldn't just stop, why we hadn't been able to reason him out of it. The consequences, the predictable consequences carried on by an intelligent person for so long, didn't match her faith in the efficacious applications of reason to prevent such terrible, disturbing consequences. Brueggemann, rejecting the faith in the universal power of "enlightenment rationality" puts it better than anyone addressing it out of a secular viewpoint.
Breuggemann: Yeah. And I think that the theological tradition understands that evil is enormously seductive. To go all the way back to Genesis 3 and the serpent we are seduced and deceived so that when we do destructive things, it's not simply because we're stupid . . . we don't smoke because we're stupid, we don't engage in land wars in Asia because we're stupid, we do those kinds of things because we're seduced. And we are fooled into thinking that somehow we can get by with this and make it work. Which finally leads us to I think to Paul's dilemma in the book of Romans that "The good I want to do I don't do and the evil I don't want to do I do and I don't understand why I'm doing it and I'm doing that because I'm seduced in ways that are beyond my resistance. And I think what we know is that our modern rationality doesn't even begin to touch that. So, I'm thinking of C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters in which the seducer is always at work leading us into the very things about which we know better but we go there anyway. And it seems to me that the religious crisis which gets acted out in 12-step programs is when we finally arrive at the awareness that I do not on my own have the capacity to resist this. And then you get the appeal to the saving power of God or something like that.
Having had years and years of directly viewing serious addiction and interacting closely with hard core addicts, I think this is the most insightful thing I've heard about this in a very long time. I would bet that any accurate survey of those who succeed and those who fail at attaining sobriety that atheism would be a significant predictor of failure.
Is it possible for someone to stop a seriously addictive behavior without addressing the power of seduction and the help of someone more powerful than their addiction? I have profound doubts about that. I think that even in some secular contexts success in recovery depends on exactly that kind of orientation. Sometimes the higher power is a person, sometimes it's the leader of a recovery program. In some cases, someone who turns that into a cult of personality. The reality of cults around a charismatic psychiatrist or psychologist or, God help their victims, psychoanalyst is quite well documented. I remember a narcotics recovery cult that a large number of prominent jazz musicians were caught up in back in the 1970s. I don't think any of the AA meetings in the area here are rumored to have such a focus so maybe accepting God as the higher power is someone less likely to lead to that kind of thing.
I don't have the answers to anyone's particular addiction, I do have experience with what doesn't work and if there's one thing I've seen not work it starts in a puffed-up declaration that "I don't recognize any higher power." I'd put "AA doesn't work, as another candidate for something that's almost guaranteed to mean that someone is going to surrender their life to their addictive substance of choice or as a result of someone licensed to prescribe pills to them. The person in question has become addicted to opioids on top of his addiction as a result of the several accidents at home while they were drunk.
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