Not-God (30 page)

The Enlightenment’s enthronement of human autonomy sprang from a two-edged revolt that aimed to protect the truly human from debasing encroachment by other humans. Enlightenment thinkers labored mightily to attain for mankind
freedom
. First and foremost in this endeavor, they cast off as superstition all sense of mysteriously hidden forces beyond human understanding and control. To man belonged the responsibility as well as the right to determine and to shape human destiny. Second, but as part of this same commitment, the leading minds of the Enlightenment rejected all human claims to embrace or to represent any Absolute.
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Given the definition of human freedom as individual autonomy, the Enlightenment was a success and its modernity has ever more triumphed. But the very victory of the modern has proved ironically hollow if one of the responsibilities of attained human freedom is service to human happiness. The irony is most poignantly revealed, and its relevance to Alcoholics Anonymous most clearly seen, in one key, pivotal Enlightenment idea — a new understanding born in that age that has boomeranged to generate almost infinite unhappiness: “Man is by nature insatiable, and it is the will of his maker that he should be so.”
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That human freedom meant insatiable craving was only the first irony, for other incongruities were intermingled with the Enlightenment insight. Because Enlightenment thinkers proposed to break all chains of superstition, they claimed to abolish all intelligent belief in and claims for mysteriously hidden forces beyond human rationalization and control. Yet a bare century after the triumph of the French Revolution had irreversibly established the path of modernity, something unexpected occurred, eluding Enlightenment assumptions about rationalization and control. The new insatiability of the quest for rationalization and control began to discover or create its own esoteric secrets and its own recondite mysteries — if not so evidently its own profound absolutes. Subtly and in newly secularized garb, an ancient intuition revived and a classic paradox regained command: that which was most real was least tangible.
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The triumphs of rationalization and control, especially in an era moving simultaneously and self-consciously toward increased equality and greater democracy, soon revealed themselves as paradoxical indeed. The scourge of sickness offers a good example. Less and less was sickness understood in its ancient sense, as a form of admonition or punishment by a Hidden God or an ultimate reality. In that former understanding, any person enjoyed at least some hope of control insofar as he could conform himself to ultimate reality. Now the triumph of modernity proclaimed illness to be the product of mysterious entities called germs and viruses, visible if at all only to skilled eyes assisted by long training and by special and costly microscopes. And all people yielded more and more of any sense of control over their own lives to a new priesthood of medicine, with its acolytes of technology, prelates of public health, and hierarchies of hospital administration.
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An example. Symbolically, in a space of less than eighteen months, Roentgen’s discovery of the “x-ray” and Freud’s first published claim for the determinism of the “unconscious” joined to proclaim the ultimate result of “enlightened” methods of investigation. The most importantly real things could not by definition be “seen” — at least not by “ordinary” men. Descartes’s criterion of the “clear and distinct” thus became the hallmark of falsehood rather than the guarantee of truth. Soon Planck and Heisenberg, representatives of the model modern science of physics, came along to pick up — and throw away — any lingering loose scraps of the ultimate certainty that the Enlightenment quest had set out to realize. Such direct correlation of ultimate hiddenness with ultimate reality was hardly what Enlightenment thinkers had in mind when they set their definition of “modern.”
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Another paradoxical irony: the Enlightenment definition of the human as autonomous gave birth to another ever more flourishing characteristic of modernity — a sense of crisis concerning human identity. This paradox is not unrelated to the first, for running parallel to the modern tendency to locate ultimate reality as hidden within has been the democratic era’s inclination to seek identity as something bestowed from without. This search for identity was pursued in two ways: one, by devoting increasing attention to what an individual
does
or
makes
as defining the
being
of the self; two, by expanding the sense that one is defined by others — a person is as he or she is treated; to be human is to shape one’s being according to the expectations and responses of others.
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Post-Enlightenment man professes devotion to openness and fundamental faith in the possibilities of change. Yet it seems less from these commitments than from an unthinking relativism which denies the concept of essence that modern thinkers derive their understanding of the meaning of human. Post-Enlightenment thought tends to interpret products as producing their producer. “Mr. Carpenter,” for example, is not
one who
saws, hammers, and joins; he is
the carpenter
, who chooses recreations, educates his children, and even shares love
as a carpenter
. Moderns tend to dismiss
persons who think
by sheer labeling of the assumed source of their thought: “Oh yes, well, of course, he’s a policeman, a psychologist, a professor, a property owner,” or whatever.

Further and as a corollary of that same relativism, post-Enlightenment man tries to analyze relationships among persons as a series of transient
roles
rather than as rooted in any enduring
identity
. “Are you speaking now as my friend or as my stockbroker?” “He used to be my doctor, now he’s my friend,” tells little if anything about
who he
is. lacking such an anchor as
identity
, even the metaphor of growth — which implies a goal — has been overcome by the terminology of flux, and a welter of attention to externally determined “stages” and nebulous “process” has all but demolished any concept of
personhood
. But perhaps children raised through “The Terrible Twos” were inevitably destined to agonize over their “Trying Twenties” on the way to “Catch-30” and “The Age 40 Crucible,” their only goal “Renewal.”
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Roles and process, essentially transient and variable, offer scant basis for stability and so little sense of self-as-person. Ever increasingly, moderns feel their humanity precarious. From two very different directions, the two classic critiques of twentieth-century man-in-society have attempted to speak to this point.

The Marxist insight, albeit “modern,” offered a profound criticism of modernity. Marxist thought located the
meaning
of “being human” in what humans make or produce, thus embracing modernity’s sense of ultimate power and so of absolute autonomy. But in the Marxist challenge of capitalism’s separation of the worker from the products of his labor lies a deeper protest: even if humans “make” reality, human beings themselves can never
become
products, commodities. What one does or makes can never
become
what one is.
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The relationship between
being
and
doing
also exercised the ingenuity of existentialist philosophers, and their investigation of modernity’s understanding of it carried to a deeper disjunction. For thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and especially Martin Heidegger, the truth of human existence as Being-in-the-world had been lost. The Cartesian
cogito
with its futile quest for absolute objectivity was the final wedge that split man and his world irrevocably asunder. Dissatisfied further with role as ultimate, these philosophers and their hybrid offspring attempted to quench the thirst for identity-as-human by directing sole attention to sheer be-ing and very is-ness — to use the tortured language that the modern age imposed upon their very efforts to confront it.
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Existentialist thinkers, searching from the depths of the twentieth century, sought to specify for their time the Enlightenment insight that “human” meant
free
. They found only a paltry and pathetic shadow of the Enlightenment vision of human autonomy. For Sartre, the ultimate freedom was to say, “No!” Heidegger found freedom — and so authenticity — in the embrace of human finitude. Can it surprise that the historical moment bracketed by
Sein und Zeit
and
L’être et le néant
gave birth to the Alcoholics Anonymous of “not the first drink,” “one day at a time,” and “not-God?” Significantly, existentialist insights, at times directly but most often in garbled form, infuse virtually all popular psychotherapies of the later twentieth century. “Who am I really?” and “Why do I feel so empty?” are the questions most psychotherapists hear most consistently even if usually only implicitly. Despite Marxist and existentialist insight, therapeutic training has taught most modern therapists to follow one of two approaches. If they practice as depth psychologists, they focus client attention on the hidden reality within. If they operate as behavior therapists, they help the client change his doings and makings. Most often, in either case, the client’s presenting questions remain unanswered. “Success” in therapy seems to mean repressing the questions as “meaningless” — strange therapy indeed for an age committed to rationalization and control.
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Fittingly, our examination of the Enlightenment-modern ironies of the hidden as real and identity as requiring search have brought us to the psychotherapist’s office, for the twentieth century is pre-eminently the Age of Psychology. Its vaunted claim has been acknowledged as “The Triumph of the Therapeutic” — but in the saddest irony of all by a careful scholar who reminded, correctly, that the goal of therapy is not healing wholeness but “understanding.” “Religion,” Philip Rieff cautioned, “is where therapy leads when it takes on hope.”
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If so, if
religion
is where therapy leads when it takes on hope, then effort expended to understand Alcoholics Anonymous as a religious expression of American hope in the therapeutic twentieth century is a worthy historical endeavor.

The twentieth century began in America with the “Progressive Era” — a self-conscious quickening of hope in the possibilities of extending rationalization and control in service to human happiness and fulfillment. The era’s philosophers and economists agreed in identifying “doing” and “making” with
being
— that is, with being “American.” Its psychologists built on a controlling assumption that understood imitation and socialization as the root of as well as the route to mature adulthood as an American. The Progressives consequently sought to apply rationalization and control, so successful in the technological and economic spheres, to the political and psychological lives of their fellow citizens. They instituted manipulative reforms such as proportional representation and city-manager government, hailing them as especially progressive in cities swollen by immigrants needing to be
made
“American.” The movement called “Americanization” reflects this. An earlier generation of immigrants had enjoyed the privilege
of becoming
American. The Progressives wrested this privilege from a later immigrant generation’s grasp, and made “Americanization” the onerous task of native-born Americanizers. Meanwhile still others devised “improvements” such as assembly-line production and advertising for mass consumption. Despite the premonitions of a few that this effort to extend rationalization and control to humans themselves was essentially flawed, despite suspicions that the insatiability inherent in the twin goals of efficiency and democracy led them to become at some point contradictory rather than complementary, most saw the grandest of goals as capable of achievement — and soon. The Progressives were certain that American culture stood poised on the threshold of the fulfillment of modernity.
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It did not cross that threshold. The idealism invigorated by American intervention in World War I broke down in the aftermath of the contagious cynicism of Versailles, and a population accustomed to the deflationary economy of the late nineteenth century found it impossible to comprehend, much less to cope with, the inflationary underside of their very modernity. Pained and confused, Americans retreated, internationally into isolationism and domestically into privacies. Even the abundance was for most illusory. At the height of the twenties’ “boom,” over sixty per cent of American wage earners supported their families on less than the income required for a minimum standard of decent living.
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Still, in the twenties, some roared and some soared until the Crash of 1929. The thirties brought depression to all, and new attempts at community for almost all. In the forties, surprise attack led to a war that ended in hollow triumph as new fears emerged. Then, in the 1950s, there was Korea with its hint of limitation; and there flourished a curious mixture of suspicion and complacency rendered tolerable only by denial that it existed. The decade of the sixties brought in every way too much for even the insatiable. There were the enthusiastic idealisms of Camelot and the New Frontier, the confidence-shattering violence of assassinations, and an increasing mistrust of government not unrelated to increasing immersion in an increasingly unpopular war.
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A sense of limitation was clearly and distinctly born. A “consumer movement” arose and soon sired offspring that made earlier concerns for conservation look amateurish. Adversarial relationships began to displace the presumption of even the existence of a “common good” as groups of newly self-conscious underdogs of every variety sought to impose their own definition of “equality.” “Doing good” itself became suspect as the sixties turned into the seventies, and the spectacle of a virtually impeached vice-president, then president, shattered lingering altruisms. Dedication to rationalization and control had led, paradoxically, to the sense that, in human affairs at least, the only rational understanding was that there could be no effective control over all the contingencies and complexities so newly and carefully made understandable.
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