Alcohol as a seeking for Infinity: Excerpt from my 2008 book, ‘Lapsed Agnostic’
At the back of AA’s spiritual programme is the idea that it is precisely a 'thirst for transcendence' that expresses itself in the alcoholic’s addictive, obsessive-compulsive drinking.
Mortally Wounded Brigand Quenches His Thirst: painting by Eugène Delacroix
The Thirst for Transcendence
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Prologue
Last Monday, July 29th, was my 34th birthday. My ‘AA birthday’, I mean — the 34th anniversary of my last alcoholic drink, and this introduction to a related chapter from my 2007 book, Lapsed Agnostic, was written for my diary for that day. (Full subscribers who have read this week’s diary should skip to the headline ‘Not God’, below.)
When I say ‘last alcoholic drink’ I mean ‘most recent’ rather than ‘final’, for that would be a dangerous conceit, and a sort of blasphemy. We retain sobriety, according to the doctrines of Bill & Bob — the founders of AA — one day at a time, ‘by the grace of God and the help of the fellowship.’
I don’t argue with any of this except to say that I believe I have moved beyond it. Alcohol long since ceased having any appeal for me. Right at this moment, I wouldn’t give you two cents for all the Guinness in Dublin, or all the vino in Andalusia, where I go tomorrow [July 30th]. This is a kind of AA heresy, but I have found it useful to think and say that I ‘used to be’ an alcoholic, even though, in different company and with a slightly different emphasis, I can admit that I shall always be one. I am no longer an alcoholic for as long as I do not pick up that first drink, which I have no intention of doing.
Despite the number of rainforests consumed in its analysis, alcoholism remains at its core a mystery. It is a ‘disease of modernity’. It is a ‘disease of the spirit’. It is ‘not a disease.’ You can have any colour you want so long as it’s not black and white. Speaking of which, I never liked Guinness, so my remark above about being able to resist all the Guinness in Dublin is a kind of lie — a lie of misdirection (a topic I have been thinking of addressing in some detail one of these weeks). I also don’t care much for vino. Beer was my drink, with occasional injections of whiskey.
I wasn’t a raving, sleeping-in-the-park alkie. I just came to realise that drinking had become too important to me, and that I was on a slippery slope, on which staggering was ill-advised. It took me two years to stop, because I felt the need to continue going back to conduct one last check. There’s a saying in AA — ‘The best it’s going to be is like the worst it was before!’ — which means what it says on the bottle: alcoholism is a progressive condition from which you cannot take rests; it continues to develop even when you’re not drinking; so, if you stop and start again, you’ll take up not where you left off, but where you would have been if you hadn’t stopped. If that’s not scary enough to stop you picking up, I am lost for words or help.
The idea of an ‘AA birthday’ is not a cheap feelgood gimmick. The idea is that your life starts over the day you stopped drinking. That’s absolutely true. The day you stop, you think your life is over, but it’s just beginning. I thought there would be no point, or a lesser point, in living without drink, that I would be diminished in my enjoyment of it, as well as in my personality, courage, creativity, and much more. Utter nonsense, all of it. My life began on July 29th 1990. Having slipped and slid for two years before that, I had somehow attained the point where this phase had osmotically ended. I got ‘it’.
What is alcoholism? It is one mode of manifestation of a universal trait, which may indeed be a ‘disease (or, as they say, dis-ease) of modernity.’ It arises from an infection of rationalism elevated to the highest value, whereby a man comes to believe himself the total master of his own existence, life and destiny, and answerable to no one in this world or beyond it. This is why I always remind myself (and anyone who happens to be listening) that the most important step in coming to believe in God — as I have said many times — is coming to believe that you are not God. This sounds daft, but only because we do not speak — either religiously or secularly — of matters in these terms. ‘Becoming God’ is actually a natural inclination of man, especially when God is not in a position to set the individual straight, as He was with Adam and Eve, for all the good it did Him.
In this hypothesis, alcohol is an analgesic and anaesthetic against fear, a fear that is inevitable when a flesh-and-blood human takes on the responsibilities of God, if only in his own life, and then discovers that he lacks the power to meet the inevitable challenges and burdens. Drink helps, for a while, but eventually, being a poison, starts to eat away at body, mind and soul.
That was the first surprise: that, in my drinking, I had not, as I imagined, been pursuing something like enjoyment, or even tranquility, but the blocking out of terror on account of the fact that I believed I had to assume total responsibility for the vehicle I was travelling in, even though I knew almost nothing of its mechanics.
That’s really what alcoholism is — or, more precisely, what it is like, for alcohol is noteworthy among addictions only because, about 90 years ago, it became the locus for the first serious investigation of this category of human susceptability, which brought these improbable factors to light. Other forms of addiction have expanded our understanding of the nature of the condition, which exhibit common features across various addictions, and yet manifest the common factor of escape from reality.
Machine gambling, for example, is responsible for the most ‘advanced’ and fastest growing form of addiction on the planet, and also the most virulent and harmful, causing gamblers to become addicted four times as rapidly as other forms of gambling. To put things in somewhat mechanistic terms: there is growing evidence that certain activities — and this is one — have the same capacity to affect the neurochemical pathways as alcohol or other drugs. This suggest that study of the objects of addiction may be just as vital to understanding the problem as any weaknesses in the make-up of the subjects.
In her book Addiction by Design — Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, Natasha Dow Schull cites numerous gambling addicts as arriving at a similar formulation of the state of addiction. They talk about the way the gambling industry has entered into a symbiotic contract with gamblers to supply the real commodity gamblers desire — time in ‘The Zone’, i.e. a place of peace that nothing else offers them. The ‘zone’ might be called this mythic place in which the god-man finds temporary peace away from all of the burdens he has drawn upon himself.
One interviewee, ‘Mollie’, emphasises that she doesn’t play the machines to win: whenever she does win, she puts the money straight back in the machines. Why, then, does she play? ‘To keep playing — to stay in that machine zone, where nothing else matters. . . . It’s like being in the eye of the storm, is how I’d describe it. Your vision is clear on the machine in front of you but the world is spinning around you, and you can’t really hear anything. You aren’t really there — you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with.’ The zone, said Mollie, is ‘nowhere’ — not that the zone is not to be located, but that, in reaching the zone, you arrive at nowhere: oblivion.
Some machine gambling addicts told Schull about the desire they have to ‘climb into the screen and get lost’. Another wrote to her about the ‘ever-present awareness’ that accompanies the gambler ‘about being in a destructive process’. The point, says another addict, ‘Sharon’, is being allowed to continue. ‘So it isn’t really a gamble at all — in fact it’s one of the few places I’m certain about anything. If I had ever believed that it was about chance, about variables that could go any given way at a given time, then I would’ve been scared to death to gamble. If you can’t rely on the machine, then you might as well be in the human world where you have no predictability either.’ The addiction, then, is not to gambling, or alcohol or sex or food, but, In Schull’s words, ‘a reliable mechanism for securing a zone of isolation from the “human world” she experiences as capricious, discontinuous and insecure.’
In other words, addictions arise at the front line of man’s attempt to buck God’s power over him by finding a zone that is ‘safe’ from the consequences of his own hubris and delusion — a zone in which time, space and self-consciousness are suspended and lose their power over the subject. Although the route is somewhat different between the various addictions, the goal — the zone — is the same. All addictions arise from a search for a form of ‘sleep’ from reality: not a sleep of the body or the mind but of the entire being and psyche of the human, an abandonment of the identity in which, without God to lean on, you have found life unmanageable. What all addicts have in common is an unconscious desire for self-annihilation, which is only to some extent metaphorical.
This is the meaning of the identification of the AA approach as a ‘spiritual programme’. It is a programme for reconstituting the human spirit in total alignment with reality — or, more correctly, in alignment with total reality, which conveys the meaning better.
Immediately, on entering AA, I discovered that there was a purpose to the incessant dialogue bouncing around my mind. I was meant to be talking to someone, or perhaps Someone. Who? The one who made me? No: The One Who Makes Me. There’s a massive difference: I am being generated anew in every instant, with or without ‘me’.
This, rather obviously, changed everything. It changed me and it changed the world, or at least the world as seen through my viewfinder. One of the things I learned was that the world was not random. Everything that happens in it has meaning, and not only because it is happening. It has meaning because happenings and encounters are the suture of reality and my life in it. I remember the time I first happened on this idea, in a prayer given to me by another alkie. It was called The Prayer of Acceptance, and the line was: ‘Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake’, which, when I heard it first, seemed to me a sensational and somewhat unbelievable statement. I think now that it may amount to a slight misstatement, in that it implies that everything in the world is ordained and organised by God, which I do not believe is true. There are also, in the world, phenomena like evil and free will, which God must work around. He tolerates them because they are part of the trials and tests which a human being must endure in order to grow sufficiently to be ‘saved’. And, of course, because He know all things — past, present and to come — God foresees everything. What I deduced from the line, however, even at the beginning, was close to this understanding, and also close to the postmodern notion of ‘simulation’. Long before I heard that word, I had formed a view of the world in which everything that happened needed to be approached with the utmost attention. There were no accidents or random events. Everything I encountered was there for a purpose. Everything was part of a kind of drama, a storyline. Things did not happen and then evaporate without meaning. Everyone I met was significant, even if I never met them again. Some of the encounters or storylines might have quite the longitudinal dimension, but they were all happening for reasons particular to themselves. This wasn’t always obvious: people came and went, but as I grew older I began to see how they all congregated around me, in a kind of existential ring-a-ring-of-roses that seemed to provide me with a map of my life, path and destiny, even to the extent of providing an unwanted approximate intuitive sense of the time I had remaining.
This, I need hardly add, was a rather different interpretation of the spiritual life than anything I had heard before. Nor do I claim that I retained it constantly. It remained — remains — as a map in the glove compartment that I take out occasionally to re-establish my coordinates. Sometimes, I lapse back, even for long periods, into my old way of seeing reality as this arbitrary process that just happens in this bunker we’ve built for ourselves, buffeting me about the place for no particular reason. But I know this is false — it’s just a habit you pick up early on in the bunker and — if you’re lucky —spend the rest of your life trying to shake.
I was lucky. My luckiest day was the one I was told I was a drunk and needed to sort myself out. I’m sorry that I did not record the precise date, but it was in 1988, sometime around this time of year, when I came home from work as Editor of Magill magazine and found the poet, Brendan Kennelly, sitting in my armchair. I barely knew him and took some time to grasp why he was there: he had been on the Late Late Show talking about alcoholism and he had come at the request of a girlfriend of mine, who had begun to worry about my escalating sadness. Brendan it was who started me thinking that there might be more to alcoholism than bottles swaddled in brown paper bags. He took me to my first AA meeting — which I recognise as one of the greatest gifts of my life. Even though I no longer go there, I still work the programme and hold to it as a kind of code by which I can re-enter the maze of reality with confidence, having lost my way. There were others, later: Derek, J.R., Paddy, Willy, and many more — and, a single ‘layman’, Dr John Cooney, whom I briefly attended as an impatient patient of his private practice. He it was who gave me the test which catches out many’s the unwary alkie. I think it comprised 20 questions, and I immediately intuited that I needed to get more than ten ‘No’s in order to dispose of the ridiculous idea that I might have a problem with drink. I worked hard on it, while he got on with his own paperwork. I decided on giving him two-thirds ‘No’s in order to leave the matter beyond doubt. When I had finished, he studied the results in silence for a few minutes, before announcing: ‘Well, John, I’m afraid I have to tell you that you are without doubt an alcoholic’. It had been a trick question: If you answered ‘Yes’ to one question you were a possible; a Yes to two made you a probable, and three made you a certainty. I answered ‘Yes’ to seven, though I could have breached ten.
The focus of the programme of AA is twofold: to reconstruct the fractured psyche of the alcoholic and to restore his lost connection with the Absolute. A friend of mine in AA, now dead, used to say to me, ‘John, the spiritual life is not a theory — you have to live it’. This is the hard part. The AA programme is beautiful as a theory, but you need to work it to discover that it holds something like a key to the meaning and purpose of life.
My story, in keeping with the theory behind it, reflects this. Some time after I stopped drinking, I began to focus on the fact that the visit of Brendan Kennelly occurred at the same time of year as, two years later, when I eventually decided to knock the bottle on the head. Coincidence? Impossible. The reason, I worked out, was something like this:
I was never a reckless/feckless alcoholic, probably because I didn’t give myself enough time to become one. I was able to manage my life between bouts of drinking, which I afterwards identified as conforming to a pattern of two every year — one at Christmas, the other in high summer. These were the early peaks of my pursuit of escape from reality, and were governed respectively by the Christmas madness and the ecstatic promise of summer. In between, I was able to give up drinking for quite long periods — from January 1st to Easter, for example, or for Lent, or for the month of November. This, I now know, was because I was able to discount my expectations in those periods, saving myself for the next peak. I learned from Brendan Kennelly that the idea of abstention in these patterns is one of the key ploys of the self-deluding alcoholic, who thinks that his capacity to stop is sufficient to disprove any diagnosis of alcoholism. On the contrary. As soon as Brendan explained it to me, I found myself nodding. He said that the only way to stop drinking is one day at a time, because only this acknowledges your helplessness before the problem, and only this remains — relatively — within your control. To stop drinking for Lent is nothing like this, because this pledge retains within it the prospect of the next drink, upon which the alcoholic subconsciously fixates even while he is abstaining — roll on Holy Saturday! By constantly projecting forward to moments when you will be ‘free’ to drink again, you give the drink rent-free space in your head, which, under multiple headings, is almost as bad as continuing to drink.
A person whom I once foolishly trusted recently attacked me in public in the context of my election-run, implying that, as an alcoholic, I was unfit to go into politics. It was more bizarre than that, however: Having denounced the idea of political participation, i.e. voting, standing or running, this person proceeded to express concerns lest I go back on the bottle abroad in Brussels:
‘ . . . you know, I don’t like to see alcoholics being involved in politics., because it’s true: once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. That is a fact. That is a fact and I am sure, I am very sure that every single day alcoholics yearn for the poison.’
This is not merely intrinsically incoherent (why, if you have such a low opinions of politics, would you object to, or even be surprised by, alcoholics being ‘involved’ in it, or worrying lest he lapse and do some damage to . . . what? . . . the ‘swamp’ of your own assertion?); it is also pig-ignorant. Recovered or even recovering alcoholics do not ‘yearn’ for the poison. Each one, usually on his knees, will have asked his ‘higher power’ to relieve him of the burden of any compulsion towards drinking, and will renew this appeal on a daily basis. It is a strange thing for anyone but a complete idiot to to say, but it is an especially bizarre thing for an individual laying claim to a strong faith (as this individual does) to come out with, for it suggests something that is utterly contrary to Christian teaching: the possibility of redemption.
Now read on:
Not God
When I was young I used to ask the most fundamental questions all the time. What am I? Who made me (sometimes though not always in the sense of Who is this God Who made me)? What am I doing here? Why now rather than a million years ago? Was there always a ‘now’ or is the present nowness just a trick of my presence? Was I always present in one form or another? Will I be present after I die? Where, physically, might heaven be?
I had lots of ‘smaller’ questions too. Why did Jesus need to die for me? In what sense did he do this? Since he knew what was going to happen, and also that he would rise again, how could it be called a sacrifice?
When I became what I in retrospect describe as an ‘agnostic’ these questions vanished from my consciousness. Occasionally, I would trot them out in order to argue with someone who asserted a decided belief in God, but for myself they were no longer live questions. This suggests to me that my ‘agnosticism’ was never an actual position, but rather an evasion. Reacting to the dark spectre of Catholicism, I withdrew not into a new and convinced philosophical position but into a kind of self-constructed box which shut out questions that seemed, to my then consciousness, irrelevant. Perhaps this is a tendency that goes with young adulthood. Children are alive to fundamental questions because they are opening up to reality and are still overawed by all of reality’s possibilities. Older people return to these questions for entirely different reasons. But, in between, perhaps from late teens through to late middle-age, the average citizen of modern society tends to airbrush these questions out of sight. There is a life to be led, an economy to participate in, work to be done, fun to be had.
Another way of putting this would be to say that, from the time I became an adult until I arrived at my forties, I avoided serious consideration of the fundamental meanings of things. I constructed this box for myself and lived within it, allowing the logic of the world to supply all my answers. This is not difficult for an adult in a modern society, because so much of reality is prefabricated, sterile and safe. There is risk, fear, of course, but these can be kept at bay also, by artificial means. Art, which used to have a role in society intimately bound up with religion, nowadays functions to insulate the boxes of the middle-aged evaders from the incursion of reality. It deals, of course, with the fundamental things, but in a compartmentalised way that renders them distant and safe. Like a cultural inoculation, it immunises the citizen against the implications of anything beyond his prefabricated reality. It is, after all, ‘Art,’ which, having its own page in the newspaper, signifies a discipline designed to elevate intelligent people, albeit in a manageable and, where possible, rational way.
To be an agnostic, then, is to enter a landscaped reality which continually tells us that it is the totality of reality. It is to forget what life is, while remaining convinced that you are still in touch with reality.
Thus did I live for more than 20 years. I had tidied the big questions out of my view and was getting on with enjoying myself.
It didn’t at the time, or indeed for a long time afterwards, strike me that there was any particular connection between my taking up drinking and my letting go of religion. If you’d put it to me, I’d have called it a coincidence, or connected the two events only in the sense of both being symptoms of growing up. But now, after many years of thinking about it, I have no doubt that these were not two events, but one. I abandoned one form of spirituality, the kind that sat on a fluffy cloud in the sky, for another that came in bottles. I gave up God and took up the glass.
For alcohol is a kind of higher power, one of a growing number that modern people need to ensure that their prefabricated boxes remain impervious to the encroachment of larger realities.
People think of drink largely as social lubricant, a means for people to relax and be more ‘themselves.’ But its function as relaxant, de-inhibitor, is something of a distraction. It is, fundamentally, a mind altering substance. As well as repressing the layers of social conditioning which serve to police our behaviour, it opens up a previously undreamt of inner universe of creativity, imagination, freedom and joy. Beyond this, because there is no free ride in this world, and because ethyl alcohol is a poison, this chemical facilitator of artificial serenity begins to eat away at the souls of those whose need to preserve their denial of reality requires more and more concentrated doses.
I was born shy. As a child I was a loner who, suffering from a chronic form of bronchitis, spent most of my time at home in bed reading. As a teenager I spread my wings a little, playing a bit of soccer and taking an interest in pop music, but I remained tongue-tied and prone to profound panics when in the company of strangers, especially girls to whom I was even slightly attracted.
This changed about halfway down my second pint of Smithwicks. In Ballaghaderreen one night in the late summer of 1973, myself and Gerry Beirne, who had been my best friend from infants’ class, and from whom I had got both my first guitar and first guitar lesson, had a couple of pints before heading for the Midnight Club. Gerry was already a seasoned drinker, although three months younger than me. I remember still the sense of exhilaration that accompanied me on the walk from the hotel bar to the dancehall, as though I was floating two feet above the ground. I felt no shyness, no inhibition. I had discovered a way of making myself whole. Although I had been going to dances for a while, I danced that night more than I had ever danced before. I talked and laughed with girls. I even ‘squared,’ which is how we described getting off with someone, which back then meant simply walking them home and maybe kissing round a corner from their front door. After this I ‘rested’ from alcohol for nearly a year, half terrified at my discovery, half conscious that I had found an ‘answer’ to nearly all my problems. I was to resume in earnest following the night in the early summer of 1974 when, on my way to Confession, I met a couple of older guys I used to play soccer with in the fair green and elsewhere, who were going to play pool in a local pub. They persuaded me to join them and then prevailed upon me to partake of a glass of cider. During the pool game, I listened to their talk about girls. They were funny and outrageous and made the whole thing sound much less solemn than I had begun to imagine. I became convinced that I needed to invest less energy in prayer and a little more in becoming more like these guys. Not only did I not go to Confession, but the entire experience seemed to offer me a wholly new approach to dealing with reality. I could take control of my life and make things happen with it. I was not a prisoner of reality. I was free.
My relationship with drink over the next seventeen years or so grew out of that first night and its eventual sequel. I never liked the taste of alcohol in any form, but knew that, with enough of it inside me, I could be someone else, someone sharper, more confident, cleverer. It gave me the inner power to act the part of John Waters which I had written in my fantasies. Without drink, I was incapable of functioning in ways that other people seemed to be able to do as a function of personality alone. Drink became my substitute for a personality. With a couple of pints inside me, I could pass for normal.
Just as the world of Harry Potter breaks down into wizards and Muggles, so it seems to me now that the real world breaks down into those who by consent describe themselves as ‘alcoholics' and people who can take a couple of drinks and leave it at that. The word ‘alcoholic’ is completely misunderstood by the Muggle world, so much so that I would hardly ever publicly use the word to describe myself. In the outside world, an alcoholic is someone lying in a gutter clutching a bottle of wine wrapped in a newspaper. He (it is stereotypically a ‘he’) has drunk the farm, beaten the wife and thrown away everything he ever had — due to a craving for this liquid poison. It was never like that for me. Long after I stopped drinking, it was a shock for almost everyone who knew me that I had a problem with it in the first place. ‘You were never like that,’ they would say, meaning the tramp in the gutter with the brown bottle. It didn’t matter. My problem with alcohol related to the extent to which I was incapable of functioning without it. How much or how often I drank didn’t matter. In fact, I could give up drink for weeks, even months on end, but it took me many years to perceive that these breaks, far from signalling an absence of dependency, were themselves entirely focused on the occasion of the next drink, projected weeks or months into the future — my birthday on May 28th, St Patrick’s Day, the beginning of summer. . .
My problem derived from the fact that I needed alcohol in order to be even a shadow of a sociable human being. On the surface I was simply a young man who had perhaps become over-exuberant in his indulgence in the bottle. I hadn’t drunk the farm, beaten the wife or damaged my health beyond redemption. But when I reviewed my drinking years after they had ended, I became convinced that everything about me that worked at all had been built on a foundation of alcohol. I could mix with people, talk to women, dance with abandon, provided I had enough alcohol in my system to overcome whatever was preventing me being normal without it.
The word ‘alcoholic’ is misleading as to the nature of the problem. It implies that the issue is a craving for this liquid that cannot be met in any other way. Certainly this is what it becomes in the later stages of a drinking decline. But that is not the essential nature of it. In the beginning, the condition is defined by a need for something that makes you normal, if not exactly complete. One of the things I began to learn about after I stopped drinking was the ubiquitousness of fear in my life. Without knowing it, I had been afraid of everything: meeting people, conversation, waking up in the morning, going to sleep at night, telephones, unopened envelopes with my name on them, work, responsibility, police officers, people with English accents, fluent Irish speakers, people older than myself, people younger than myself, people my own age. I was afraid of big things and small things. I was afraid in the macro sense of fearing life and death and everything in between, and in the micro sense of not wanting to ask for directions in case my thick-tongued mumble led me into disgrace.
Drink cured all that, or, to be absolutely precise, I was relieved from all this fear when I had drink taken. Not only was I able to face people and situations that otherwise terrified me, but all the dead weight of accumulated little fears became dissipated by the second drink. Of course all the things and situations that terrified me remained unaltered by my drinking (except when, sometimes, they were made much worse), but this perhaps said more about the nature of my fear than about the limitations of my drug of choice. Alcohol often gets a bad press, but it is important to record how effective it can be in meeting the needs of those who use or abuse it.
Modern society, with its pervasive hyper-rationality and supposedly limitless range of technological solutions to its publicly visible problems, has caused us to forget how relatively powerless the individual is to deal with issues for which the society at large feels it has all the answers. In the past, such feelings of impotence were offset by a belief in God. One result of God’s obliteration is that, without anyone — least of all the unbelieving individual — being especially conscious of this, human beings have been burdened with bellyfuls of fear, anxiety and sadness concerning things our antecedents regarded as the will and the responsibility of God. And, blinded to the true source of the problem, we seek increasingly ineffective and even more damaging palliatives for these feelings — drugs and alcohol having become the most readily available non-spiritual antidotes.
We live in a world which claims it has all the answers, but, as isolated, atomised human beings, we are secretly and deeply sceptical about rationality. Sitting in front of my computer screen, I feel at once in control of the universe and also terrified that, in truth, the scope of my extended reach through technology has made me more vulnerable rather than less. If, as sometimes occurs for no apparent reason, my computer behaves in a way that I have never seen it behave before, I find myself experiencing a fear that seems, on the face of it, to be utterly disproportionate to the situation. I may have inadvertently pressed some button or engaged some process which has altered the configuration of the text, or made visible the system of symbols reflecting the underlying organisation system to the programme I am using. I don’t know how to get things back to normal. For a time, I become convinced that this is the worst thing that has ever happened in my life. I may go to bed for a night or two believing, in all seriousness, that my life will never be the same. Deeper down, I am aware of perceiving that, in some vague way, I have expected this to happen, that it is an event perfectly in tune with my innermost expectations. In this deeper sense of things I am aware that my sense of technological adventuring has been an illusion, that I am now more helpless than if I had never owned a computer, and that this sudden remembrance does not really come as a surprise. It is sometimes remarked that, the more ostensibly rational our cultures become, the more the individual is cast back into superstition, because the poverty of religious thought has made us less rather than more rational. We are, in fact, in our very natures, profoundly sceptical about rationality, which means that, the greater our dependencies on things we do not understand or fully control (i.e. almost every aspect of our modern existence), the greater our secret need to admit our limits to ourselves and to life.
When I was drinking, I was oblivious of all this. I imagined that I was simply ‘enjoying myself.’ Of course, in a sense I was enjoying myself, but largely by virtue of the unconscious relief that the balm of alcohol brought me. If you had suggested to me that my life was governed by fear, I would have declared you mad, though I would probably have needed to get a couple of drinks in me beforehand.
And the fear was not just of the kind that can in retrospect be recognised and named. All kinds of rivulets of terror secreted themselves in the fabric of the everyday that would have rendered me immobile without the aid of alcohol. One of the things I began to see clearly after I stopped drinking was that the entire motivational mechanism of my working life was constructed around drink. I had placed drinking sessions strategically between bouts of work in such a way as to get me through what would otherwise have been an ordeal. When I stopped I became immobilised for a while and had to reconstruct my system of self-motivation from the ground up. One of the reasons for this is that, when certain kinds of personalities become introduced to alcohol they cease to develop for as long as the power of alcohol remains available to them. There is no need to learn emotional or other forms of coping skills if all you have to do is fork out for a pint of beer. As a result, whole areas of the heavy drinker’s psychological and emotional apparatuses begin to atrophy. Without drink, he is like a bulb without power: inert, purposeless, waiting. With drink he is effervescent, exultant, alight.
In all Western societies, technology, fear of crime and a tyranny of choice are eroding people’s quality of life despite considerable material gains. Although we enjoy greater affluence, more advanced healthcare, a safer environment and a wider array of labour-saving gadgets than ever, a range of anxieties is hampering the growth of true contentment. Massive gains in material wealth have not resulted in any significant increase in happiness. What we gain at one end of the equation we more than lose at the other. In Britain the proportion of people suffering from ‘anxiety, depression or bad nerves’ has almost doubled from just over five per cent in the past decade. About eight in 10 people believe that Britain has become a more dangerous place over the same period. Ireland generally shows up in such research as more optimistic than Britain, but this may be because we are still benefitting from the residue of traditional society while still relishing the novelty of the modern era. We worry about big things and small, real and improbable. We worry about our children — are they safe, will they succeed in life? We worry about our jobs — will we keep them? Will the multinational for which we work relocate to the Czech Republic?
Much of the anxiety affecting modern societies is covert and often banal. The rise of individualism and increasing specialisation in the workplace means that few people have a full understanding of where they fit into the general picture, or of what their colleagues are doing. Each function is discrete and self-justifying, leaving workers with the feeling that they are not important and could easily be dispensed with. For many, the blurring of boundaries between traditional male/female roles is leading to confusion, while for others the challenge of organising leisure time with so much on offer is another unexpected source of stress. At the domestic level, a fear of science manifests itself in problems understanding the latest technology. ‘Feature overload,’ whereby new gadgets are designed with so many extras that they are rendered almost impossible to use, means that, as one survey indicated, more than half of British people are unable to operate all the features of their video recorders, while nearly three-quarters are unable to use all the features of their personal computer. Nearly one-third are baffled by microwave ovens. Mundane phenomena like utility bills and pensions come with labyrinthine charging structures that can make them almost impossible to analyse. Some companies engage in what is actually called ‘confusion marketing,’ deliberately seeking to hoodwink consumers. Every conceivable facet of human interchange and culture is nowadays broken down into market transactions, and the complexity of this process both boggles the mind of the individual and also multiplies the anxiety about some future collapse of earning potential, with technological complexity mirroring this confusion. We have obliterated many of the extraneous comforts which membership of human society used to confer — neighbourliness, courtesy, chivalry, and so forth — and replaced them with services which are available, sometime with a smile and a ‘Have a nice day,’ but which are deeply unsatisfactory by comparison with the enculturated values which have been destroyed. This renders us utterly dependent on technological means to address even our most intimate needs or concerns, and also terrified that our ability to live in any kind of dignity, safety and comfort depends exclusively on our wealth/earning potential.
Here it becomes pertinent to consider the assassination of God that occurred in post-Sixties culture in many Westernised societies. Previously, God acted as a kind of buffer between the human being and absolute responsibility to be in control of every aspect of his or her own life. Problems could be offered up, handed over or placed for mediation with the Blessed Virgin or Saint Anthony. Now, unless I am able to guarantee my own and my family's safety, security, comfort and happiness, the responsibility rests on my shoulders alone, and this causes me such intolerable anxiety and fear that I am unable to do even the most ordinary things without incurring further stress.
In all the debate about God, we seem to have missed the possibility that there is something in the human being that actually requires to believe in an external power, an absolute horizon of responsibility, and that, without this mechanism, we are being shrivelled up with the fear that comes from having God's responsibilities without God's power. Fear has become the most pervasive element in the life of the modern citizen. Many of these fears remain not only invisible but also unacknowledged and, to a large extent, unconscious. Fear is the root source of addictive behaviours, and fear is really the absence of faith.
The ‘rational’ arguments about the non-existence of God impressed me for quite a while. I had strong motivations for taking them seriously. I wanted to be free. I wanted to be clever. I wanted to convince myself not merely that I no longer needed to kow-tow to those hypocritical priests and bishops, but that my life would become better, more honest, without these childish superstitions. I wanted to think of myself as a rational, reasonable, modern-minded human being.
There is little in the current frenzy of neo-atheistic material about God and his alleged non-existence that I did not at one time or another ventilate in my own life. Religion, because it fed tribalistic animus, was not merely foolish, but actively dangerous. Belief in God was an evolutionary fluke, a byproduct of some once-useful cognitive function, a neurological accident. Religion was a hangover from the primitive mind, and the simple-mindedness of Irish Catholicism was the living proof of this.
Some of those who have set their caps against belief invariably consider that, in discussing the subject in the presence of believers, they are dealing with an intellectually inferior species. For many years I thought like that. It was self-evident, was it not, that anyone who believed that a dead body could rise again, or that water could be changed into wine, was suffering from delusions? It seemed to me that, required to choose between what was visible, intuitive and concrete and what was clearly counterintuitive, immaterial and intangible, a rational person would choose the former. And, from the seemingly solid ground of this resolve, it seemed to follow that the phenomenon of belief had evolved from primitive limits to human understanding. Whatever man did not understand, he ‘explained’ as the actions of ‘the gods.’ In this, there was an implicit acceptance of the superiority of these gods and, by extension, of one’s one inferiority. This did not appeal to me in the least. Religion was childish and old-fashioned. Moreover, I did not need it and could be freer without it.
I have come to a different point of view, and strangely do not now regard this view as less rational than the one I held before. I have come to this view through necessity. The neo-atheists would say that I have come to this position illogically.
It appears to me now to be obvious that humans do not, cannot, know everything. Whereas many scientists tend to speak as if the present condition of relative unknowingness is a temporary and receding condition, my own sense is that the unknowability of reality is of an infinite nature. Faced with infinity and eternity, my most reasonable response is to admit my limitations. One of the ways in which I trace my steps into a partial-explanation for my belief is to say that I had, to begin with, a need. After two decades believing myself the master of myself and, to an extent, my destiny, I came to realize that I was completely at sea in the universe. Eventually, I came back to the idea of God as something useful to me, something necessary for my correct alignment in the world. Didn’t George Bernard Shaw once say something to the effect that the human mind is such a complex and intricate instrument that it surpasses its own ability to comprehend itself? Maybe the difference between what we understand and what we don't understand, we choose to call God. Or maybe all the ‘rationalisations’ and ‘explanations’ as to why God does not exist are themselves dissolved by the possibility that an omnipotent, all-seeing God must surely have anticipated them. Put another way, isn’t it likely that God, if He exists at all, created us in such a say as to make human belief in him a natural if not instinctive phenomenon? Establishing, therefore, that ‘religious’ belief is something we seem to have created in our own heads becomes tautologous. Arriving at a scientific explanation for why our brains seek to imagine deities may therefore amount to no more than a clearer understanding of the way God works within us.
None of this, of course, confirmed God’s existence, but it did enable me to reestablish solidarity with those who have continued to believe in him. I began to see that such people were not necessarily irrational, still less stupid, They were behaving in accordance with the rational configuration of their need.
Believing in God is a choice I make based on my need and on my nature. I don't really know if God exists or not, but I have long believed that, even if He doesn't, we humans have an urgent necessity to imagine Him.
There remains in modern society the perception that drug and alcohol abuse is some kind of isolated siding into which people get shunted for various reasons to do with their exposure to drink and/or drugs. This may be partly true, but it is probably also the case that, if an individual who becomes addicted had not taken up alcohol, he or she would very likely have fallen into some other kind of self-destructive behaviour, and this, rather than the particular crutch that is chosen, is what needs to be observed.
There is, in other words, an underlying condition which renders an individual susceptible to addiction. I also happen to believe that, while this may have certain symptoms which exist within the individual, there is also a societal dimension.
More than six decades ago, William D. Silkworth, a medical doctor consulted by the embryonic Alcoholics Anonymous, defined two of the key symptoms of alcoholism as physical allergy and mental compulsion. This means that (a) the body of an alcoholic is not the same as the body of a non-alcoholic; and (b) those who drink abusively are drinking to overcome a craving beyond their mental control. The only hope of recovery, Dr Silkworth asserted, is ‘an entire psychic change.’
It is an article of faith in Alcoholics Anonymous that alcoholism is a disease. And this disease, according to Silkworth’s analysis, can only be cured by a spiritual transformation. Up to a point I am comfortable enough with the idea that what we know as alcoholism, like many forms of addiction, is some kind of spiritual malaise, though I have problems with the way this concept can be employed by some alcoholics to absolve themselves from responsibility for their actions. If their condition is a ‘disease,’ they reckon, they can’t be blamed when it breaks out every so often like a recurring rash. This, I believe, is dangerous foolishness. But, such is the paradoxical nature of this condition that I also recognise the lack of usefulness in deconstructing the disease theory. This is a classic example of a topic in which the ‘truth’ may not be as useful as a certain form of constructed, workable error. Anyone who ever managed to overcome a problem with alcohol has lots of theories about what alcoholism is, but most of these theories remain largely untested because none of them is worth the risk of it being wrong.
I gave up drinking at the age of 35. Everyone who drinks even a little too much has a satchelful of colourful anecdotes of atrocities, calamities, near misses and excruciating episodes of what amounts to public breakdown of personal identity due to intoxication or alcoholic decline. The incidents, of themselves, are not important. What matters is that I once drank a fair deal, couldn’t handle it, and stopped. When people ask me nowadays why I don’t drink, I respond with a line from the comedian Billy Connolly: ‘I wanted to stop while it was still my own idea.’ It conveys the reality to those clued-in enough to hear, dissipates the tension that seems to gather around such discussions in Ireland, and saves time.
I had briefly encountered Alcoholics Anonymous a couple of years before, when I went to meetings for a few months, but had broken out later and, while understanding my own need to be rid of the bottle, did not feel motivated enough to go back. I therefore spent five years as what I later heard described as a ‘dry drunk,’ i.e. someone who gives up alcohol without a spiritual programme. It worked for me, in the sense that I managed to stay away from alcohol. Later on, events occurred on my life which, though ostensibly unconnected to drinking, brought me to a point where I recalled the warmth I had encountered on first entering the rooms of AA, and, having no other options, decided to see what it might offer. Over the next few years I was able to obtain a sense of the topography of my condition which revolutionised my thinking about myself.
Soon, for example, I gained insight into why the fellowship of AA looks askance at the idea of trying to give up drink on the basis of willpower alone. The programme of AA insists that willpower is not enough, and the Big Book refers to alcohol as ‘cunning, baffling, powerful.’ Because there are different levels of intensity associated with various compulsive/addictive behaviours, some are relatively easy to treat and others almost impossible. Some such behaviours may well be resolved by willpower alone. Others require a rewriting of the mental programme which, by creating and maintaining certain associations, serve to propel the addictive behaviour. Invariably, these programmes have to do with either pleasurable or painful associations concerning the addictive behaviour, and it is necessary to deconstruct these logics if the addictive behaviour is to be addressed.
Willpower can work with less virulent addictions, such as cigarette smoking (cigarette addicts will not agree). But there are some addictions which, by their nature, have an inbuilt defence against almost any attempt to rewrite the underlying belief system, and an addiction to alcohol is one such. The issue is not whether the condition is genetic, or even whether it has, for example, an allergenic dimension — the point is that it occurs beyond the normal reach of the individual's ability to self-correct. Because alcohol is a mood altering drug, it sabotages attempts to rearrange the belief system which has created the addiction. In AA they say that alcoholism is the only disease that constantly tells you that you don’t have it. But more fundamentally, the very nature of the inebriated state, or indeed the mindset which persistent drunkenness engenders, is utterly resistant to attempts to constructively change the personality of the sufferer. The state of inebriation is so attractive, and the escape so complete while it lasts, that, without some additional elements being brought to bear, the alcoholic mindset rejects even the notion that change is necessary. It resists intervention in the way a drowning man fights off his rescuer.
The outside world anticipates Alcoholics Anonymous as a fanatical cult which brainwashes its members against the evils of indulgence. No, AA offers perhaps the most sensational programme for living that has ever been presented in one coherent entity and suggests, yes suggests, that, if you want to begin living a decent and happy life, you think about following it. The programme of AA amounts to a distillation of the wisdom of the ages, gathered together by desperate but brilliant minds, as an arsenal against the encroachment of the dark side of human nature. It calls itself a ‘spiritual programme’ and certainly it offers a spiritual prescription. But it is first and foremost a psychological programme, which, knowing the nature of the mentality it is dealing with, presents a staged and digestible blueprint for dealing with life’s difficulties.
The ‘one day at a time’ concept is a classic example of something that is known about on the outside but utterly misunderstood. In the logic of the Muggle world, 'one day at a time’ conveys a clinging on to sobriety in spite of near overwhelming temptation, a joyless existence filled with dreams about drink. But although embracing the idea of not drinking for today, the concept is not primarily related to drink at all. What it tells me is that today is both the only day I have to endure and also the only day that is available to me. I should not, therefore, either allow it to overwhelm me or let it to slip away untasted. On any given day, either one of these imperatives will be uppermost. I have had days filled with fear, when the total implications of an unfolding situation caused me to become paralysed with terror and have found myself able to unravel that terror by remembering that I only need to survive until bedtime. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. On other days, I have found myself so focused on some future event — a date, my birthday, seeing my beloved daughter again — that I have been absent from the present moment. The programme tells me to live now, right where I am. It tells me to smell the flowers as I walk along and to wear my best shirt today.
The literature of Alcoholics Anonymous is very specific about the physiological dimension of the condition. Alcoholism, it insists, is a ‘disease.’ My belief is that this notion, if taken too literally, can be unhelpful to the alcoholic in need of a good shoe up the backside. But in general, again, it works. And the reason it works, I believe, is this: in order to impress upon the still suffering addict that his own sense of powerlessness is not the definitive word on the subject, it is necessary to allow him off the hook of absolute responsibility for his condition. This both reassures him in relation to various previous failed attempts at giving up the booze, and also prepares him for the central plank of the AA programme: the idea of God As We Understand Him.
I have never met anyone who had a problem with alcohol who could say that they had been cured to the extent of becoming a normal social drinker again. AA developed a practical treatment for alcoholism at a time when the problem baffled everyone else. There are, of course, people who stop drinking without the help of AA, but there is a complete absence of information as to how they are faring in the contexts that AA’s philosophy has identified as central to the total rehabilitation of the addict. And, of course, those alcoholics who go back drinking invariably provide poor evidential back-up for those who say there are ways of curing alcoholism outside of daily total abstinence in AA. It may well be that its principles work in a sense that is mistaken or misleading, but the danger of too much deconstruction is obvious. In a context where most of those requiring treatment come in at their lowest ebb — physically, mentally and spiritually — it is necessary for the programme to explain itself in the simplest terms possible. There is in AA an ingrained opposition to analysis of its principles — ‘paralysis by analysis’ — purely because any sense of the paradoxical nature, complexity or ambiguity of some of the principles might not be helpful to the addict just in off the street. In this context, the disease theory does a job. Call it a necessary simple-mindedness.
Alcoholics Anonymous sets out to achieve two things: to reconstruct the mindset of the alcoholic and to restore the fractured relationship of the alcoholic with God. Generally speaking, these two objectives amount to the same thing. But before that, and as an absolute prerequisite, the sufferer has to be persuaded that he is not, himself, God. There is a book which one occasionally encounters in AA called Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, in which the author, Ernest Kurtz, reminds his readers that ‘the fundamental and first message of Alcoholics Anonymous to its members is that they are not infinite, not absolute, not God. Every alcoholic’s problem had first been, according to this insight, claiming God-like powers, especially that of control.’ Kurtz’s book is dense but worth the effort, a richly rewarding work for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of addiction in its social context. He identifies alcoholism as a disease — rather, a ‘dis-ease’ — of modernity, an expression of the human being’s confusion at the fracturing of the human personality, the separation of the physical from the mental from the spiritual in a rational, secular, industrial context. Centrally, AA seeks to lead the recovering alcoholic to a reintegration of these three elements, defining alcoholism as a threefold — ‘physical, mental, spiritual’ — condition. In his scintillating analysis of addiction as a byproduct of modernity, Kurtz quotes my middle-namesake Saint Augustine: ‘Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.’ At the back of AA’s ‘spiritual programme.’ writes Kurtz, is the idea that it is precisely ‘this thirst for transcendence that expressed itself in the alcoholic’s addictive, obsessive-compulsive drinking. The thirst for transcendence had been perverted into a thirst for alcohol. . . [One of AA’s founders] Bill Wilson at times observed to trusted correspondents that the alcoholic seemed to be an especially sensitive person, one haunted by a particularly pressing need for transcendence. That, he and others suggested, was why the spiritual program of Alcoholics Anonymous worked. It spoke to the need for transcendence by offering the alcoholic real contact with the spiritual.’ Addiction is prone to strike free spirits who have glimpsed Infinity while remaining imprisoned in their earthly bodies. The alcoholic, having dreamt of transcendence, cannot abide ‘real’ life, but desires to be in heaven, right here, right now, all the time.
It is possible to be around AA and have a profound sense of the spiritual dimension of the programme, a sense replicating that of one’s early childhood about God and goodness and so forth. It is also possible to survive in AA and have a sense that the ingenious AA concept of ‘God As I Understand Him’ is simply a clever psychological trick, designed to lure the addict out of his own dualistic sense of omnipotence/impotence, and into a more relaxed, surrendering frame of mind. In other words, God in AA terms may be more a psychological than a spiritual phenomenon. It is possible, indeed, for a recovering alcoholic to remain unconvinced about God and still gain the benefit of having a functioning Higher Power in his life. The point is that sincerity doesn’t matter: willingness is all. This approach has been found to work, possibly because, in western societies, almost everyone grows up with some sense of a God, and has therefore a hardwired association between God and goodness, morality, virtue, restraint and all the other values which we tend to associate with the religious part of our upbringing. Thus, AA reconditions the rusty mechanism which once drove the individual alcoholic’s sense of moral rectitude. In doing so, it restores the remembered moral framework of the individual, but it also does something else: it relieves the individual of the burden of worrying about the world, of carrying the weight of every detail of existence on a single pair of frail shoulders.
A central element of the AA programme is the idea that people who have abused alcohol have done so because they are seeking to fill what might be termed a ‘God-shaped hole’ in their psyches. But there is also an apparently paradoxical tendency to seek to occupy the throne God has been forced to vacate, and this is telling in respect of the wider experience of a society which has abandoned its faith, in which addictions of numerous kinds are multiplying. The fundamental problem has been that drugs and alcohol enable the addict to feel, falsely and temporarily, that his becoming God may not be such a preposterous idea after all. By dulling his sense of personal impotence, his drug of ‘choice’ lulls him into a feeling of omnipotence, which remains for as long as the drug is functional and available.
In the AA and drug rehab recovery programmes, therefore, God is, in this sense, purely functional as a way of counteracting the previous functionality of alcohol. In a way, what the AA blueprint does is to set about rewriting the mental programmes of addicts, using their own idea of God as the ultimate witness, since experience has shown that this offers the best chance of getting the rewritten programme to take. This same process also replaces the chemical dependency, born of fear and a sense of inadequacy, with precisely that which it displaced in the course of its virulent assault. There is a chapter in the ‘Big Book,’ aka Alcoholics Anonymous, ‘We Agnostics,’ which in its deadpan title conveys the reality of alcoholism: all alcoholics, whatever the appearances, had succumbed to the temptation to remove God from His throne and take the seat themselves.
Those who graduate through Alcoholics Anonymous are warned of, among many things, the dangers of complacency, of describing yourself as cured. The programme of AA does not promise to turn you into someone who no longer drinks, but only to help the alcoholic to resist the first drink, one day at a time. By AA logic, I will never be ‘cured’ of alcoholism but am sober today by the grace of God. I understand the logic of this, but no longer feel bound by it. I think of myself nowadays as an ex-drinker. I don’t believe I will ever drink again. This doesn’t mean I am complacent, but it does mean that I no longer see myself as someone who has to spend every waking moment on guard against the revisitation of addiction.
Another thing that is discouraged in AA is the idea of people who have come through the fellowship making public statements about the programme, such as I’m doing by writing about my experience like this. There is a good reason for this also: if someone who has declared publicly that he has come through the programme were to relapse, this might discourage others from seeking the help they need on the basis that the programme doesn’t work. Again, there is an irrefutable logic in this, but it seems to me that the world today, perhaps more than ever, has a need to hear about and how AA has managed to save millions of people from a grisly and ignominious demise. Alcoholism is itself already a death of the spirit, but untreated it has but two outcomes: madness and literal, physical, death.
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