Sobriety and Wokeism are Diametrically Opposed to Each Other

Why 12-step Recovery and Social Justice Warriors Collide

***This is from October 2022. It is one of my most popular posts. Somehow I just realized that despite this being the case, it weirdly only got sent out to 136 subscribers. So here it is to all 1,189 of you.

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On October 22, the Substack podcast (which I highly recommend) “Blocked and Reported” interviewed Clementine Morrigan, a young leftist who is pro-prison abolition but who was brutally cancelled by her own tribe not long ago for crimes against the left (she didn’t agree with 100% of the Woke views; gasp!) The interview was fascinating. I disagreed with some of Morrigan’s bigger lefty claims but I found her to be intelligent, articulate, insightful and intellectually honest. She now runs a podcast called “Fucking Cancelled.” It was a breath of fresh air to hear a young lefty calling out the BS on her own side. Rare in 2022.

But what really stuck out to me, more personally, is the fact that she’s sober and in a 12-step program and that she understands these two concepts—recovery from alcoholism and Wokeism—to be fundamentally at odds with one another. This struck me so deeply, of course, because I am 12 years sober myself, and am in AA.

I decided, on 10/22, to comment on the Blocked & Reported Substack. My response garnered a LOT of likes, which made me decide to write this post. Here was my original comment:

“I loved this. The abolition ideology is absurd, in my opinion, but I very much cherish civil debate. On a personal note: Morrigan’s sobriety matters a huge amount here. I’m sober 12 years myself. Our national discourse feels very ‘alcoholic’ right now. Twelve-step recovery helps you grow up and become less narcissistic and self-involved. You begin to mature and sort your life out and help others and genuinely connect to reality. Victimhood is not supported in AA; taking responsibility very much is. Social justice warriors are all about victimhood and immaturity and shutting down dissenting opinions. The two cannot coexist very well. So, good for Morrigan on getting sober and seeing through the lies and woke bullshit!”

And I vehemently stand by my comment. It’s the truth. I am almost 40 years old now. I got sober in 2010, just shy of 28. A kid, really. I started drinking and getting wild in my lurid teens. It lasted throughout most of my twenties. Besides the hard-drinking, absurd, angry, violent, fast lifestyle I lived back then, I was also, politically, very far to the left. I was never Woke; I knew people back then who fit this label and I never trusted either them or their overly simplistic ideology. Coming from a highly educated family and parents who were both teachers was probably much of the reason; I was taught to THINK, and do so critically.

That said: I was on the left. I remember protesting George W. Bush in San Francisco in 2004 with my “anarchist black-bloc” friends, many of them wearing black bandannas over their mouths and causing havoc. Several of them were arrested at various protests frequently back then. (They were also, many of them, vegan bike messengers who later moved to Brooklyn, Philly, Portland, etc. Aka: post-punk hipsters.) My father and I, when I was young, would often fight about politics. We were roughly on the same team (Democrat) but Dad was a Boomer Centrist and I was a young, angry radical who supposedly hated capitalism and thought of America as the most evil racist nation on Earth.

Then I got sober. It was 2010. I was 27. I hit hard rock bottom and just couldn’t do it anymore. I started going to AA. I got a sponsor. I did the 12 steps. I read the AA “Big Book.” I started to believe in a Higher Power. I did amends with dozens of friends and family and ex-girlfriends from the past. My life, slowly, started to change. And in the process I began to grow up. This happened in all areas of my life—some more slowly than others—and it also happened with regards to my political and cultural thinking.

For the first time, I actually started reading serious books about American and global history. I started listening to people from the other side of the political spectrum. I used my critical thinking skills not just on others but, crucially, on myself and my own cherished and fossilized ideas about myself, identity, culture, the world. And the more I did this, of course, the more my “stable” views started to shift and feel much less stable. My mind changed on many topics. I realized that so much of my politics had stemmed from unlikely places—my resentment and rage towards two wonderful but complex parents (who had their own issues); my feeling unseen and unheard by “society”; the lack of my ability to express myself honestly; etc. I had simply projected my anger and fear onto The World.

This, I think, is in many ways what is happening in our nation right now. We’ve got this rabid, angry, binary thinking: Right bad; left good. Women good; men bad. Black good, white bad. The truth is we’re all complex, wounded, flawed human beings. We exist in the gray area, not in black and white, though the profit-driven media on both sides wants us to think we’re enemies. (Whether racial enemies or political, ideological, social, gender-wise, etc.) We all have so much more in common than apart.

Being sober over a decade now, I see the cognitive distortions (to use a phrase from both CBT and Jonathan Haidt) inherent in Woke social justice warriorism. And I see it on the right, too, of course, with the extremism of Trump and his rhetoric. (Ironically he is a teetotaler.) Within Wokeism there is a certain brand of hysteria; Sam Harris refers to it (as do many others) as a “moral panic.” I think this term does fit the bill. It often seems as if Woke people are actually angry at themselves for myriad reasons and are projecting that self-anger onto others. Blaming is their main attack: It’s the fault of white people, or non-white people who don’t tow the Woke ideological line, or Boomers, or Republicans or Centrist Democrats, or “the system” or “capitalism” etc.

I understand these feelings; I really do. Especially when you’re young, there’s a strong desire to throw the figurative Molotov cocktail at the generation before, at The System, for failing, in young eyes, to “deliver.” But the truth is: Most of the disastrous claims being argued on the far left right now aren’t happening, and to the extent they are happening they’re not happening anywhere near the degree to which the far-left claims. Though I grasp the anger on the left, I wish they had more self-awareness and could be more adult and honest with themselves and therefore the rest of us. Like I said: I was in the same boat when I was young. So were my parents in their generation, in the 1960s, as many were then. But my parents grew up. I grew up.

Twelve-step recovery teaches you to understand your role in interpersonal relations; to understand how you contributed to conflict in your life. It requires taking radical individual responsibility for your actions and words in the past and in the present and future. There’s a saying in “the program”: “Getting sober is easy; all you have to do is change everything.” One might even think of it, in a way, as a sort of spiritual bootcamp. You become a soldier, in a sense, fighting for your own personal change and growth. The concept of making amends, too, is powerful. Seeing people in real-time who you hurt, and owning your part in that is powerful. Rage settles down; anger loosens; fear lightens; love rises; forgiveness comes to the fore.

Sober people who work the steps (obviously I can’t speak for every person here, nor am I suggesting that I am anything like perfect; clearly, I am beyond flawed like all of us) in general have a much easier time cultivating nuanced views and having compassion. For one: The steps save our lives, keep us sober, and force us to change. For two: There are all kinds of people in AA. Every race; every gender; every culture. It has spread all over the globe. It’s common in AA to know people who have been to prison for murder. Or rape. Or you name it. But we don’t judge these people and make them feel like shit for having a past, even a righteously gnarly and horrific and egregiously violent past. No, instead we allow everyone in; we leave politics and judgment at the door; and we understand that we’re all on a common journey and we’re all there for the same reason.

I think this is a potent lesson and a lesson we can and should consider in our political and cultural “conversation” (more like mutual mud-slinging) in contemporary times. What are our commonalities? How do people on the left, say, have a role in how the Right has reacted? Can we cultivate compassion and empathy for one another? Or are we doomed to judge each other forevermore based solely on skin-pigmentation, gender-identity, geographical location, class, political side, etc?

This is one of the major reasons writers have been flocking to Substack. The legacy media is alcoholic; let’s face it. The narratives on both the Right and Left are largely alcoholic; certainly and obviously toxic. It’s a positive feedback loop; both sides play off each other; they need one another to survive. Both sides lie. Both sides revise history. Both sides aren’t seeing or hearing each other. There are many root causes for this. (Read Jonathan Haidt’s “The Coddling of the American Mind.”) But the roots matter less, in my opinion, than what needs to be done NOW.

We can start by owning our parts, on both sides. And in order for that to happen one side has to start. Can’t that be the left? I have only ever voted Democratic. That won’t change. I criticize the left because they’re “my team,” even if I don’t agree with all their values, and even if I think the lies, hypocrisy and denial are rampant. (As they are on the Right, too.)

At the end of AA meetings we always (well, usually) say The Serenity Prayer, and I think it’s of use here, for all of us:

God, grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change

The courage to change the things I can

And the wisdom to know the difference.

Michael Mohr

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