Gresham's Law and Alcoholics Anonymous 5
decline. Who wants to do things the hard way when they do not have to? Who wants to drive a car with standard shift when the model with automatic is a hundred dollars cheaper?
AA has been in existence now more than forty years. There is still widespread lip service in the movement to the importance of working all the Steps and practicing rigorous honesty in all one's affairs. But as a matter of fact, precious few AA’s continue to attempt seriously and consistently to DO these things on a daily basis - not after their first months of sobriety in the fellowship.
Reversion to a lower, more "normal" level of aspiration is the order of the day. Those who do continue to practice strong AA have to be careful how they talk about what they are doing in AA meetings. In many places, too much or too serious talk about God is considered bad form. The same is true about talk on the subjects of confession, restitution, and rigorous honesty - especially where they affect such difficult and sensitive life areas as job applications, tax returns, business dealings, and sex relations.
But if weak AA works - if it produces recovery - what fault is there to find with it? Maybe this is a case where heterodoxy turns out to be superior to orthodoxy. Why should anyone go to the extra bother of practicing strong AA? For one very good reason. Weak AA brings about a far less profound life alteration than strong AA does. In many cases that relatively superficial change is not enough to crack the alcoholic pattern. In many other cases, it results in an apparent recovery which does not last, but sooner or later eventuates in a relapse into drinking.
What the original AAs were shooting for - and what they aimed their program at - was not mere sobriety. That would have been the "common-sense" approach, the way of worldly wisdom, the reasonable-level-of-aspiration gambit. But the founders of AA were men moved by inspiration. They were coming at the problem with the uncommon sense of men under guidance.
The common-sense approach had already been tried and it had failed. If you set a drunk's level of aspiration at mere abstinence - "'Why don't you be a good fellow, use your will power; and give the stuff up” - it did not work. The poor candidate for reform was back drinking again in short order. The discovery that launched AA in the first place was that if an alcoholic were somehow to be rocketed into a state way beyond abstinence, if he were to achieve a real spiritual conversion, an utterly new relationship with God, then permanent abstinence would automatically occur as a blessed and life-saving by-product. That was how it happened with Bill. That was how it happened with Dr. Bob. That was how it happened with most of the first hundred members. That was how the authors of the Big Book thought it would have to happen with everyone.
Originally, the Twelfth Step read: "Having had a spiritual experience as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs". Two key phrases were "spiritual experience" and "as the result of these Steps". The assumption was: no spiritual experience - no recovery. It was also assumed that there were not a number of different results from working the Steps; there was one result -"the" result - and that was spiritual experience. To the first members, spiritual experience meant that God had touched your life - directly, tangibly - and turned it around.
Sometime between 1939, when the “Plain Dealer” article was published, and 1941, when the Alexander piece ran in the “Post”, a major shift in philosophy occurred. No one in AA was much aware that it was taking place at the time, and to this day the process that went on remains almost totally unacknowledged throughout the fellowship. What changed was the importance of the roles assigned respectively to the recovery principles and the recovery fellowship in AA.
Up until 1939, AA was a small, unknown organization whose success record, though excellent, applied only over a tiny group of cases, and had not yet stood the test of time. Recovering alcoholics in the young movement relied upon each other and worked closely with one another. But the principles were the primary life transformers. The movement as such was not large enough or well enough established that it could be leaned on in lieu of faithful work with the Steps.
After AA became big, after it gained national recognition as a success, a new relationship became possible with it, one which had not previously been an option, and which the founders had not really foreseen. It became possible for an alcoholic to come to meetings and get sober without undergoing a real spiritual conversion, simply by the process of mimesis, or imitation - by the practice of something no more spiritual than the principle of when-in-Rome-do-as-the-Romans-do.
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