Foreword to "AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A REFORMED DRUNKARD; OR LETTERS AND RECOLLECTIONS BY AN INMATE OF THE ALMS-HOUSE."

As we conceive it, the duty of a foreword is to make three points.

1) Why we liked it. Why it was worth our time.

2) Why it has relevance today.

3) Why it is worth your precious reading time.

We liked it because it deals with a subject that is one of our hobbyhorses, one of the elements in our mission, an ingredient in our long term plan. We believe, and hope to build on this insight, that there is a divorce between modern ‘recovery’ and the larger Christian tradition that must be healed and bound back together. This divorce has caused the larger church to give up on many social causes that she should be leading, because the state and the pharmaceutical-insurance industrial complex have monopolized and commoditized the ‘recovery movement’ and turned it into a ‘recovery industry.’ This is a larger thesis, for a different time, but this notion has guided our efforts in finding books worth resurrecting from the forgotten archives, and sending out into the world.

We do not want to be pedantic, shrill, or righteous about any of this, but we have arrived at this conclusion through lived experience and wide reading. It is a problem nobody is working on, and it is a problem that will require time and evidence, evidence in the form of a series of books, books that find their readers, in order to plant seeds for future solutions. Future solutions that we hope to build, if our bookmaking venture takes root and begins to bear good fruit.

This is a bit of a tangent. But tangents are the very nature of life, for, as Joyce wrote, “Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”

This is to say that what we found in the book, besides a catchy title, is spiritual paydirt. Whether it sells enough to free us from our dayjobs is besides the point.

This drunkard’s autobiography is written by John Cotton Mather, of the Mather family. The Mather family is the non plus ultra of WASPs, a family of ministers stretching back to the 1500s, who played a pivotal role in the founding of Masschussetts and the Puritan settling of New England. They battled witchcraft in Salem. They helped cast out Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, who went on to found Rhode Island. They were of the first generation of Harvard students. They are a storied family, the oldest kind of Yankee Bluebloods and Boston Brahmins you could hope to find.

Maybe for this reason, the name of the author is partly obscured with anonymity, and only becomes apparent partway through the narrative. Seeing a leading light of the time take the cloak of anonymity in the 1840s suggests to us that the principle of anonymity is a deep and timeless well, not something new.

We find it to be important that such a goodly family as the Mathers had one of its scions succumb to drunkenness. The horror of that state of mind is recognizable to anyone who has lived it or seen it close up in their loved ones.

In our time, there have been Presidents’ Wives and Senators and Secretaries of Health and Human Services who have succumbed to—and recovered from—addiction. It is no respecter of persons, an equal opportunity scourger of souls.

What you will find is a recognizable story of homelessness, wandering, arrests, stupor, shame, and foolishness.

What you will also find are a few colorful scenes, like something out of Pilgrim’s Progress or the Divine Comedy, with allegorical visions of processions of hell, as the demons march triumphantly with enslaved drunkards in train.

And you will find a slice of first person testimony that the Washingtonian Society worked very well for those who fell into its embrace. This is a niche subject known at best to a few AA oldtimers and historians, but finding this book revealed a few more books on them which we hope to bring into the world.

What you will find within is another angle that doesn’t map onto the modern recovery movement, which tries to restrain itself from ‘outside issues.’ That angle is the relentless scorn and anger that the author, John Cotton Mather, poured upon the rum-seller, and the State of Massachussetts. He believes the state manufactures drunkards for profit. He holds the state directly responsible for licensing and profiting from the liquor trade, and does not pull his punches in attacking them or any of the others who profit from his—and other drunkards–misery. The same arguments and attacks he makes upon the liquor trade could be readily applied to the many ‘legal’ drugmakers and the many doctors who prescribe them.

It might have made sense for the early AA movement to sidestep the decades-long issues of ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ and Prohibition, in order to survive and focus on helping others. That is no longer the case, and now there is noone with any power or willingness to push back against the many institutions and people who profit off of the misery of millions who are suffering from chemical dependency. Neither the Church nor any recovery group says anything about these issues.

All that is to say, we see his story, and his anger, as a deeply relevant corrective and antidote to the shortcomings of the modern Church, which lives tax-free and spends its energies on either endlessly litigating social war issues it does not have the authority to solve, on mission trips abroad, and on chiding men to ‘man up;’ and the modern recovery movement enmeshed as it is in psychobabble, prescription drugs, Hollywood sensibilities, “harm reduction,” and New Age fads. All while the recovery rate plummets and overdose deaths continue to reach new record numbers.

This is a pretty solid answer to points 1 and 2, why we liked it, and why it’s relevant. We will let you infer the rest, and we may write about this topic ourselves in the future.

Why would this be relevant to you, Dear Reader?

We expect our first audience will be a certain slice of twitter users, who are predominantly cosmopolitan, yet call themselves conservative or ‘right wing.’ Sensitive Young Men alienated from their consumerist peers and disempowered by decades of policy choices. Perhaps they have found themselves abusing substances, and perhaps this narrative suggests a way out.

Yet it’s possible this group likely has little interest in such a narrative. Either because it has never had to deal with these issues, or because this issue cannot be quickly and simply weaponized to score political points online. But we should note that the drug war industry, the cartels, the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, all have a vested interest in ‘business as usual,’ and will not be stopped by internet posting, and will not be stopped by money. It will take a great movement and great power to change things.

But we also hope to reach the more obvious audiences, like Christians, like people in recovery. It is for those people that this book was resurrected. We believe that the path between recovery meetings and churches has been blocked, by disuse, by design, by lack of knowledge, and we believe this book can help retrace a trail between those two points, and strengthen both.

We sincerely hope that this foreword has piqued your interest. We believe if you have found this book, it is meant for you.

Available: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1966777051