[LISTEN on Substack]
Time for a re-write of the Pythons’
Philosophers Drinking Song, the one insinuating that the old dead philosophers (including “John Stuart Mill of his own free will”) were lushes.
Gary's going to talk to us about the link between William James's philosophy and the 12-step recovery movement, including AA and similarly-structured programs that emphasize acknowledging one's personal ultimate impotence and the need to rely on a Higher Power (which may or may not mean God or something supernatural) to boost the will in the face of an addiction.
A good pragmatist will always say that when such programs work for anyone, they "pay their way" and show themselves to be reliable and even in touch with truth.
A good pragmatist will also always say that different approaches work better for some than others, and that one size does not fit all. (A good pragmatist is, in other words, also a pluralist.)
I try to be a good pragmatist.
I'm coming up on my one year anniversary of not consuming alcohol.
For most of my adult life I've enjoyed a beer with dinner, frequently preceded by a bit of Kentucky's finest. I subscribed to novelist Walker Percy's philosophy of bourbon:
The joy of bourbon drinking is not the pharmacological effect of the C2H5OH on the cortex but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime--aesthetic considerations to which the effect of the alcohol is, if not dispensable, at least secondary.
A year on, I miss that particular aesthetic form of Kentucky sunshine. (I do still experience Tennessee summertime, via a different aesthetic.) But not enough to revisit it, not yet anyway.
Two years ago my buddies and I did our annual late-summer meetup in the environs of Lexington KY, where we combined our shared passion for (minor league) baseball with a spin along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. Glad I got that out of my system.
What I decided a year ago was that I wanted to prioritize my long-term health, and I'd read enough evidence at that point to persuade me that no amount of alcohol was consistent with that priority.
But I was never comfortable with the 12-step insistence on essentializing my relation to alcohol, the idea that I was under the sway of a compulsion before which my own assertive will was powerless. Irrelevant. Nothing, it seems to me, could be less Jamesian than to sideline one's volitional impulses precisely when they most need to be engaged and committed to.
So I looked around for a different approach. I found Annie Grace's This Naked Mind, I read her books, and it made sense to me when she said things like
“We need to stop asking ourselves if we have a problem with alcohol and start to get curious about how much better our lives could be.”
I agreed with her citation of the Buddha:
“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.”
We ourselves must choose to walk the path.
I liked the emphasis on drinking or not drinking being a choice, not in my case a disease; and I decided to choose to drink only when I wanted to--not from mindless habit. I did not wish to concede my powerlessness, or the irrelevance of my will to choose. I do not concede them, again in my case.
I know there are many others whose relation to alcohol is indeed compulsory and not free. Many others do benefit from the public declaration of impotence, from a surrender of will and a professed reliance on whatever they mean by a Higher Power... and reliance on a supportive community of peers who've traveled a similar road.
So good for them. Good for whatever works, whatever conduces to one's health and happiness.
Fortunately, for those who do not find the 12-step approach a congenial fit for their own case or circumstances, there are other alternatives to AA (et al) besides Annie Grace's. To name just a few:
Alternative Programs to AA
- Self-Management and Recovery Training (SMART) Recovery.
- Women for Sobriety.
- Secular Organizations for Sobriety (S.O.S.).
- LifeRing Secular Recovery.
- Moderation Management.
- Evidence-based and science-based treatments.
- Holistic therapies.
- Experiential therapies.
In light of some of the items on that list, I want to say that in my case I choose not to speak the language of "sobriety"--anyone who knows me will tell you that I am and always have been "sober, "probably to a fault much of the time.
But just as I would never announce (as I understand they do at AA meetings) "I am an alcoholic" even after having refrained from drinking for an extended time, years even, I would also never announce that I am sober (in the reverse sense of the statement). That's what I mean by not "essentializing" my relation to drink. Pragmatists (like Aristotelians and Existentialists) think we are what we repeatedly do, not what in the distant past we previously did.
So I lift my glass of sparkling water or kombucha or (more often) my Stanley mug of fresh-brewed coffee to all who've found or fashioned an effective strategy for choosing a better relation to their own ingestibles of healthy preference. Whatever it may be, whatever they may be. To your happiness.
Cheers!
