BY AMES K. SWEET

The new American Dream may no longer revolve around owning your own home with a white picket fence or having two cars in the garage. America’s quintessential “rags to riches” dream has undergone serious redefinition in recent years, and today the new American Dream may well be best defined by the failure, redemption, and recovery of America’s many addicts and alcoholics.

While the “rags” portion of this country’s classic transcendence tale still holds true, the “riches” have changed. Success, it seems, is a moving target. Once easily measured in terms of possessions, performance and economic possibility, a new set of criteria has taken hold.

“Fewer people are pegging their dream to material success and more are pegging it to abstract values,” says The New York Times’ Katherine Seelye. “People are shifting their definition of the American dream.”

FAIL TO WIN
Part of this new consciousness, this new dream, includes a new definition of what it means to succeed and fail. In a September 2010 Newsweek article titled “Redefining Failure,” author Julia Baird wonders how America’s iconic loser, Willy Loman, the central character in Arthur Miller’s classic “Death of a Salesman,” might be perceived against the backdrop of today’s economic meltdown. A figment of postwar prosperity in 1949, Willy was employed for 38 years, owned his own home – he had just made the last mortgage payment – and had a wife and two children. “Today he’d be a survivor,” says Baird.

Recognizing that the economics of things have changed considerably since Willy’s time – how we live in a world of high unemployment where promotions, bonuses and retirement savings “seem like relics” – Baird acknowledges that failure is something many of us are wrestling with right now. But if we accept that success is not a simple, upward career trajectory, she explains, this economic crisis may not just reduce the stigma of losing a job but transform the way we think of failing. “Shocking as it sounds,” she says, “failure can be a good thing.”

This is a notion that recovering alcoholics and addicts have known for some time. And it is perhaps just this deeply personal understanding of failure that has reverberated in the American consciousness and helped fashion a greater sensitivity, as the author J.K. Rowling said in a 2008 address to Harvard graduates, that rather than something inherently negative, failure can mean a “stripping away of the inessential.” Put another way, in a phraseology alcoholics and addicts everywhere would likely recognize, “You have to surrender to win.”

This doesn’t mean, of course, that being an addict or an alcoholic – or any other kind of “failure” in society’s eye – is an uplifting experience in and of itself; yet with failure comes the possibility of success.

‘SPIRITUALITY OF IMPERFECTION’
According to Laura Miller of salon.com, America is a country in recovery. In a recent review of the book, “America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of Life” by Benoit Denizet-Lewis, Miller echoes the changing nature of the American Dream, putting it in terms of recovery when she notes that “the 12-step ceremonies of public confession and contrition, the emphasis on humility before the community, the promise of an enlightened, remade self awaiting anyone willing to work hard enough, the very idea that who you are is not an immutable fact, but rather a story whose theme is change – all of these rituals and dreams are part of the fabric of American culture.”

The recovery mantra seems to be everywhere and what started out as a relatively quiet and anonymous effort in small recovery groups or within the privacy of therapy offices has, in the last decade, reached critical mass, mushrooming into a full-scale social movement.

Similar movements in modern American culture – the civil rights movement, the women’s movement and the gay rights movement, to name a few – have also transitioned from despair to burgeoning social consciousness and community building, forging a new set of values, a new vocabulary of change, new social institutions and new rituals of gathering, protest and celebration. Says Miller, “the genius of the recovery movement lies in its ability to transform everyday survival into an heroic endeavor, investing it with tremendous meaning.”

The message of recovery has always been based on the imperfection of its messengers. In fact, it is that “spirituality of imperfection” – a phrase coined by author and recovery historian Ernest Kurtz – that makes the recovery movement unique.

RECOVERY COMMUNION
Communities of recovery are places of sanctuary and healing for those who have been stigmatized and marginalized by addiction. In such communities one is accepted not in spite of one’s imperfections, but because of them.

Within such a community, says William L. White, author of “Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America,” one can find a deep sense of fit – a sense of finally discovering and connecting to the whole of which one is a part. “The recovery community is a place where shared pain and hope can be woven by its members into life-saving stories whose mutual exchange is more akin to communion than communication. This sanctuary of the estranged fills spiritual as well as physical space. It is a place of refuge, refreshment and renewal. It is a place that defies commercialization – a place whose most important assets are not for sale.”

It is generally agreed that the phrase “the American dream” was first coined in 1931, in the midst of the Depression, by author and historian James Truslow Adams and was reflective of the second sentence of the U.S. Declaration of Independence which states that “all men are created equal” and that they are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In his book, “The Epic of America,” Adams wrote, “The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement… It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

Lofty sentiments, indeed, which, unfortunately, over the years, were co-opted by the primacy of economics.

In today’s world, however, recovery has helped to overhaul the cultural predominance of money, property and prestige in America’s Dream. “It has given anyone suffering at the other end of a bottle, pipe, needle, sex or food addiction a place to go, not only to feel better but to get better,” says psychologist Tian Dayton in a recent article in The Huffington Post. “Recovery makes hope and health more important than despair and sickness. It gives people a way to become different on the inside and on the outside. In treatment centers and twelve step rooms all across the world, communities of like-minded people share their ‘experience, strength and hope,’ throw a dollar in a basket and change their lives and the world for the better. They light one candle and that candle is themselves and that candle lights the candle of the person next to them and eventually the whole room is warmed by the glow of hope and healing.”

Sounds a lot like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to me.

Ames K. Sweet writes on issues related to addiction for many organizations, including AA, the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, and the Hazelden Foundation.