Gresham's Law and Alcoholics Anonymous 6
Here is how AA-by-mimesis worked. The newcomer was joining himself to a big, successful organization, like the Elks or the Kiwanis. One of the customs of this particular club was that you did not drink; so if the newcomer liked the people he had met in AA and wanted to stay associated with them, he gave up drinking. He made AA meetings and AA people the focus of his social life and his leisure-time activities and stayed sober, more off the power of the pack than anything else.
The true nature of this quite other, and quite non-spiritual, recovery option was never clearly faced and admitted within the fellowship. Instead, an attempt was made to broaden the meaning of the term "spiritual" to include both kinds of recovered alcoholics: the sober-by-conversion alcoholics - those who as the result of working the Steps had had a spiritual experience and become transformed human beings, seriously involved with regenerative life and ideas - and the sober-by-imitation alcoholics – those who had remained essentially the same type of people they had been before coming into AA, except that they had joined a new organization, made a new set of friends, and given up drinking in conformity to their new social setup.
There is only one term in the Twelve Steps that has been changed since the Big Book was first published in 1939. That term is "spiritual experience" in the Twelfth Step. A member of my home AA group, who first came into the fellowship in 1941, tells it this way: “When I first came in, they were still talking about 'spiritual experience'. A year or two later they started calling it 'spiritual awakening'.” It was at this time that the official version of the Twelfth Step was changed to read: "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps ..." The term spiritual experience, which had been perfectly acceptable in the early years when the fellowship was small and explicitly conversion-oriented, came to be viewed as too narrow and prejudicial against the less profound life changes resulting from mimesis-oriented AA, which were coming to be the majority recovery pattern in AA. An explanatory note was added to the Big Book, as follows:
“The terms "spiritual experience" and "spiritual awakening" are used many times in this book, which upon
careful reading, shows that the personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism has
manifested itself among us in many different forms.”
“Yet it is true that our first printing gave many readers the impression that these personality changes, or
religious experiences, must be in the nature of sudden and spectacular upheavals. Happily for everyone, this
conclusion is erroneous.“
“In the first few chapters a number of sudden revolutionary changes are described. Though it was not our
intention to create such an impression many alcoholics have nevertheless concluded that in order to recover
they must acquire an immediate and overwhelming "God-consciousness" followed at once by a vast change in
feeling and outlook.”
“Among our rapidly growing membership of thousands of alcoholics such transformations, though frequent, are
by no means the rule. Most of our experiences are what the psychologist William James calls the "educational
variety" because they develop slowly over a period of time. Quite often friends of the newcomer are aware of the
difference long before he is himself. He finally realizes that he has undergone a profound alteration in his
reaction to life; that such a change could hardly have been brought about by himself alone. What often takes
place in a few months could seldom have been accomplished by years of self-discipline. With few exceptions
our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently identify with their
own conception of a Power greater than themselves.”
“Most of us think this awareness of a Power greater than ourselves is the essence of spiritual experience. Our
more religious members call it "God consciousness.”
“Most emphatically we wish to say that any alcoholic capable of honestly facing his problems in the light of our
experience can recover, provided he does not close his mind to all spiritual concepts. He can only be defeated
by an attitude of intolerance or belligerent denial.”
“We find that no one need have difficulty with the spirituality of the program. Willingness, honesty and open
mindedness are the essentials of recovery. But these are indispensable.”
When you compare this statement to that which introduced the Twelve Steps in chapter five, the difference in tone is astonishing. Chapter five rings with a series of booming affirmations that the goal of the program is a life given to God and the way is an uncompromisingly spiritual one. In the later-added appendix there is virtually a full retreat from the earlier vigor and un-selfconscious joy in God-commitment. The stated purpose of this appendix is to reassure people that the spiritual change accompanying an AA recovery need not be in the form of a sudden upheaval. The point needed making and was well made.
But a further point was also made - not directly, but by implication - in the defensive, back-pedaling, almost apologetic treatment of the whole subject of religious experience. That point was the following: the authors and publishers of the Big Book, unofficial spokesmen for the movement, were responding to a change in the AA recovery pattern by lowering the spiritual level of aspiration of the society, a move they would not have dared to make in the early days but could, and even felt they must, make now that the society had become large and gained a reputation for respectability and reasonableness.
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