Thinking in Search of a Language

And Vice Versa

Every AA meeting demonstrates the limits of language in describing or defining our experience. Us drunkards are thinking (out loud) in search of a language that might make sense of our pasts, which now seem so removed from the present as to be irretrievable—which is to say unspeakable. These pasts are so distant that we resort to outlandish metaphor or fall back on laughable cliches to make them legible, to ourselves among others.

But in undertaking this project every morning so that we can get through one more day of sobriety, we’re no different than our brothers and sisters who don’t have a problem with alcohol—their words aren’t any better than ours in conveying what has happened to them, and what waits for them on the other side of waking—except that we have a forum where we’re supposed to speak up, where we’re actually expected to turn ourselves inside out.

Most people (those “normies”) don’t have such an outlet, where they get to retell their life stories every day. Unless of course they’re teachers or preachers or politicians, but these figures are supposed to be speaking about or on behalf of others, whether Jefferson or Jesus or constituencies: their own mundane problems or concerns are not relevant items on the listening agenda of their audiences. In an AA meeting, these things are the priorities.

So we learn how to speak of what we don’t yet understand, what is evident yet unknown, in accordance with the animating principle of all 12 Steps—the will to believe, as William James put it, and as Bill Wilson, the founding father of AA, consciously, meticulously reiterated it in the bible he composed, the so-called Big Book (see above: that’s p.59 in my copy). In Appendix 2, “Spiritual Experience,” for example, Wilson solemnly invokes and merrily countermands James’s dictum (“the absence of faith is a mental nullity”) by concluding that Herbert Spencer is the exemplar of scientific method!

In this extraordinary sense, those of us with the privilege of being alcoholics—I know how crazy or stupid that sounds—get to invert the sequence that defines the pragmatist’s intellectual itinerary: we deploy language in search of a way of thinking, or, to put it as John Dewey tried to in defending James against his critics, we wait hopefully on the words we use to acquire meaning, to admit possibility, to achieve embodiment, in short to become the truth.

I’ll give you an example of how this strange process works, from a meeting a few days ago. To set the stage, you have to know that the 4th Step is the hinge on which your spiritual progress turns. That’s where, having admitted you’re powerless over alcohol and need some agent greater than yourself (God “as you understand him”) just to stay alive (Steps 1-3), you make a “fearless moral inventory” of your resentments—of people, particularly, including family members, but also of institutions, events, etc.—and then write up your role in creating and sustaining them. It’s a kind of DIY psychotherapy that teaches you how you are, in fact, the proximate cause of all your complaints against the world, and why you still think you’re the center of the universe. From there it’s three short confessional steps to 8 and 9, where you compile a list of the people to whom you owe amends for the harms you know you’ve done them, and then go make the goddamn amends, in person if possible. It’s an ugly experience. But after that, Steps 10-12 are clear sailing, ending with the exhortation to take the message to your fellow alcoholics and to make the steps a way of being in the world, in all spheres of your life.

It sounds grueling, and it gets a little uncomfortable in the middle there, but with the 12 Steps come 12 Promises, which are a kind of compensation for the work of the steps.

The meeting I mentioned, my “home group,” begins with a lead by the convener, who shares his or her experience, strength, and hope for 10 minutes and then opens the floor to “shares” by the gathered host, typically 50 + people on Zoom. That day, Kevin (names changed) leads with the 9th Promise: we'll "lose our fear of people and economic insecurity," and, more important to me for reasons I know but do not understand--which is to say I can't articulate it, put it into words--we will "intuitively know how to handle situations that used to baffle us."  Thinking in search of a language, and/or vice versa, as always in the rooms, especially this one.  

(I say to myself, yeah, my experience at the cardiologist's office on Monday is a case in point.  I didn't think about it, I just acted differently than I used to, with some bemused distance from my own emotions. When they told me the crucial test, a PYP scan to detect the effects on my heart of amyloidosis, was cancelled because the fucking insurance company [Blue Cross] wouldn’t approve it—if it turns out you got the bad kind of this weird condition, the pills are $700 per, and you take one daily—I didn’t lose my shit, I laughed instead, and asked myself, “who is this guy impersonating me?”.)

But then Kevin goes on, and makes me cringe. This promise, he says about himself, "helped me get over the notion that the world is going to change."  He illustrates, he tells a story about his training as a financial analyst.  "One of my younger colleagues said to the boss, the guy leading our team, she said, 'Does it ever get easier?'  He said, 'No, it doesn't, but you'll get better at it.'  We were stunned, devastated.  But he was right.”

"AA teaches the same lesson,” Kevin continues: “My spiritual progress doesn't change anything out there in the world.  All I can do is protect my little world, me and my family, and hope for the best."

I had to remonstrate.  I told the story of Lyman, my colleague at UNC-Charlotte, who once said--we were drinking beer, of course, sitting in a bar downtown, it was July 1986--"I'd do anything to protect my family."  I reacted without thinking, I just blurted out, "Well, that makes you the most dangerous man in the world."  He laughed, he said, "Ah, Livingston, you're such a fucking philosopher, what can that mean?"

"If your family is the outer limit of your responsibility to the world," I said, "revenge becomes your only measure of justice."  Or something like that, I'm sure it wasn't as concise as this sentence, but I did cite "The Godfather" as proof of my assertion.  In a book, much later—The World Turned Inside Out (2009)—I developed the idea as I was writing about movies of the late-20th century, so I had some semblance of coherence ready that morning in the meeting. (Not that Creon had the last word on where the claims of the state must supersede those of the family, I hasten to add. Antigone is no picnic, but, as Hegel noted long after Sophocles wrote the Theban plays, and just before Kierkegaard rewrote them, her claims are no less pressing in the making of the law than those of her suitor’s father. The state, the family, and civil society are overlapping spheres of modern existence, as in a Venn diagram, not mutually exclusive domains.)

I went on to say that there's a productive tension—not anything as neat as a contradiction—between the closure of the 9th Promise (as Kevin felt it) and the action required by the 12th Step, because that last stage of the journey exhorts you to go out into the world, help your fellow alcoholics but also "to practice these principles [of AA] in all our affairs," and not, I take it, just in the love affairs. You can't rest easy with fixing yourself or protecting your loved ones, in other words, you have to become your brother's keeper, in accordance, as always in AA, with the teachings of every major world religion (yes, Judaism, too, tikkun and all that), with the possible exception of Buddhism. 

The stranger is the proper object of your attention and solicitude according to this dispensation. Tradition 12—yeah there’s twelve of them, too—states that anonymity is the “spiritual foundation” of all else, an imperative that places “principles before personalities” and forces us drunkards to trust, or at least to rely on, each other, without even knowing who we are in real life. There it is again: that will to believe, the readiness to act on mere faith, the ability to pin our hopes on the evidence of things unseen. Because that’s about all we got to go on. We speak our minds without thinking, finding words before we know what they will come to mean.