AA’s Tyranny of (Other People’s) Experience

Suppose someone close to you passes away and you’re sad. A few days later you hear their voice, plain as day. You look around but the room is empty. You henceforth tell the story, “I’ve experienced things that lead me to know that death is not the end.” You’ve had a lifelong belief in souls and god and heaven, and this is strong corroborative evidence of all that. 

Or you might say, “I was so devastated after so-and-so died that for a while I worried I might be getting wonky. But I got over it.” You are a materialist and “believe” in science, which tells you that aural hallucinations in the circumstances you were under are in fact quite common. The mind plays tricks. Nothing “woo woo” here.

To tell a story about what you “know” from experience, you must engage in an act of interpretation, and that essential step opens the door to an infinity of possible error. Interpretations of exactly the same raw experience can diverge radically, and the worldview of the interpreter always–always–comes along for the ride.

Science calls these stories “anecdotal evidence” and tries very hard to steer clear of them, precisely because they are so untrustworthy. In our daily lives, however, all of us create and rely on them.

*  *  *

The year is 1,000 or so BCE, and you are a priestly functionary in some city state near a river surrounded by desert. Your job is to predict the future by “reading” the livers of sacrificial animals–sheep and goats and cows or whatever. You’ve got this stone model of a liver with writing on it, made by your fore-priests, as kind of a manual on how to do it, plus you’ve learned your own tricks, based on long experience and training. 

You’ve done this your whole adult life; your father did it, and his father did it, and on and on, and if some punk kid came up to you and asked, “Does that stuff even work, man? Because it seems kind of bogus and random…” you’d probably call the temple guards and have him roughed-up, at least a little, right there amidst the carcasses and guts, for being so disrespectful. 

What a stupid question! Of course it works. Not only your own experience, but the long experience of your entire society testifies to its efficacy. Is it 100%? Well, of course not. Nothing involving mere humans is ever perfect, but any failures derive entirely from errors in implementation. And, of course, once in a while the gods change their minds. Or tell a little fib. But yeah, this sheep-liver-future-foretelling stuff works like a champ, buster, and no king with any sense would even think of going to war without it.

*  *  *

My first AA meeting was a profound “spiritual” experience, unbeliever though I was (and still am). I admitted to that roomful of people the shameful fact that I was an alcoholic, which simply meant to me that I needed to stop drinking but hadn’t been able to do it. They told me I was welcome and gave me a chip and a hug. I felt accepted and understood. These people had been to the same bleak place that I had come to. We shared that experience, and knew something important about each other that could be learned in no other way. 

That meeting was on a Sunday night, but I would find another the following Friday, and I believe as much as I can believe anything that without that friendly, sober group of people to be around after work on Friday nights, at the end of the week, there’s no way in hell I could have kept myself out of the bars and sober. It might have been as simple as that. I needed a place to go and be accepted and feel the warmth from other people who understood why I was there, instead of the bar. 

And so, yes, we shared something important, but the stories we told about it were often very different. I came into the rooms at the ripe middle age of 54 (yes, I do plan to live to at least 108) while the majority of the newcomers in that meeting were in their 20’s or 30’s. I’d raised a family and been a “respectable” member of society for decades before my always-unhealthy relationship with alcohol progressed to where I had to reach out for help. It seemed to me then and now that my experience in being The Alcoholic (a mythical beast, anyway) had to be quite different than some kid who had only been drinking legally for a year or two. Plus, I was a straight drunk, while almost all of them had “outside issues” with other substances. I also learned that the world is essentially a war zone for a large percentage of women, and especially for those who end up in recovery. To pretend that I shared a substantial part of their experience would have been laughable if it wasn’t so insulting.

Another difference was that many of them spoke of how God was doing things for them that they couldn’t do for themselves, extolling the joy of becoming passive conduits for the will of some unseen, supernatural entity. They grounded all this in stories about their experience. And I listened respectfully and enjoyed their company anyway, but didn’t for a minute take seriously the supposed “truths” they were telling me. I could certainly see the appeal of conjuring up this magical mega-person to hand things over to. It must be super nice, sometimes, to think you could sit back and let something else drive. But the thing I could never get past was, pretending it was so didn’t make it so.

It also very soon became clear that a lot of them were utterly convinced that a certain book was where The (only!) Program of AA (another chimeric critter) was laid out, and they thought very highly of it, and acted like you were foolish if you didn’t agree with them on that. At their urging, I got around to reading it fairly soon but found it underwhelming. It, too, wanted me to buy into the supernatural intervener business, and to do so based only the supposed experience of a small group of people in the 1930s. I was unconvinced, of course. By that logic, we should all be Mormons, or some such thing. 

After I reached the four year mark (which I did, in the rooms and godless), I would occasionally mention that, since the main guy who wrote that book had only been on the wagon three years or so at the time, and everybody else in the group had dried out even more recently than that, their tome clearly could contain no knowledge of long term sobriety. But don’t panic, and stay tuned: I now had more credentials than they had had to write my own book. The first thing I’d do is consult a new doctor about this allergy canard, and the suspicious eye with which science viewed anecdotal evidence in general. We’d get some real data in there. And, obviously, all the god nonsense would be jettisoned. My greater experience had proven it superfluous. And experience was the rock-solid foundation. Right?

My interlocutors were less than amused. They told me that this all just proved that a) I probably wasn’t even a “real” alcoholic, and b) the Book must have been god-inspired (the insulting implication being that I was not!), and that its author(s) had merely been taking dictation.

I would continue to take a run at it now and then, but mostly just out of stubborn masochism. If–at the drop of a hat, with a straight face and an expectation of getting away with it–you could define me out of existence, plus invoke a magical omniscient super-dude to explain any apparent discrepancies, your argument guns were way bigger than mine. I had no chance of winning that showdown.

*  *  *

The literature of AA has the notion of the reliability of stories about experience at its very center, and so does most of the dogma that comes out of people’s mouths at meetings. But let's get “rigorously honest” for a second: none of us really believes anything for only that reason, do we? Obviously we can’t, since for every truth supposedly derived from experience, the denial of that truth, also derived from experience, can easily be found. And it doesn’t help at all if a large number of people agree about something. We don’t let that persuade us either, as well we shouldn’t, since it’s a well-known logical fallacy (and therefore a bandwagon upon which we are ill-advised to jump).

What we do, of course, is center our own experience and biases and preconceptions, and believe the stories that reinforce those, or depart from them in a way that feels right to us. This thing of simply “taking direction” has been nonsense from the start. We follow the directions we freely assent to, and ignore–or fake–the ones we don’t. We all pick and choose.

Another thing we do because we are human is forget that this is the way we do it, and start thinking that our outlook on things is self-evident. We get around a bunch of people who do agree with us and start acting like it’s the only way to think, and laugh (or at least look askance) at anybody who thinks another way. These newcomers should listen to what we tell them, we say, in various ways, and read the book we believe in and do what it says, by gum.

Perhaps, since deep-down we know that few who are inclined to disagree will change their minds just because of our stern testimony, that isn’t the real purpose of it. Perhaps the real purpose is the old, old game of defining the doxastic boundaries of The Group and signaling to any who would dispute them to damn well keep their mouths shut. This is what we believe here. This is what defines us. 

And of course we will do that while at the same time proclaiming complete openness to all views, and denouncing any desire for conformity. Only a misguided fool would disagree with us, as we have explained again and again and again and again. But we are super loving here, with minds as open as the sky. Go ahead and disagree, Friend. 

When, in the rooms, I raise questions like the ones I have raised here, one of the responses I often get is something like, “Dude, we get it. You don’t have to believe anything you don’t want to. That is baked in. There is no problem here.” The subtext being, So why don’t you shut up about it, already?

And then they go right on reinforcing a culture where it takes much more courage than it should to openly express any rejection of the dogmas they espouse. I’ve experienced it too often myself, and listened to too many trauma stories, to be sold the idea that everything is fine here. I know better. Secular AA wouldn’t exist if what they say is true. 

They’re right about this though: there is another tradition in AA that I would like to reinforce and extend. The My program might make you drink, Take what you need and leave the rest, This book is meant to be suggestive only, tradition. I’m well aware that it has always existed too, but I think it doesn’t go far enough, and doesn’t often speak with sufficient volume. It doesn’t usually say, My perfectly legitimate AA program doesn’t use this book at all–at least where I have heard it. 

And I should be hearing it, because I know it is often true.

And with that, I’ll just take another twenty-four. 

Thanks for listening.