Sham Read online

  Given this mainstream stamp of approval, twelve-step catchphrases soon began showing up in courtrooms. When Salt Lake City’s Deseret News ran a five-part series on drunk driving, the paper revealed that even some defense lawyers complain about the judicial system’s lax handling of DUI lawbreakers. Noting that her clientele consisted of “a constant stream of repeat offenders,” an unidentified attorney pointed out, “The first thing they say to a judge is that they’re in counseling. They say they have jobs and families to take care of. To have defendants dictate their work schedules for the judges to work around, it’s ridiculous.” According to a lawyer I spoke with, a motorist facing sentencing in Nevada told the judge, “Your Honor, I am appalled by what I did out on that highway”—note the due observance of step 5 in the twelve-step sequence—“but I ask the court not to forget that I am a victim, too. I’m a victim of the genetic disease of alcoholism [italics added].”

  Courts have accepted such arguments despite the fact that society most certainly gets hurt because of drunk driving. According to an ambitious study prepared in May 2002 for the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety, 40 percent of all highway fatalities in 2000—that’s 16,653 deaths in a single year—“involved at least one drinking driver, bicyclist, or pedestrian.” That’s a fair amount of “hurt.”

  Interestingly, if the drunkenness-as-disease paradigm doesn’t mitigate the treatment of impaired drivers as well as it once did, that is largely because another group of victims rose up in an aggrieved chorus: Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Members of MADD could describe losses that were rather more tangible than those cited by the Recovery side. For example, Susan Bragg, a MADD victim advocate in Texas—which led the nation with 1,745 alcohol-related deaths in 2002—has argued, “Victims must deal with so much throughout the process. Worse yet, during plea agreements, victims are made to feel guilty if they don’t support a plea agreement or an early release from prison. Victims say, rightfully so, ‘We didn’t put ourselves in this situation. Why are we made to feel otherwise?’ ”

  MADD advocates and other critics of judicial leniency also point out that society isn’t likely to solve this problem by coddling the drunk driver, at least not if the statistics can be believed. According to the study prepared for the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, in 2001 American drivers took an estimated 80 million trips in which their blood-alcohol level exceeded the legal limit. Since only 1.55 million drunk-driving arrests occurred that year, the study calculated the odds of being arrested during any one such trip at more than fifty to one. The report concluded that authorities could “convince more drunk drivers to change their behavior”—note: behavior, not dysfunction—pointing out that states that have taken such aggressive steps as zero-tolerance prosecution and lower blood-alcohol limits have substantially reduced the problem. Evidently drunk driving is a disease one can be cured of by watching other sufferers go to jail.

  Which brings us back to Bill Clinton’s adulteries and society’s blurry lines. I often suggested to my classes that Clinton’s “weakness” was not as innocuous as is typically believed, or at least as is typically portrayed in the media. Leaving aside his treatment of the assorted women in his life (including his wife), Clinton caused significant damage to a great American institution—the presidency. His behavior undercut the leverage chiefs of state are supposed to enjoy with other branches of government. Certainly his nonstop legal entanglements and eventual impeachment distracted him from concentrating fully on governance. What presidential business went untended while Clinton focused on defending his personal behavior from constant attack? We may never know how many ill effects the nation suffered as a result.

  My classroom arguments fell on deaf ears. Sometimes students would actually groan. “I hear people say those kinds of things and I want to scream, Oh, grow up, America!” one young woman said. She opined that the problem during the Clinton years was not the man himself, but America’s prissiness, combined with its lack of sympathy for Clinton’s “being human.” This was the same student who, earlier that semester, had chastised critics of actor Robert Downey Jr. for their failure to grasp “the tragedy of his addiction.” She wasn’t alone. Much of Hollywood and not a few editorialists rallied to Downey’s defense after one of his many tumbles off the wagon, condemning his detractors as “judgmental” or “mean-spirited.”

  We have the Recovery movement to thank for the fact that nowadays the people who criticize wrongdoers are the sinners, while the wrongdoers themselves are simply “being human.”

  As all of this implies, viewing dysfunctions as diseases has profound social consequences. If the alcoholic’s want of drink (or Bill Clinton’s want of women, or Winona Ryder’s want of that extra handbag) is as much an ineluctable symptom of some hardwired biological imperative as the leukemia victim’s proliferation of white blood cells, then questions of right and wrong become moot. If we do what we do because we must, then what difference does it make whether we should or shouldn’t have done it?

  Recovery’s bedrock assumption—that you’re not evil or venal, you’re simply exhibiting symptoms—lays the groundwork for an amoral view of life. It explains why today’s society goes to extraordinary semantic lengths to separate the criminal from the crime. A person who makes his living robbing liquor stores isn’t necessarily a common thief anymore; he’s a person “involved in an ongoing criminal enterprise.” We shouldn’t really impugn him, as a person, because he may have no control over what he’s doing. I could cite innumerable cases of this mentality in action, but a particularly telling example was the defense mounted on behalf of Rosemary Heinen. The former Starbucks corporate manager embezzled $3.7 million from her employer, then splurged on diamonds, Rolexes, grand pianos, hundreds of Barbie dolls, and nearly three dozen new cars. Yet according to her lawyer, Heinen wasn’t greedy, unethical, or corrupt. No. She was a tragic example of “impulse control disorder.”

  Melody Beattie was right when she asserted in Codependent No More that “guilt makes everything harder.” But . . . isn’t it supposed to? Sally Satel, like many rational observers, is perplexed by the suggestion that we should refrain from calling a spade a spade. During an interview with John Stossel for his ABC News special Help Me, I Can’t Help Myself, Satel was asked how she felt about the psychiatric industry’s admonition to use the word alcoholic sparingly so as not to “stigmatize” people. Satel refused to flinch. “Why would you want to take the stigma away?” she replied. “I can’t think of anything more worthwhile to stigmatize.”

  “There are things that shouldn’t be that easy for people to do,” says David Blankenhorn, pointing out what should be self-evident but has become less so amid the moral relativism of the past quarter century. “Guilt originates in conscience. To deny guilt is to marginalize the conscience.”

  A NATION OF HUMPTY DUMPTIES?

  It’s the oldest dictum in sales and marketing: “Find a need and fill it.” Clearly unhappiness represents a more solid base on which to build a Recovery movement than contentment. Happy people aren’t trying to recover from anything; nor do they go looking for massive amounts of help. That’s why the impresarios and self-styled healers of the twelve-step world went one better than finding a need: They created a need by devising a twisted metaphysic wherein caring about people equals codependency, self-sacrifice equals masochism, raising obedient children equals child abuse. If there is a particular genius to Recovery, it’s as a marketing tool, not a personal-salvation program.

  For the individual consumer, Recovery may be worse than merely wasteful. “The problem with a lot of it,” says James Q. Wilson, “is the unfortunate and diabolical human tendency to reject the good news while embracing the bad.”

  Think about that in the context of the harrowing and relentless psychic pounding visited upon people during the early stages of Recovery. Though a (sincere) Recovery workshop tries to impart a dual message—this is why you’re broken; this is how you can be fixed—the part about b
eing broken is what sticks. Therein lies the supreme and fatal paradox of Recovery, and of so much of self-help in general: It is easily capable of persuading followers that they’re gravely flawed. But getting people to the next step—that they can change—is a major stretch. Many in this created class of victims never attain “wellness.”

  As Harvard’s Brodsky puts it, “In too many cases, the ‘I’m a loser’ part stays with you long after you’ve given up on the remedy.”

  The result is what some label the Humpty Dumpty Syndrome—wherein you’re taken apart, but your pieces can’t be put back together again. “It’s like the guy who’s got a little something wrong with his car, some relatively minor thing, so he figures it’s not worth going to the mechanic,” one psychologist told me. “He buys the shop manual, puts the car on blocks, gets the thing taken apart just fine. Then he finds out he can’t get it back together right. And now it won’t start at all. He’s much worse off than he was before.”

  In societal terms, it’s bad enough when misguided but sincere people reach out to others they perceive to be damaged. It’s far worse when the charlatans get into the act, knowing as they do that they can sell their books, fill the seats at their seminars, or boost the ratings of their TV specials only by persuading large numbers of us that we’re less happy than we thought, or we’re afflicted with some dreaded dysfunction we didn’t know we had.

  Is that really what we want? A nation of diffident Humpties, teetering on the edge of that wall, above a boulevard of uncertainty and regret? A society beset by a curious, paralyzing combination of self-doubt and self-interest: a country made up of 295 million Individuals-with-a-capital-I who are endlessly second-guessing not just the choices they make in their private lives but also the most critical issues of social policy? In hyping the hope of “Recovery,” SHAM has left us more troubled than ever.

  9

  LOOKING FOR LOVE . . .

  ON ALL THE WRONG BASES?

  We live in a society that’s very selfish.

  —Raoul Felder, divorce attorney to the stars, answering a Fox News anchor’s question about why the divorce rate is so high, July 2004

  If there’s an overriding message to this book, it is this: Even if you’ve never turned a single page of a self-help tome or heard the first word of wisdom depart the lips of some newly ordained self-improvement deacon, the way you live your life has been affected, if not transformed, by SHAM and its canons. There is simply too much of it in the environment: on TV, in magazines, embedded between lines of dialogue in the latest Bridget Jones movie or some other Hollywood blockbuster. You may hear it in the patter of friends who have been reborn as part of Dr. Phil’s flock, or read it in the codes of behavior spelled out in your company’s personnel-policy manual. Over time—as is true of anything that enjoys near-constant repetition—SHAM’s program for better living has a way of sounding plausible, inevitable, “normal.” The most incorrigible skeptics fall prey to passive reinforcement.

  Nowhere is this truer than in that bedrock area of human interaction where self-help’s efforts have been most concentrated through the years: love and relationships. And once again, it becomes clear that the “payoff” has not been as advertised.

  In the course of my decadelong tenure as a Little League coach, I watched gloomily as divorce touched more than half the families whose kids played on my teams. Over that same period, among the several dozen employees who came and went at the bank where my wife worked, most of the marriages also came and went. During the final year of her employment, her crop of eight coworkers boasted just one intact union other than our own. More recently I taught at a large Midwestern university, and while I never formally surveyed my students, classroom discussion made clear that many of them reported their grades to (and solicited money from) more than a single set of parents.

  The pace at which couples uncouple has shown a modest decline in recent years. Even so, the current rate—four divorces for every one thousand members of the population—remains about double what it was in 1960. Generally speaking, the younger you are nowadays, the worse are your odds for fulfillment everlasting. An extremely complex demographic analysis by the Census Bureau, “Number, Timing and Duration of Marriages and Divorces: 1996,” showed that a twenty-five-year-old man has a 53 percent likelihood of being divorced at least once in his lifetime; a woman of the same age does just slightly better, at 52 percent. As troubling as how many of us get divorced is how fast we do it: A third of divorces occur before couples reach the unremarkable five-year plateau. Should the trend continue, we may need to rethink our traditional notions of marital longevity and the commensurate awards for same. Diamonds suddenly seem a fitting tribute for any couple who makes it to the ten-year benchmark.

  The ramifications of this trend are dire. Census Bureau figures reveal that the nuclear home is about to sink into minority status among today’s infinite array of family-living arrangements. Just 50.8 percent of American households consist of a married mother and father and children whose conception awaited the conception of the marriage itself; that figure was 67 percent in 1970. A quarter of the nation’s children now live in broken homes—or, to use the current euphemism, “alternative families.” Despite such euphemisms, however, Americans are coming to realize that this rampant dismantling of households cannot be good for the children left behind: Statistics on crime, drug abuse, and teen pregnancy leave scant room for dissent. “There comes a point,” David Blankenhorn told me, “where the ugly numbers drown out the politicized debate. We’ve reached that point.” And one might argue that many of the parted adults themselves suffer because of divorce.

  To be sure, SHAM alone cannot be held responsible for these dismal trends. Other reasons for the rise of the divorce rate have been amply chronicled. Working wives are less dependent on men for financial sustenance and thus no longer have to suffer marital problems in silence. Concrete notions of morality rooted in Judeo-Christian ideals have given way to freedom of choice and situational ethics; as one comic gibes, we’re wont to act these days as if Moses had handed down the “Ten Suggestions.” The past quarter century has witnessed the destigmatization of most of the taboos—single parenthood, abortion, adultery, and divorce itself—that once militated for the traditional family unit. Then again, the evidence indicates that SHAM has contributed to this destigmatizing and to the blurring of right and wrong.

  Even more important, of all the factors affecting the grim numbers on divorce, the most virulent—and paradoxical—may be the very self-help outreach that was supposed to make everyone happy. The various twelve-step programs and their myriad less-structured imitators emphasized breaking the cycle of victimhood by not being so solicitous of others, in the process also teaching followers to worry less about any collateral damage inflicted in the course of pursuing their own needs. Like a social Ebola, the cry of “codependent no more!” has broken out of that small core group of perpetual victims for whom such admonitions might be necessary; it now infects the mainstream with the supposedly empowering message that the best way to foreclose being a loser at love is to never put your feelings fully at risk in the first place.

  Empowerment and Victimization have inflicted a curious double whammy on relationship-minded Americans. SHAM tells people to expect the moon (after all, “you deserve it”) while browbeating them for letting themselves become victims in the past and reminding them that anyone with even a shred of dignity would never let that happen again. It’s not hard to see how this fulminating obsession with emotional self-preservation would spell death for true love. Like doctors in a cancer ward who avoid becoming too involved with dying patients, many Americans today approach their wedding day with a reserve that can’t help but handicap the marriage.

  For example, they draft prenuptial agreements and refuse to commingle assets. Though in its September 2002 items on prenuptial agreements American Demographics could report no “concrete numbers” on their latter-day rate of incidence, the magazine noted that “ane
cdotal evidence” strongly suggests a trend toward prenups, “especially as more people are giving matrimony a second, third or fourth try.” In the American Bar Association publication Attacking and Defending Marital Agreements, Laura Morgan and Brett Turner report that about 20 percent of couples embarking on second marriages obtain a prenup, compared with just 5 percent of couples who are having their first go-around.

  Moreover, couples postpone having children, in part for financial reasons, but also because they “want to make sure the marriage works first.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2003 that the average age at which American women have their first child had reached an all-time high of 25.1, compared to 21.4 in 1970. Today, as David Frum of the American Enterprise Institute observed in a 2003 column for the Wall Street Journal, “marriage is a continuum, a series of gradations between true singlehood and formal matrimony.”

  Another sign of the distance kept in more and more marriages: Couples take separate vacations and glory in the notion that each partner “needs his/her space” to “grow as a person”; a contingent of young marrieds, probably small but still significant, create customized arrangements between the parties that slice large loopholes in traditional marital dogma to accommodate greater sexual freedom.

  Does that sound like a recipe for marital bliss?

  Now SHAM wants to help dig America out from under the relational rubble its philosophies have helped create. It’s not unlike a doctor injecting you with some frightful disease, then telling you that for a small extra charge, he’d be more than happy to show you his home remedy for it. And SHAM’s cure is as bad as the disease.