Changing Ideology and the Destruction of the You-niverse
daily gratitude list 4.4.23
I’m grateful for the hopeful, gauzy, orange sky this morning. I’m grateful for resolve. I’m grateful for stepping back and seeing. I’m grateful when my own foibles get pointed out. I’m grateful the universe has a sense of humor. I’m grateful to be sober today.
First things first, it’s Tuesday and that means the Anyone Anywhere Meeting of Alcoholics will be live at 7pm (edt). We will be starting Chapter 2 of the Big Book, “There is a Solution.” Yes, there is! Hope to see you tonight!
I read this fantastic book a while ago, “The Ministry for the Future,” it’s science fiction by Kim Stanley Robinson. I really loved “The Years of Rice and Salt,” which was kind of a trippy exploration of some alternate post-Black Plague outcomes narrated by two guys who keep meeting up courtesy of reincarnation. Trust me, it’s actually a really fascinating experiment in thinking differently.
So, back to “The Ministry for the Future.” It’s set in the not-so-distant future and it becomes kind of clear that the planet is not headed for a soft landing from an ecological point of view. The rest of the novel lays out a pretty appalling vision of what could happen, but what struck me was the proposed solution. It was a change in ideology. A change in thinking. This really struck a note with me.1
Why did it strike me? Because “ideology” seems like a more accurate word than “religious” to describe the change in thinking that attends sobriety. I think the more common parlance these days is the word “narrative.” At some level, we all construct a narrative, an ideology, a story that frames how we see the world, that explains the world. Here’s how Kim Stanley Robinson describes it:
So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, that some kind of personal organizing system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and act. Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above.
The Ministry for the Future, p. 41
“Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation.”
That’s also called thinking. The thing you hear most often about AA is that it is a religious program and we all know that perception keeps a lot of people away. To be fair, part of my resistance to AA was to the ideas of “powerlessness” and “turning over my life and will.” Number one: The resistance to those notions is itself a “symptom,” I believe. Number Two: My view of God was more of a benign, uninvolved, universe-seeding entity that was beyond my understanding and also didn’t really have much connection to my life. Even as a kid, the idea of prayer seemed kind of naive and certainly very inefficient.2 To the extent that God was paying attention, well, my situation seemed pretty obvious,
if there was help to be had there, well, why hadn't it happened?
To be sure, the Big Book is awash with the word, “God,” and the Big Book God is always a “He.” You will get no argument from me that the male-centrism of the Big Book is off-putting; the Big Book is 100% the product of it’s times and its author. But looking at it that way misses the forest for the trees. Bill was not an adherent or a real proponent of organized religion; his “spiritual awakening” in his bed at Towns Hospital was more of an inspirational Instagram video than a burning bush and stone tablets. There were no words whispered in Bill’s spiritual ear, no explicit directives issued. TBH, Bill thought it might all be a hallucination; he was after all still detoxing, taking belladonna and pheno-barbitol and probably fighting through what we now call PAWS (“Post-Acute Withdrawal Syndrome”).
It was the saintly Dr. Silkworth who told Bill not to try and figure out if it was real or not, but simply to hang on to it, because:
It is better than what you had.
You can debate the exact nature of Bill’s religious views, I think that is all besides the point. What Bill really describes and experienced is less of a religious conversion and more the adoption of a radical new ideology. A brand new way of seeing the world. The difference between the old and the new worlds? One was self-centered, run on ego, the other simply acknowledged that there just might be a power greater than himself out there.
This is where the ship runs aground too often. Newcomers often have their first experience with AA in some kind of a treatment setting or simply out of their own desperation in a church basement mediated by whoever shows up that night. I think way too often, the version of AA newcomers are treated to is kind of like the version of Christianity that some people believe: God is a dark, justice-seeking, score-settling, my-way-or-the-highway type of Deity and have you seen some of those paintings of hell from the 1100’s?
Not saying they are correct, but also not saying they’re not
At this point, the AA chorus will often begin telling people there is only one way out. That if they stray from the AA Yellow Brick Road, well, good luck with that “research,” kid. They’re told that Zoom meetings aren’t the real AA, that they’ll never get sober with “half-measures” like that. I think that is all really unfortunate, misguided nonsense. There’s a well intentioned belief at the bottom and it comes from knowing how hard it was for each of us to come in and the real, sincere desire to spare other people that same fate. But it’s not the approach that worked for Bill and it’s not the approach that Bill lays out in “Working With Others.”
I think the real nugget at the core of AA is the correct conclusion that alcoholism and addiction are diseases of ego. What that means from a medical perspective, I don’t know. We can use words like “grandiose,” “selfish,” “manipulative” to describe our alcoholic personalities (or at least I can), those are all functions of ego. Bill slips in the cost of the spiritual awakening, this new way of life, pretty quietly on page 14:
Simple, but not easy: a price had to be paid. It meant destruction of self-centeredness.
Bill goes on to describe that for him, this meant adopting the view of turning “all things over” to the “Father of Light.” That’s not exactly how things were explained to me at the 8:00am services at Zion Lutheran Church, but that was Bill’s conception of a force greater than himself.
When I speak at meetings, I sometimes describe my years of struggling to get sober, all of those horrible failures and soul-crushing relapses (and sadly, mine wasn’t the only soul getting crushed), as really representing a failure of imagination.
I simply couldn’t believe there was a life without drinking
Note: I didn’t say life was better with drinking. I couldn’t imagine life without it. At some level, you can only believe what you can imagine. I think that’s the real exercise in the Big Book, one of the reasons it actually works. What happened to Bill that night when Ebby knocked on his door was not religious conversion, it was simply a mind-blowing expansion of possibilities. Seeing long-gone Ebby, recently avoiding incarceration in a psychiatric facility with the help of his new proto-AA friends, simply saying that he had found God and gotten sober tested Bill’s imagination.
Bill’s old worldview, his ideology, didn’t survive his dinner with Ebby. Ebby presented a new way of looking at the world, a new construct, a different narrative. The new ideology that Bill adopted does definitely use the word “God” a lot and certainly comes from someone raised in or adjacent to the Christian faith tradition. It’s a mistake to assume that Bill is saying you need to adopt his view of the universe, his ideology. It’s also a mistake to say that at an AA meeting. The explicit command, if there is one, is simply to try to find your own conception of what things mean.
The point is not the adoption of religion, it’s the destruction of the You-niverse.3
So, what is the new ideology? Well, I think, by necessity, that’s something everyone has to do on their own. I’m not sure that I can tell you how to suffuse your life with meaning or purpose—because that’s all we’re talking about here. The only real “religion” required is determining what brings purpose and meaning to life and then lining up with that vision. Whatever it is. If that’s God or Buddha, or Krishna the Destroyer, or Baal or Gozer or Space Ghost or whatever.4
The real spiritual trick is not getting stuck on who or what the Higher Power is, it’s focusing on what that Higher Power can do for you (restore you to sanity). And then, living a life of “maximum service.” I think this is one of the real active ingredients in AA. It’s not the adoption or worship of any particular deity or religion, it’s simply determining where purpose and meaning flow in your life and how to place yourself to be of maximum service to that purpose.
In business, we assume that assets are appropriately placed where they generate the highest ROI. That is the organizing belief behind our economic ideology. But ROI is not just a metric, it contains an ideological nugget. That what we should be doing is maximizing the return on our assets in service of delivering that value to shareholders. The Ministry of the Future tells the story of what happens when you adjust ideology and the resulting metrics to fit what is really happening, a new set of priorities and needs.
Ultimately, ideology is bounded by imagination. You have to be able to at least conceive of something before you can believe in it. I have no idea if Bill W. and I believed in the same God, but that doesn’t matter. The key to this didn’t require that kind of ontological heavy lifting, it simply required me to imagine there was a force out there, some something in the Universe that could help me get sober, restore me to sanity, that could help the people who loved me to heal, that there was a way back. And then change my daily filter from “what’s in it for me” to “how can I be of maximum service.”
Do I know what I believe in? Not really. That's why I can’t tell you to believe in the same thing. But I can tell you this, its April, and on the 22nd of this month, I’ll be celebrating 3.5 years of sobriety.5
Haha, yes, pun intended.
To the extent I thought God was a force capable of listening, I always assumed that there were way more pressing concerns than my hope to receive “Monday Night Football” for my birthday.
I think I just made that up?
Please don’t do the door-knob thing. Whatever your conception of your higher power, you need to use it in this sentence: [Name of Higher Power] can restore me to sanity. “Space Ghost” still works for me, “door knob” does not.
Yes, my kids convinced me of the wisdom of recognizing “half-birthdays” long ago.