The morality and moralizing of addiction
What is need? What is want? Writers bank on the universality of their ideas to reach their audience, but on the subject of addiction, anything I have to say feels as useless as anything I could say about mental illness to someone in throes of madness. Currently, I’m on day four of smoking cessation after falling off the wagon last weekend. Before that I went three months, and earlier on, about two and a half years. Now, I’m trying not to talk about it, my strategy being to take life as it comes, and rely on others to take me as I am without feeling the need to divulge my struggle. But I’ve dealt with insufferable smugness in response to one of my lapses, and that got me thinking about the issue of moral accountability for addiction.
A certain entitlement exacerbates my problem, believing I can do whatever I want and damn the consequences. The social activists would accurately call it privilege, believing emphysema would pass me over because I’m a nice guy. Those sympathetic to my plight would cite the highly addictive properties of nicotine, but that would be cold comfort to me when I’m carting around my own oxygen a few years from now. Like anyone, I would be more sympathetic to others than I would be to myself, which in itself bodes ill for me when I ascribe my own weakness to others and legitimize it out of a misguided sense of compassion. Addiction is tricky. My addiction is tricky. But that’s only my problem.
Sometimes I tell myself that “I shouldn’t have to” chew licorice root and toothpicks, suck on Halls, drink water and breathe deeply, or walk around the block (which I just did). But that’s the addiction talking, bolstering my stubbornness and feeding my privilege. I also tend to remember all the cringe-inducing things I’ve done in my life with each attempt to quit, but that’s also the addiction inuring me to privilege with the luxury of self-pity. It speaks with many voices, and I can afford cockiness as little as I can afford self-loathing.
Years ago, when I was recovering from schizophrenia, I volunteered at a dry cafe, a place for AA members to meet between their perpetual forways to meetings across the breadth of the earth. I was having some distressing problems relating to my living arrangements that included the disconnection of my phone without my knowledge. I called a friend to vent and left him the number of the cafe, which he called, asking for me. He later told me that the proprietor could be heard bellowing in the background to “tell Kyle to tell his friends not to call here.” He had forgotten in his state of disproportionate outrage that I was working full time hours – while going back to school – to keep his concern going. It’s a state known as “dry alcoholism,” a kind of emotional incontinence that makes loved ones long for the days of the bottle.
The real addiction of which there needs to be more awareness (though I have no idea what the PSA would be like), is moral presumption. We are aware of non-substance addictions such as gambling and sex, but more needs to be done to get the judging monkey off our collective backs. We also need to recognize bullying as an addiction. In my view, every bully has a morality to justify their behaviour, and every moralist must be a bully to impose their subjective values.
A while ago, a man was killed down the street from where I live who it turned out I had grown up with in Acton. When I was a kid, he and another older boy had nearly killed me by coaxing me out onto the ice on Faerie Lake with the intention of seeing me fall in, being unaware of the consequences of their actions as some children are. So I had a legitimate reason to avoid him, in contrast to the patent racism directed at him for his native status even as a little boy. Bigotry is what passes for knowledge among the willfully ignorant, hence its allure and habit forming properties. In response to some of the off-colour jokes that were made after his passing, my friend Jessy Bell Smith dedicated to Joe a performance of John Prine’s “Bruised Oranges (Chain of Sorrow)”. It was a beautiful shamanistic moment reminiscent of a soul being championed by the living before it can move on to the next world. Joe had serious problems with substance abuse, and a lot of people got their moral fix judging his human vulnerability. It’s as though love were in limited supply, finding ourselves huddled around a mirror, dividing up every grain of every line, only for the deserving, only for those who can pay.