April 1970
During my first sober year in AA, I heard that a group in the next state was awarding poker chips to members who stayed sober for various lengths of time. They even gave a party at the end of a newcomer’s first year, with a candle on a cake, and everybody singing “Happy Birthday.”
I was horrified. Scandalized! I declared that such childish behavior led people to stay sober only for rewards, rather than for their own lives’ sake. Besides, it violated the 24-hour plan of trying to stay sober one day at a time, not for a month or a year. I shook my head and muttered, “Something ought to be done.”
Soon after that, a speaker at our meeting told some off-color stories. (Like many “reformed drunkards,” I had become quite a puritanical prig.) He also revealed that he had been drinking the day before. This was too outrageous to be ignored, of course. So I went to an older member, who had patiently listened to me before, and I complained again, “Something ought to be done!”
“Well, do it then,” he declared, grinning, and walked away. (No Traditions had been written down yet. It was 1945.)
Shortly thereafter, through Grapevine, I began to learn shocking facts: In Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Miami, lots of groups did things “wrong”—which meant, of course, not the way we did them in my group.
And yet those faraway, seemingly benighted AAs seemed to stay sober just as well as we did. Besides, with their anniversary parties and sobriety tokens, they seemed to have a lot of fun that my group missed out on. And those exasperating old-timers I talked to didn’t seem to mind one bit. They just kept on serenely staying sober. Apparently it bothered them not at all that other groups and other members were going their own independent ways. I didn’t know then what the old-timers realized: that getting distressed about other members and groups was dangerous, not to those others, but to the AA who got upset about them.
There was the rub: If I was unwilling to grant autonomy to others, the one likely to get drunk was me. So finally I had to learn, once more, that there are no bosses in AA (as our Second Tradition says) and that nobody in the outfit would take orders anyway.
In my opinion, there is additional, specific guidance on this in the now-written words of our Fourth Tradition: “Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A. as a whole.” And I don’t think I am distorting the spirit of those words when I say to myself that not only each group, but also each member, deserves autonomy. Besides, respect for the independence of others is to my own advantage.
If there were no Fourth Tradition (first in the old-timers’ experience, then in written words), what would my own AA story be? If, during my first AA months, one way of doing things had been forced on all groups, I might not have stayed around to get well. If the poker chips and anniversary parties had been mandatory in my group, all of us who shrank from such sociability could easily have found AA not for us, and gone away to drink again and to die.
On the other hand, if some AA laws had absolutely forbidden such practices (as I had wanted to do), many AAs who have found sobriety tokens or key chains, birthday cakes and anniversary parties helpful in their recovery would have been deprived of these aids in staying sober.
I think the autonomy Tradition means that any help—whether it is a poker chip, a piece of jewelry, a book, a prayer, a cake and candle, a slogan, a clinic, one particular kind of meeting, a psychiatrist, a sponsor, or any other means of staying sober—is wonderful.
If each of us is expected to arrive at his own understanding of a greater power, I cannot believe that any other member—or a committee of us—is meant to decide how he shall do it. But I have found that grudging tolerance of others’ ways is not enough. Learning to respect the positive values of these different ways has contributed much to my recovery.
As AA now grows into its thirty-fifth year, I feel that our Fourth Tradition has grown in value. Because of it, we are helped to avoid a rigidity which might destroy the usefulness of AA and hinder its ability to take in more and more kinds of sick alcoholics.
Early in my own AA life, I was fortunate enough to encounter members who wanted to try daring AA experiments. They started types of meetings that no one in AA had heard of before: closed discussions, open discussions, and Step meetings, among others. Some even persuaded a general hospital to open a ward for alcoholic patients, run in close cooperation with our AA Central Office, and to allow meetings on the premises.
You can guess what a ruckus these innovations kicked up. “Heresy!” one faction cried. Because a certain approach had never been used before, they said, it would not work. It might even ruin AA!
Of course, thousands of us now know that different kinds of meetings give us the different kinds of help we need at various stages of our sobriety. Thousands of us have had our lives saved by such hospital arrangements. (Mine was, twice.) Who says the Fourth Tradition does not apply to sobriety for an individual?
So I am glad that group autonomy gives us the right to experiment if we wish. Otherwise, all meetings would be alike, all held at the same time, and every one of us who has ever benefited from a daytime discussion or a midnight Eleventh Step meeting would just be out of luck.
Quite recently, I found myself back on a group steering committee. I had been chairman of the group many years before, but no one else on the committee knew that. I sat in quiet horror as the Young Turks discussed what kind of sandwiches seemed to go best at the beginners meeting. Sandwiches?
I smirked inwardly. They couldn’t get anybody to make them, I was sure. Besides, the group treasury would be depleted by such fancy food, and our rent would go unpaid until our church landlord was heard from.
At our beginners’ meetings, we now have the biggest crowds ever, happily munching away, sober. Instead of barely scraping up the rent, we now have a treasury full enough to pay it and then make generous monthly gifts to our local intergroup and the AA General Service Office as well. Thanks to that Fourth Tradition, my group could be independent of me and my rigidity. And who knows what wonderful new ideas are yet to come if members like me will be flexible enough to accept them and use them?
The closing words of our Tradition do suggest, however, that the autonomy is not unqualified. My group has the right to run itself any way it pleases, but only so long as it does not mess things up for other groups, or hurt our beloved Fellowship as a whole.
Each time I recognize the value of my group’s autonomy, I am reminded of my personal responsibility. For example, when those all-important newcomers arrive at a meeting where I am present, whatever I do or fail to do may indeed affect other groups. If I am not friendly, if I am overzealous, if I am hypocritical, if I am dogmatic, if I am frivolous, if I am humorless, any one of these may be the quality which a newcomer ascribes to all AA. He may go away saying, “Those AAs are clannish” or “fanatical” or “dreary,” and he may never come back to that group—nor try any other.
What can I do about it? Well, whenever I lead or speak at an open meeting or participate in a discussion meeting, it is probably important for me to say clearly that no one member speaks for AA as a whole or for any AA group, that each speaker expresses his own opinion only. In AA, we seek diversity of opinion, not uniformity, because in that way we can help more and more people. (I especially need to remember this, of course, when opinions I do not like are voiced.)
But I am not sure that such announcements are totally effective. In fact, as an AA member, I can do very little that does not reflect on my group or on AA as a whole, whether I like it or not. To the non-AA world, we individuals are AA. It is an awesome responsibility. Once I spoke sharply to a fellow worker, not in AA, and he responded acidly, “All you AAs are so damn rigid!” Since I was the only AA he knew, I represented to him our entire Fellowship.
My AA freedom to do or say as I please does indeed need to be watched.
On the group level, the widespread autonomy so fiercely practiced and cherished sometimes brings with it a severe handicap to our Fellowship overall—or at least a disadvantage which we have to