THE TWELVE STEPS: “THESE ARE THE WORDS”
A Radical Look at Recovery is an exegesis on the exact words handed down to the time of this writing, which constitute “the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery,” in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Words are vitally important in our lives, and they’ve been vitally important for millennia. “These are the words,” is a reference to a phrase employed in well-known, ancient literature from the Near East.
In English, the famous book is called Deuteronomy. In Hebrew, it’s called Dvarim, “Words.” The custom was to title a book after its first (specific) word. Deuteronomy begins with the phrase, Ayleh ha-dvarim אֵלֶּה הַדְּבָרִים , “These are the words….” This particular phrase was employed to indicate the writer was quoting another source.
It’s easy to see, then as now, that pains could be taken to ensure that the “right” words were used, not merely to quote accurately, but to relate the meaning intended.
Since this is about the meaning of certain words, let’s begin with the unusual one in the title: radical. We’re all products of our times and, in these times, the meaning of this word which likely first springs to mind is “extreme.” Radical also means: “relating to or forming the root, basis, or foundation of something; original, primary,” (from Latin radix “root”). [OED Online]
A Radical Look at Recovery is not concerned with the origin of the Twelve Steps. Much information about that is available through many other sources, some of it conflicting. Undisputed is the genesis of the Steps in The Oxford Group (originally called A First Century Christian Fellowship; subsequently called Moral Re-Armament; presently Initiatives of Change) founded by Franklin Buchman of Pennsylvania in 1921, with which the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous were intimately familiar. Rather, the primary concern here is the Twelve Steps as they are currently purveyed and codified in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, and in countless other places in and outside the fellowship of AA: the Twelve Steps which have been “suggested as a program of recovery,” unchanged since their initial publication in 1939.
In addition to Alcoholics Anonymous, more insight into the Twelve Steps is available in the book, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Those publications, and others approved by the General Service Conference of AA, largely describe the how and why of the Twelve Steps. This treatise is concerned with the what and revisits the precise wording that has become completely fixed through generations of reprinting and distribution.
While no rolls or records are maintained, the “fellowship” of Alcoholics Anonymous has ostensibly grown to membership in the millions. That makes for a lot of people saying innumerable things about “the program” of Alcoholics Anonymous, which has doubtlessly caused the definition of this “program” to seem somewhat malleable: it means different concepts and actions to different people. Many members consider attendance at meetings and reading certain literature to be part of “the program.” One may often hear from AA members that the program is “in the first 164 pages of the Big Book.”
For many years, Alcoholics Anonymous has offered an item in their literature catalog called How It Works. Its current description is, “An excerpt in large type from Chapter 5 of the Big Book. This page, which includes the Twelve Steps, is often read at the start of meetings.” Indeed, it is difficult to find an AA meeting which doesn’t hold to the practice of reciting this document.
Initially, the Twelve Steps were not as sacrosanct as the Twelve Traditions, or even the Warranties of the AA Conference Charter. The Traditions and Warranties were placed outside the machinations of the annual Conference, in AA’s original Charter of 1955. Not until 1976 did the Conference, itself, resolve to move the Twelve Steps beyond its purview, making it the third item to require “consent of the AA groups of the world” for any official change or amendment.
–The AA Service Manual (S104)
In this excerpt is a particular definition: “Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery….” The suggested program of recovery is “the steps we took,” which are then enumerated. These Steps are not only recited at the start of most meetings, they’re posted in most meeting places. While they may only be “suggested,” these Steps are the “program of recovery” within Alcoholics Anonymous, the only program purveyed by the Fellowship, with no specific alternatives proffered.
These are the words of those Twelve Steps:
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
COMMUNICATION AND MEANING
“There exists in the world today tremendous distortions in meaning as men try to communicate with one another. The job of achieving understanding and insight into mental processes of others is much more difficult and the situation more serious than most of us care to admit.”
—Edward T. Hall. The Silent Language. (Doubleday & Company, 1959.)
We apprehend our surroundings through our senses, and no other way. Even if one posits a “sixth sense,” it is a sense, nonetheless, and becomes just one more gateway to receive information about our surroundings. It is not beyond the bounds of definition to say, then, that our surroundings communicate to us.
Do we communicate to our surroundings? Certainly we communicate most clearly to
others of our own species…and more clearly to life-forms possessing sense
organs similar to our own than those which do not.
COMMUNICATE (verb used without object): to give or interchange thoughts, feelings, information, or the like, by writing, speaking, etc.
The origin of spoken language among humans lies in the unreachably distant past, but its function remains unchanged: to communicate—to transfer information. Probably deriving from simple sounds for pleasure, pain, alarm and the like, human primates developed an incredibly extensive range of vocalizations to communicate nuances of meaning. Science has not yet unravelled the mystery:
“Archaeologists have identified various milestones in human behavior in the 5-million-year evolutionary void between animal communication and human speech, but there is no consensus on which achievements imply the capacity for language.”
—Science 27 Feb 2004 (Vol. 303, Issue 5662, pp. 1316-1319)
Countless species in the animal kingdom make sounds to communicate with others of their kind. In many cases, one species is even able to discern the audible message of another species, as dogs, horses, and others do with humans; nevertheless, experts in the field don’t equate communication with language:
“There is no doubt that animals communicate. Bees can demonstrate the direction and distance of a source of food. Dolphins make noises that function like names. Animals from one region can share sounds that differ from groups in another, leading researchers to talk of animal ‘dialects’. Then there are the remarkable achievements of Koko and her primate predecessors, including a chimp delightfully named Nim Chimpsky.
“Yet there is an important distinction between communication and language. Take the misleading term “body language.” It is sometimes claimed that words convey just 7% of meaning, and that body language and tone of voice do the rest. This wildly overstretches an old study which found that most emotional messaging—as opposed to the propositional kind—comes from tone and body language, especially when a neutral word such as ‘maybe’ was used. But try conveying a fact like ‘It will rain on Tuesday’ with your eyebrows, and the difference becomes clear. Language allows for clear statements, questions and commands.”
–The Economist (July 5, 2018)
While the nuanced distinction between language and communication in the animal kingdom may be arguable, it is uncontested that no species other than Homo sapiens, converts and conveys the audible message in writing.
A spoken word lasts only as long as the sound it takes to make it. A word written can last millennia. Writing ended the vast unrecorded age of “prehistory,” and began “history.”
Prior to writing’s arrival, great effort was expended through recitation to ensure a message survived: mnemonics and chanting were honed to their extreme; nevertheless, there was no irrefutable proof that the recitation was precise. Only if one knew how to write, could one’s exact words be recited—even long after the writer’s demise—exactly as they had been originally scribed. Indeed, time arrived when writing carried its message beyond the demise of the entire civilization which originated it.
Writing—or any communication—that reaches beyond the culture which created it is subject to translation, irrespective of its age. A message sent only minutes ago from China to the United States is unintelligible to the majority of American citizens if it is composed in the Chinese language—as a message in English sent the other direction is meaningless to most residents of China.
Likewise, a message that crosses “barriers of time,” can become unrecognizable, although it has traveled very little physical distance. “Oft him anhaga are gebideð,” is the opening phrase of a poem called The Wanderer, well-known in Old English, but having no meaning to readers of Modern English, though they be descendants of its culture and live scant miles from the poem’s origin.
On the other hand, a word can remain in continual use, while its meaning changes completely over time; this is known as semantic shift. How the word was originally used doesn’t always inform us about its meaning subsequently, as each new generation joins the language, and colloquial or slang use modifies it, “If you dig what the cat is rappin about.” Experts refer to the notion of always finding the “true meaning” of a word in its origin, etymological fallacy.
The message, the information, the communication, is in the meaning. No meaning, no message. The written message can travel distances of time and space immeasurably beyond its (unrecorded) spoken counterpart—but it travels without any visual cues from the face and body, without aural indicators in pitch or tone—and if it crosses certain barriers, it requires translation to have any meaning at all.
Writing changed the medium of words from sound to sight. As a graphic representation of words, writing remains intrinsically unchanged to the present day, but the cuneiform tablet differs from the papyrus, from the stele, from a paperback book, a Xerox copy, a light-emitting display. The twentieth century saw the formal study of mass communication or media (as differentiated from “journalism”) enter academia. In his seminal work in that field, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan went so far as to say, “The medium IS the message” [emphasis added]. We cannot avoid being influenced by the medium; it becomes part of our sensory apprehension of the message. What that influence amounts to is still subject to debate.
Once the senses have, in some way, apprehended the message, it transcends physicality—it becomes thought. It returns to thought, actually: the message and its words began in thought. Thought takes on physical form through language, be it spoken or written, but in the final analysis that physical form—whatever it may be—is analogous to no more than a wire or conduit: it is simply the material carrier of thought—something with no known material existence—from one mind to another.
Recognizing this, the meaning of the message is seen to transcend the physical realm. Even those who admit to the existence of nothing beyond “physics,” must concede that we don’t yet understand the matter or energy of thought, if either does exist. The existence of a non-physical realm—be it called mental, spiritual, or any other name—may remain the subject of debate, but it is easy to conclude that thought exists at the very edge, at least, of the known physical realm.
Mental telepathy as a form of communication is arguably present among humans, but certainly not sufficiently pervasive to serve as a primary form. We are not concerned, here, with any extra-sensory perception of communication; it may appear that we are attempting to “read the mind” of the person(s) who wrote these Twelve Steps as they are, but we are engaging in no more than the standard, commonplace, sensory perception of discerning the meaning of a written message—a human behavior dating back more than five thousand years: what do these written words mean?
Having, somehow, reached AA, I needed to know what this Program everyone seemed to talk about was, exactly. [Herein, Program and Steps are capitalized when referring to the Alcoholics Anonymous Twelve Step Program.] Even if I were only willing to try it just to prove it wouldn’t work for me, as everything else until then had not, I first had to know what this Program is. Simple logic—which the most recalcitrant among us must concede—dictates: I cannot follow the Steps “which are suggested as a program of recovery” if I don’t know what those Steps are.
Since they were posted and recited at nearly every AA meeting, they were well hidden.
In the years since, I’ve found many a member who seems to be attempting to “work the Program,” without knowing exactly what that Program is. If I fumble over their recitation from memory, if I can’t quite reach their meaning, how can I take those Steps, precisely? If I don’t take those Steps, precisely, how does that effect the result? If I am imprecise about their wording, if I am imprecise about their order or number, will I become disconnected from the actual Program—which may be the only thing that ensures my recovery? At some point, therefore, I became intensely interested in the precise wording of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous: which words were chosen, which were left out….
Even though I’m a native English speaker, those lines I saw posted up on the Twelve Step list made very little sense to me when I first appeared at AA meetings. I had gone to a rehab for nearly a month, and it took them about that whole time and then some just to teach me what that first line meant: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”
As for the remainder of the list, it was incomprehensible. Not that the words were unknown to me and required a dictionary. They were mostly simple, everyday words, apparently following the accepted rules of the English language in syntax and grammar, but it was worse than Shakespeare or Chaucer to my addled brain. It seemed a language I should understand, but did not. The years of alcohol and drug abuse had clearly taken their toll, but somehow, reading a newspaper still made sense while these sentences made none.
Alcoholics Anonymous emphasizes the importance of “honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness,” often referred to as the “HOW” of the Program. Without these attributes, we are told, we will have much difficulty taking the suggested Steps. Quite probably, I had enough willingness to reach the very beginning of recovery, but not enough of the other two, yet, to get much further. My lack of these “indispensables,” at the time, prevented the sense of all those Steps beyond the first from getting through.
It was clear to me that these words were understood by others, so
their sense was certainly out there;
I was just unable to let it in. I could
not yet admit it. That very concept of admitting something, of
letting it in, is fundamental to the First Step of the Program.
Program?
In the days when the Program was first written down, very few people other than mathematicians and scientists had the notion of a program as we think of it so often, today: a set of instructions for a computer to carry out. We now use terminology that would be totally foreign in 1939, like “software” and “app” (short for application program), which spring from the ubiquity of computers large and small, none of which works without a program.
Program has its origin in the Greek prógramma [πρόγραμμα], meaning “written public notice.” The founders and first members of AA were doubtless quite familiar with program as the public notice of an event. Since those ancient times, however, program came to mean a particular kind of notice when it was written and public: very often, a schedule or itemization of performances for entertainment. Eventually we came to speak of a tv or radio program, not only as a notice, but as the show, itself.
courtesy: TV Guide Magazine
Anyone familiar with show business is well-versed in a program’s repetition. A show—especially the iconic “variety show”—is comprised of certain elements which are repeated, no matter who the performers are. American tv’s famous Tonight Show traces its roots back to live variety shows that predate even radio, and keep to a general program, e.g., a host monologue, a musical or comedy guest with performance and interview, a comedy skit, a novelty act (“Stupid Pet Tricks,” throat-singers, contortionists…), and advertising, usually in a particular order. Dramas are no different (Act One, Act Two…). A program is not only about what will happen, but its order as well.
A program unrelated to entertainment still outlines a series of events and their order, as anyone who has attended a seminar or convention has experienced.
We may also speak of a government’s space program, or a business’s acquisition program, which again outlines a series of undertakings and their order to accomplish a specific goal. The government aims to advance outer space exploration, and the business aims to acquire more assets. Since these are cooperative efforts, many people are given “written notice” of the proposed goal and the order in which certain actions will be taken in an attempt to achieve it.
Here, we arrive at program as a series of instructions to achieve a goal. In this vein, program is transferred to machinery of the industrial and electronic ages: a machine is set up to perform a number of actions, repeating them tirelessly. The Jacquard loom is an example which predates electricity. After the advent of electronics, the computer became the foremost example of a machine which made program its sine qua non. Without a series of carefully delineated and ordered instructions to carry out—a program—the computer accomplishes nothing worthwhile.
(While the founders and first members of Alcoholics Anonymous were unfamiliar with program in the electronic sense when the Steps were formed, they may well have enjoyed the notion that a machine was created that acted like a recovered alcoholic: without a series of carefully delineated and ordered instructions to carry out—a program—the alcoholic accomplishes nothing worthwhile.)
Case and Tense
“Here are the steps we took, which are suggested….”
“Wanna get an alcoholic to do something? Tell him to do the opposite,” goes an AA saw. That whole matter is avoided in the Steps. Instead of a list of instructions telling what to do, they are couched in the case of others telling what they actually did. That case is the first person, plural.
Simple to see why the first person—I, me, mine—is used, but why plural—we, us, our?
It might be easier to disqualify the experience of some individual telling what he or she accomplished: you may be a marathon winner or an Olympic-gold-medal weight-lifter and, though your experience is true, it isn’t something others are likely to be able to repeat. One person’s encounter could well be the story of an anomaly, of something extraordinary. When dozens of people from disparate walks of life say they accomplished the same thing, the story takes on a different status.
Likewise, your talk can’t be dismissed as mere wish: “We will admit we were powerless, we are going to come to believe, we will make a decision….”
“Well, did you do it, or not? I’m not jumping in the water, now, just because you say you’re going to do it, that you will do it any minute.” If you’re already in the water—and not suffering hypo- or hyperthermia—you’ve truly given me reason to trust the jump. You are telling me not what you will do in the future, or even that you are doing it now (so the results are uncertain), you are telling me what you have done and what happened to you (not what may happen to you). The language is past tense.
What we readily (and correctly) understand about the grammatical case is that it does not mean a group took these Steps en masse. For instance, these people did not make moral inventories of each other; each person made his or her own. Each individual takes each Step; the plural case describes common ground, not a group undertaking.
One might hear in meetings: I get drunk; we stay sober; nevertheless, not everyone has the advantage of living in a metropolitan area holding dozens of meetings each week—or day—with a well-established community of recovered people to join. The Program does not hold this as a requirement, despite its plural case.
On the other hand, almost no one lives completely outside a social structure: the hermit comes from town and, in most cases, the town still exists; the most self-sufficient outlander occasionally visits an outpost of civilization for supplies. Alone on the Greenland icecap, an individual can take all the Steps save two–Five and Twelve–before that Eskimo comes over the hill with a bottle of scotch–at which time one might also undertake Step Twelve, assuming the Eskimo is a drunk.
(“What of Step Nine?” you may ask. Jumping ahead for a moment, we see the qualifying phrase “wherever possible.” That Greenland icecap is quite probably not where it is possible. Depending on the others in that Step Eight list, travel—wherever possible—may be necessary. But we digress….)
Ordination
This is not referring to anything ecclesiastic, but rather to the fact that the Program—and any program by its very nature—has an order. Ordination as simply “the condition of being ordered or arranged.” When it comes to a program, “of cardinal importance are the ordinal numbers.”
Across a wide realm of human experience, order is synonymous with wellness and working-as-intended. Native speakers of English readily understand a phrase applied to a machine or device which does not work: “out-of-order.” Ask an Israeli in his native language, “How are you?” and, if he is well, he is likely to reply, “Kol b’seder,” which literally means, “All in order.” Ask even the most skilled computer programmers what will happen if the processor executes their instructions out of order and they may tell you in complete sincerity, “We don’t know.” The only near certainty is that the program will not work as intended.
I once heard it said that Bill Wilson’s genius was not that he wrote out the Steps—their gist was completely from other sources—his genius was that he numbered them.
Two brothers were behind the Oscar-nominated film from 2000, Memento: Christopher and Jonathan Nolan. Christopher directed the movie; Jonathan wrote the short story that was basis for the movie, which he titled Memento Mori. Jonathan wrote this in his short story:
“Here’s the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It’s not that simple. We’re all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It’s a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.
“This is the tragedy of life. Because for a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius. Moments of clarity, insight, whatever you want to call them. The clouds part, the planets get in a neat little line, and everything becomes obvious. I should quit smoking, maybe, or here’s how I could make a fast million, or such and such is the key to eternal happiness. That’s the miserable truth. For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a cheap parlor trick.
“But then the genius, the savant, has to hand over the controls to the next guy down the pike, most likely the guy who just wants to eat potato chips, and insight and brilliance and salvation are all entrusted to a moron or a hedonist or a narcoleptic.
“The only way out of this mess, of course, is to take steps to ensure that you control the idiots that you become. To take your chain gang, hand in hand, and lead them. The best way to do this is with a list.
“It’s like a letter you write to yourself. A master plan, drafted by the guy who can see the light, made with steps simple enough for the rest of the idiots to understand. Follow steps one through one hundred. Repeat as necessary.”
Now, for those of us following this suggested Program of recovery—since each member of our miserable chain gang of idiots is an addict of one kind or another—the master plan has not 100, but just twelve steps to repeat as necessary.
All other lists and plans—however seemingly extraordinary—are subsidiary.