Not-God by Ernest Kurtz

Author:Ernest Kurtz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59285-902-3
Publisher: Hazelden Publishing
Published: 2010-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

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These insights — that accepted limitation affirmed, that the root flaw in human experience lay in demand, and that the possibilities of human control were less than infinite — were not unique to Alcoholics Anonymous, even in twentieth-century America. Indeed A.A.’s own history foreshadowed an interesting convergence in the larger cultural context. The first international diffusion of Alcoholics Anonymous occurred under the impact of World War II. A.A. members in the military services carried their message to other cultures as they sought out other alcoholics in their own quest for continuing sobriety. At first, as sociologists readily noted and the history detailed in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age testifies, the Alcoholics Anonymous message found attentive and interested new adherents mainly in Anglo-Saxon cultures: English, Australian, and Scandinavian alcoholics readily embraced the A.A. program. But in the mid-1950s a new development and direction began to unfold. Especially in Southeast Asia, more and more of those chemically addicted whose religious tradition was Buddhist also and increasingly welcomed and undertook to live the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. This development fascinated Dr. Harry Tiebout as well as Bill Wilson, and it led to deeper and more productive analyses in the psychiatrist’s later papers on Alcoholics Anonymous.50

In the late 1960s, elements of American culture itself discovered the religious insights of Buddhism and other Eastern religions. What was first appropriated from Buddhist thought and most clearly attractive to felt American needs were those elements that taught calm acceptance of human limitation and the sanctity of a life lived without demand. This phenomenon calls attention to a special even if thusfar largely only potential contribution of Alcoholics Anonymous to the American context.51

American acceptance of the limiting insights of Buddhist thought is itself sharply limited. Its Oriental associations render Buddhism unhelpfully mysterious to most Americans, who tend to see that faith as alien to their own experience and indeed as seized upon precisely by those somehow “un-American.” Americans are self-consciously proud of their American-ness, and for most that “American-ness” includes at least a marginal affinity for classic Western thought and especially for the Judaeo-Christian tradition. An important contribution of Alcoholics Anonymous thus might arise from its very American-ness and its deep Christianity as these characteristics of the fellowship and its program have been pointed out and analyzed in Chapters Seven and Eight. If a philosophy accepting not only limitation but the wholeness of that limitation is ever to be made effectively available to the vast majority of ordinary Americans, this will likely have to be achieved by a source as pragmatically American yet deeply Christian as Alcoholics Anonymous.

The spreading diversity of A.A.’s appeal reflected in the increasing variety of its membership testifies, in the late 1970s, that this need not be A.A.’s only contribution. The philosophy of joyous pluralism implicit in the practice of Alcoholics Anonymous allows and even invites more. But it is, of course, precisely of pulls and pushes to more that that same philosophy is inherently wary. Different individual A.A. members may carry the A.

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