Summary of Basic Thesis/Argument:
In this book, Kent Dunnington seeks to move beyond the binary categories of “willful choice” versus “disease” to describe the phenomenon of addiction. His process entails developing and defending three theses:
- The category of habit is indispensable for charting a path between the muddled polarities of ‘disease’ and ‘choice.’
- The prevalence and power of addiction indicates the extent to which society fails to provide nonaddictive modes of acquiring certain kinds of goods necessary to human welfare.
- The theological category of sin can deepen and extend our understanding of addiction (page 10).
He concludes his analysis by drawing our attention to the relationship of addiction to worship and the Church’s place in offering hope to those caught in the midst of the destructive aspects of addiction.
Analysis:
Dunnington begins his work by contending that “every attempt to provide ‘scientifically objective’ necessary and sufficient conditions for addiction has failed” (page 16). He demonstrates that both ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ actions are influenced by genetic and neurological features. In the context of discussing addiction, he believes the crucial matter centers on “whether or not the behavior in question is sensitive to reason” (page 30). He contends that the question of whether or not addiction is a disease or a choice “rests on a false dichotomy” (page 31). Instead, he believes that the philosophical category of habit resides between these two false choices, and can help us engage in fresh thinking on this topic.
In order to explore this subject, Dunnington takes a deep dive into the works of both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Through this exploration, he concludes that the notion of habit “can explain how it is possible for an agent to both rationally determine that a behavior should be rejected and yet voluntarily engages in that behavior” (page 51). In fact, he concludes that “rather than ‘knowledge simple’ or ‘abstract knowledge,’ embodied knowledge, is “required for consistent continent and virtuous action, and incontinent action is often due to a lack of embodied knowledge – that is, to a failure of habit” (page 53).
In the midst of this discussion, Dunnington makes the helpful distinction between a “habit” and a “disposition.” He indicates that if a problematic behavior can be recognized and rooted out simply through an act of the will, it is probably not a habit, but a disposition. On the other hand, habits “are ‘patterned acts that are neither fully willed nor completely automatic’ and ‘inhabit a hybrid zone’…midway between both determined disease and unconstrained choice” (pages 69-70). With this distinction in mind, Dunnington asserts that “rather than being things that we have (as diseases are), addictions are more like things that we become” (page 72).
Dunnington then moves on to discuss the process by which people who are addicted work toward the attainment of moral and intellectual goods. Within this discussion he examines the ways that simple habits combine or cooperate to form “complex habits” that contribute to the “recalcitrance” of addictive behavior (page 88). He concludes that “addictive behavior can tell us more than almost any other kind of human behavior about what human beings most deeply desire” (page 97).
After laying this groundwork about the nature of habits, Dunnington moves on to examine “why addiction is such a predominant and powerful contemporary phenomenon” (page 103). He conducts this examination through the threefold lens of modern arbitrariness (and the loss of a common teleology), boredom, and loneliness. In the first instance, he shows that our consumer culture suffers from an inability to arrive at any semblance of consensus regarding the conferring of value upon goods. Addiction, instead, provides to the addict something consumer culture says does not exist, “necessity” (page 112). Growing out of this lack of teleology/purpose, the second aspect Dunnington examines, modern boredom, has recently blossomed into existence. Dunnington describes this aspect from two perspectives: for “those who are bored with nothing to do, addiction stimulates by entangling and consuming; for those who are bored with too much to do, addiction disburdens by simplifying and clarifying” (page 118). Following his description of this fragmentation and boredom, Dunnington describes the third aspect, loneliness, a condition which has spread rampantly throughout our modern society.
Dunnington briefly traces the differences between modern friendships and Aristotle’s ideas on friendship. Aristotle’s notions of friendship concerned the development of virtues in friends; whereas, in contrast to ancient notions, modern friendships tend to focus more on affection and social utility (networking or social capital). Initially, addictive substances “help people feel more free to express affection and more confident that they are receiving it” (page 121). Unfortunately, the paradox exists that when addicted people encounter friendships that interfere with their newfound singular pursuit of substances to which they are addicted, they jettison or destroy those friendships. When viewing the issue from the perspective of Dunnington’s three-fold lens, addiction “is in fact a kind of embodied cultural critique of modernity, and the addict a kind of unwitting modern prophet” (page 123).
After examining the nature of addiction, Dunnington explores the relationship of addiction to the concept of sin. He critiques the tendency within the recovery movement to “either insist on a clear demarcation of addiction from sin, or to replace the language of sin completely with that of addiction…” (page 126). He then provides a description of what he refers to as the “paradox of sin,” in that “as Augustine argued, we may find ourselves unable to sin and yet nevertheless rightly held to be acting voluntarily in our sinning” (page 133). Dunnington maintains that the religious language of sin is similar to the idea of “habit” because it “mediates between an overly voluntarist Pelagianism on the one hand and an overly Manichaeism on the other hand” (page 134). The concept of sin provides “explanatory and descriptive insight into the phenomenon of addiction” page 138). The following summarizes his perspective:
[W]hen we speak of addiction in the theological category of sin, we draw attention to the way in which addiction constitutes not a moral deficiency but rather a falling away from our perfect good of eternal friendship with God. The emergence of the discourse of addiction was correlative to a loss of an agreed on transcendent telos for human beings, but it points back to a need for such a language of transcendence in order to make sense of the phenomenon that the discourse is meant to describe (page 140).
Dunnington then argues that in order to connect the categories of addiction and sin, and to obtain a clear focus of the depth and power of addiction, we must recognize that “addiction is a counterfeit form of worship” and “a counterfeit of the virtue of charity” (pages 141-144). As part of this argument, he dives into a discussion of immanence and transcendence, and how the immanent activities of everyday life relate to the “transcendent quest for right relationship with God” (page 143). Dunnington relies on the thought of Thomas Aquinas, and in particular his view that charity is an “infused virtue” which gives directedness to the other virtues “by ordering them to a common end” (page 147).
On the other hand, addiction simplifies the addict’s life and gives order to their desires toward an ultimate “final end” (page 151). The addict has the “amazing capacity…to orient his or her thoughts and activities around the governing center of addiction” (page 154). For the addict there is no moderation. Instead, the addict pursues “ecstasy” in the technical sense of “standing outside of oneself” (page 157), in an attempt to do violence to “our own insignificance” and inability to achieve an all-consuming experience (pages 157-159). In essence, Dunnington claims that “addiction is appropriately described as a failure of worship, a potent expression of idolatry in which we pursue in the immanent plane that which can only be achieved in relationship with the transcendent God” (page 159).
Dunnington concludes his book by examining how the Church, “which hopes to practice true worship of the true God,” should “respond to addiction” (page 169). As part of this examination, he highlights the fact that addiction, at its center, is a “fundamental contradiction” (page 175). This contradiction centers on addiction’s promise to “empower a moral agent to integrate and order his life around one all-consuming end…[But this] promise is unmasked as a lie insofar as the agent comes to recognize that his addiction demands that he disavow projects and commitments that he knows must be included in a worthwhile life” (page 175).
Instead, true worship of God trains us to see ourselves as dependent. Even our concept of self is a received gift we learn to locate “within God’s story” (page 177). Dunnington draws the reader’s attention to Aquinas’ distinction between acquired virtues (those which we develop through moral exertion) and received (infused) virtues (those we get through the power of the Holy Spirit). He highlights the importance of recognizing the priority of the infused virtues, particularly the virtue of charity, which as he showed earlier is the means by which the other virtues are well ordered.
This posture of dependence and reception places us in a position of more likely encountering God (or rather being encountered by God) in worship, instead of projecting outward our own understanding of God. In contrast to many within the recovery movement, Dunnington states that rather than labeling ourselves as “spiritual but not religious, Christian worship should train us to be neither ‘spiritual’ nor ‘religious’ but rather to be dependent on the triune God of Israel who became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth” (page 181). Our true or primary identity should rest in our relationship with God, not in a secondary label such as alcoholic or addict given by a 12-step program. Because the Christian view of redemption insists “that sin is not fundamental or ontological but rather historical and contingent” the Church can offer a more robust “hope” – one of the infused virtues he mentions (page 183).
At the heart of Dunnington’s conclusion sits the question, “why has the twelve-step movement essentially replaced the church as the place that addicted persons go to recover” (page 184). He asserts that this has happened because “of the way in which [the twelve-step movement’s] format and method invite and demand transformative friendships” (page 185). He indicates that they have done this in three primary ways. First of all, twelve-step programs place a high priority on identity formation. Whereas twelve-step programs insist at the very beginning that members identify as addicts and celebrate this identification in a ritualized manner, churches rarely emphasize that members engage in the vulnerable exercise of identifying as sinners, particularly in revealing the details associated with that identification (pages 185-187). Secondly, twelve-step programs approach friendships more in line with Aristotle’s perspective of friendships as mechanisms for training in virtues. In contrast, churches tend to be more informal in this endeavor (or concentrate on facilitating affection and social utility types of friendship). Finally, participation in churches requires much less of a time commitment as compared to twelve-step programs. Particularly, communal worship in churches is often only conceived of as a weekly activity, rather than a daily activity of the community that supports its members in personal training for holiness. He concludes by saying:
Addiction is – like all sin – a form of idolatry because it elevates some proximate good to the status of ultimate good, a status that belongs to God alone. But, addiction is uniquely alluring, uniquely captivating and uniquely powerful because its object comes so close to making good on its false promise to be God (page 191).
Dunnington brings his book to a close by claiming that addicts stand in our midst in place of the prophets of old, making us uncomfortable with the lives we often lead. He says:
Like the prophets of old, today’s addicts may remind us that our desire for God is trivial and weak, and our horizons of hope and expectancy are limited and mundane. We recoil at the presence of the addict, for we fear the addict’s life is an indictment of the insufficiency of our own lives. The addict has rejected the life of respectable and proximate contentment and demanded instead a life of complete purpose and ecstasy…The question that addiction puts to the church is whether or not it can offer a convincing alternative to the addicted life, and the challenge addiction presents to the church is whether or not it can embody the purposive, ecstatic and all-consuming love of God in a way that is more compelling than the life of addiction…
Strengths and Weaknesses:
In my opinion, this book offers much food for thought and provides interesting insights into this difficult challenge facing the Church. Though I believe there are many interesting and helpful elements contained in this book, I only briefly highlight three below. First of all, I think that the combination of two of Dunnington’s main theses (the first regarding habits, and the third regarding sin), and the way that he examines the implications of these theses provides a very helpful framework for thinking about how the church should approach issues associated with addiction. Secondly, I believe that Dunnington’s assertion that addiction, like all sin, is a form of idolatry is very helpful for framing the problem associated with addiction, and can provide helpful vocabulary for moving forward as churches formulate strategies for helping her members deal with addiction (particularly vocabulary associated with identity labels). Finally, I think Dunnington’s conclusion that addicts stand in our midst challenging the church to offer “a convincing alternative to the addictive life” provides a helpful focus on the center of the problem.
In my opinion, the only weaknesses that stood out as I worked through the book were certain sections at the beginning which I believe could have used more editing. Several sentences seemed overly complex, and that complexity did not increase the book’s precision. However, overall, I greatly enjoyed the book, particularly towards the end.
Todd Rivetti 