Sam Gentle.com

Higher Power

Ever since reading about Alcoholics Anonymous in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, I've found it fascinating. I'd heard of AA before, of course, but something about the particular depth of its treatment in the book made it much more compelling. There's a bunch in the book about the program's dependence on God or, as it's sometimes (and was originally) called, a Higher Power. I always found that strange, too; why do you need God to stop drinking?

Here's what AA's "Big Book" has to say:

The alcoholic at certain times has no effective mental defense against the first drink. Except in a few cases, neither he nor any other human being can provide such a defense. His defense must come from a Higher Power.

I really like the concept of a constrained or distorted rationality: not what you should believe as a perfect faultless Vulcan, but what makes sense to believe as a faulty squishy human. It might be objectively true that if you understand human suffering in abstract, specific contact with it shouldn't change your behaviour. But in reality we know that our actions are biased towards things that we empathise with, and we don't empathise with the abstract. So it could be rational to increase or reduce your contact with suffering. In other words, maybe rationality isn't the thing that leads us to rational belief, but rational action.

My feeling is that the Higher Power belief, and AA in general, is an extreme example of that constrained rationality. How do you teach rationality to an addict, a definitionally irrational person? If trying to reason your way out of addiction worked, far fewer people would be addicts. Instead, you have to learn ways to act rationally even when your brain is thinking irrationally. And what could be more irrational than blind faith? Yet that is exactly what AA is designed to encourage, not just in God or a nominated Higher Power, but in the program itself.

Perhaps that is valuable even as a non-addict. I don't think it's necessarily feasible to take on a blind faith in God, but it can be valuable to accept the dominion of a particular program or system, or to follow through on things you've decided are right even when they feel wrong. A creed like "I will write something every day" or "I will never lie" might be irrationally prescriptive, but you know that there will be times when you are simply not good enough to do the right thing.

And in that moment, would you rather be relying on your own impaired judgement, or be able to fall back on your Higher Power?