Measurements, Half-Measures and Other Lies

My attitude about statistical studies of success rates for AA vs. other programs vs. no program has changed since starting my own recovery. In the past, I used these studies as a way of defending my denial of my own alcoholism. I latched on to studies showing AA had a failure rate worse than no program at all, that well over 90% of those who attempt to stay sober in AA in fact drink again. I saw programs that teach you to drink in moderation (not that I ever tried them). I've seen arguments that AA is dying, membership is declining. I've seen some hostile debunking of AA on the web -- the most notorious, apparently, is The Orange Papers.

I was very interested in these studies -- they still are fascinating to me. There are a couple methodological problems with any study of alcoholic behavior, though:

1. Measuring "successful" recovery from a chronic condition like alcoholism is tricky.
2. Alcoholics lie.

The second problem is obvious. The first one bears some discussion. The most common measure of success is 90 days of sobriety after starting the program. By that measure, I am a "failure": I relapsed for a couple weeks in my first thirty days, then started over and here I am. Almost everyone I know in AA is a "failure" by that measure. And people know it, too. One lady likes to introduce herself when sharing as one of the handful of "successes," who came in and never relapsed after joining the first time. On the other hand, there are people in AA who were "successes" for many years -- until they went out and got drunk, and had to come back in and start over. God knows how many alcoholics are now miserable drunks, or dead, because after a time of "success" went out and got drunk and never came back.

In any case, is AA the only way for anyone to stay sober? Probably not. Is it the only way for me to stay sober? Probably. Most of us in AA have no desire to try to stay sober outside of AA. We LIKE AA. We like the fellowship. We like how it changes us inside. We're happier in AA than we ever were outside AA, drunk or sober. The alternative, to us, is to try to "white knuckle" ourselves dry through self-will -- and that sounds like hell, a miserable way to live, if we can do it at all.

Drink in moderation? Yeah, right. All of us have tried that a million times. Just another half-measure.

I have to say some more about The Orange Papers. I'm not going to try to argue with the guy. He's a lot smarter than I am, his volume is prodigious, and his intelligence has been honed to a razor point by obsessive, angry, righteous self-will. In other words, he's off on a hell of a dry drunk.

I don't know why he hates AA so much. I'm fascinated by him, though, because he's an object lesson in alcoholic thinking. To paraphrase: The Big Book means the opposite of what it says. Bill W was an insane, manipulative, self-aggrandizing cheat. AA is a fascist cult. AA doesn't work for everyone, therefore it's a dangerous fraud. All we care about is winning converts. We cease thinking and do whatever AA commands us to do. Some old-timers are angry and bitter, and some guys sponsor nubile female newcomers just to 13th-step them (in my town, we only sponsor the same sex we are -- I can just hear my sponsor if I told him I wanted to sponsor a woman), therefore we are all cynical fakes. And so on.

Yeah, AA does sound a bit like a cult, on the surface. We're a bunch of true-believers, we have a book, we have a lot of slogans. If it is a cult, though, it's the lousiest-run one there ever was. No one is in charge. No one tells anyone else what they have to do. No one gets thrown out. No one is forced into it. No one seems to be really sure how or why the hell it seems to work. Above all, no one tells anyone else what, if anything, they ought to believe or believe in. Some cult.

Most old-timers, far from acting like "elders," are just in awe of it; they don't pretend to have all the answers, other than "my program that works for me would be suicide for you, and vice versa." Most of us have a sense of gratitude that we are among the lucky few who have been able to stay with AA long enough for the miracle to happen. Is AA membership declining? I don't know, maybe it is. Is AA dying? Not a chance!

I particularly get a kick out of his rage at courts sentencing DUI malefactors to AA meetings. To him, this is unconstitutional, and a result of the insidious AA conspiracy infiltrating the court system to win converts and swell the ranks of AA. My God -- these guys with the court slips are so happy to sit through a few meetings instead of go to jail! And you know what? Some of them stick around and get sober and happy -- not because anyone forces them to, but because they choose to stay.

Fascist? Follow this: AA grew out of The Oxford Group, founded by Paul Buchman, an American Lutheran minister, who wanted to change society by reaching out to and transforming the social, economic and political elite of a community, and then the changes would "trickle down" to the ordinary folks. That's what Buchman thought would work. So, in the 1930's he attempted to implement it on a big scale by trying to get through to Hitler and thereby transform German society. Buchman was criticized roundly by the likes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran minister who opposed Hitler and died in a concentration camp. So, the argument goes, Buchman wanted to communicate with Hitler in the 1930s, therefore AA is fascist.

But wait... why did Bonhoeffer criticize Buchman? Not because Bonhoeffer thought Buchman was a Hitler sympathizer, or fascist, or Nazi, but because he disagreed with Buchman's tactics: Bonhoeffer believed (rightly, we now know) that Hitler was beyond reach, beyond change, and could only be opposed.

The connection of Buchman with AA is academic, anyway. Did you know Up With People was an offshoot of The Oxford Group, too? (It's true!) Therefore everyone in AA wants to wear pullover sweaters and perform clean-cut up-beat pop songs at half-time of the Orange Bowl...

Well, I've gone on too much about The Orange Papers. Read it yourself and make your own judgment. If the guy gets wind of this, I imagine he'll respond in his angry, superior way and rip me to shreds with his logic. Poor bastard.