|
Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 18, 2012 10:10:52 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Askel McThurkill on Jan 18, 2012 11:48:49 GMT
Not to reduce this issue to triviality, but it does seem that the Irish response to alcohol comes in one of two forms: over-indulgence or total abstention with nothing in between.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Jan 18, 2012 20:25:31 GMT
We are a bit like the Scots and the Scandinavians in this veering between abstention and alcoholism - I think it's a North European thing, not just Irish, and that the climate has something to do with it. I also think there are various forms of adolescent rebellion involved (and I mean emotional and intellectual adolescence as well as age). I remember when the Pioneers got into difficulties some months ago a number of the atheists on the Politics.ie board started a thread to gloat over it, and some of them expressed the hope that Alcoholics Anonymous would collapse as well. Most of those who denounced AA specifically objected to its reference to "reliance on a Higher Power" (even though AA makes it clear that the Higher Power need not be a supernatural entity - it might be a tree in a forest, the class struggle, the sunrise, Picasso's paintings, whatever). I remember one who said that AA's emphasis on realising we cannot help ourselves and must rely on others was the very definition of Sartrean bad faith - considering that Sartre glorified Stalin and the Cultural Revolution, declared that he rejoiced in the early death of his father and had deliberately decided not to have children, exploited his disciples unmercifully etc I would have thought he was hardly the best exemplar to choose. These people really seemed to think it was better to be a hopeless alcoholic than to admit that you have any limitations or were subject to moral constraints. It was the most disturbing thing I've ever seen on Politics.ie and I don't say this lightly.
|
|
|
Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 18, 2012 20:54:44 GMT
I would hope the latter position - après nous la deluge if there ever was something like that - is not typical of atheists.
Alcoholism, whatever way you analyse it, is a problem for everyone. Especially given how widespread and destructive it is.
|
|
|
Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 19, 2012 10:46:22 GMT
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Jan 19, 2012 12:26:24 GMT
Here is an example of similar hostility towards AA. The DAILY TELEGRAPH theatre critic Charles Spencer (himself a recovering alcoholic) accuses the play MY ZINC BED by the fashionable playwright David Hare of promoting the view that AA is a cult which promotes emotional dependence: www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/regional-shows/7354530/My-Zinc-Bed-at-Royal-and-Derngate-Northampton-review.htmlEXTRACT Short of putting the boot into guide dogs for the blind, or condemning the folly of children collecting milk bottle tops for the Blue Peter appeal, it is hard to imagine how David Hare could have written a more misguided and malign play than My Zinc Bed. His heroic task here is to give Alcoholics Anonymous a good kicking. How brave! How controversial! The piece was first staged at the Royal Court in 2000, when I gave it a cravenly easy ride. At the time, I was in deep denial about my own alcoholism and lacked the courage and the knowledge to take Hare properly to task. Two months later I was in the Priory, and crucified with nerves before being bussed to my first AA meeting. My memory of Hare’s play was part of my problem, for he makes AA sound only marginally less sinister than the Mafia. In this despicably glib drama, a charismatic software millionaire suggests to the fragile recovering alcoholic he has taken on to his staff that AA is a mug’s game. Alcoholism isn’t really a disease, he insists. Anyone with a bit of willpower can cure their addiction at home and then safely take a drink without going on a bender. AA merely inculcates feelings of guilt and unworthiness. There are other calumnies against AA. It’s a “cult” whose “principal aim is to retain you as a member of the group” and a social networking club where “under the guise of admitting their fallibility, people meet in fact to advance their own cause”. Anyone who has attended AA meetings will know that this is pernicious claptrap. I would say that AA is one of the few entirely benign organisations ever devised and in its 75 years it has saved many millions from misery and slow, horrible deaths. In his defence I can imagine Hare loftily declaring that his entrepreneur, Victor Quinn, is merely a character with a point of view, and a flawed character at that. At the end, we learn that he has been killed in a car crash while three times over the permitted alcohol limit. But the alcoholic in the play, Paul Peplow, is so palpably unhappy and desperate in his recovery, and such a shambolic mess as he becomes romantically entangled with Quinn’s much younger wife, herself a recovering cocaine addict, that Quinn’s disparagement of AA has far more dramatic clout than Peplow’s feeble defence of it...My Zinc Bed could actively deter those with a drink problem from seeking their best chance of recovery. It’s not just a bad play. It is a wicked one, too. END Another TELEGRAPH columnist, Charles Moore, notes that the criticisms of AA expressed in the play are not unique to Hare and that he has often heard them expressed in conversation. I suspect they reflect the post-sixties turn towards libertarianism on both left and right, which has as one of its features an exaltation of the individual will and distrust of the concepts of deference and/or co-operation as threats to personal autonomy. blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/andrewmcfbrown/100028216/charles-spencer-and-why-david-hare-has-written-a-wicked-play/EXTRACT Like Spencer, I am very pro-AA. But I can also see that the criticisms of the organisation aired in the play are ideas you hear quite commonly. What irks Spencer is that they are presented in a tendentious way and given undue weight, so misleading the viewer. This is why the Telegraph's great critic judges it to be a wicked play. It certainly shows a lack of a sense of responsibility to use a play to push onto an audience inaccurate beliefs about a worldwide movement whose only purpose is to save people from alcoholism. For sure, AA does not suit everybody, but anybody with a problem should definitely, and unequivocally, be advised to try it. END
|
|
|
Post by shane on Jan 19, 2012 14:40:57 GMT
|
|
|
Post by shane on Jan 19, 2012 15:12:35 GMT
|
|