The Kindness of Strangers
On saints, alcoholics and drivers who give you a lift
This essay is also an invitation. On Sunday, I’ll be holding the last in the current season of Sunday Sessions, an “overheard conversation” with Bhav Patel from Initiatives of Change. We’ll be talking about the origins of Alcoholics Anonymous in a movement that addressed itself to everyone, not only to those suffering from the disease of personal addiction, and whether this history might offer lessons for the work of “hospicing modernity”.
Paid subscribers to this Substack are invited to join us live for the Zoom session at 8pm CEST on Sunday 16 June. A recording of the first forty minutes will be shared publicly next week.
I still remember the first time.
It was 1996, a damp spring morning, the week after Easter. I should have been revising for my A-levels and instead I stood on the hard shoulder of a slip-road at the edge of Plymouth docks, as the lorries and cars began to pick up speed, trying to catch the eye of a passing driver. All that day, I got in and out of strangers’ cars, until in the late afternoon someone dropped me at a junction on the A1 at the edge of my hometown and I could walk the last couple of miles home.
That trip was a test run. Later the same year, I set off for real, with a guitar and a rucksack: for ten months, I travelled to the far corners of Europe, making money by singing on the street and getting around by thumbing lifts.
My dad had hitchhiked plenty when he was young. He remembered a time when there would be a queue of northbound hitchers at the bottom of the M1. The drivers who stopped for me in the nineties would often comment that they never saw anyone hitching anymore. Three decades on, there are even fewer of us who travel this way, and it’s years now since I hitched a lift myself.
I came back from that ten-month trip to start university, full of stories and out of tune with the world into which I was arriving. Anyway, the stories I’d come back with were uncooked. Isn’t it often the case that it takes years to make sense of an experience, to bring it to the place from which it can be told? I’d thrown myself into no end of experiences that year – though I knew that the calculus of risk would have looked quite different for many of my friends, compared to my own circumstances, placing myself in these situations, as a tall white man.
One thing I came to see, as I headed on into my twenties: that year of travelling had taught me something that most of my similarly privileged peers never had the chance to learn. Again and again, I had encountered the kindness of strangers. The openness and curiosity of nearly all of those who stopped for me, the willingness of some to go out of their way in order to help me get where I was going, the generous invitations that sometimes sprang out of someone’s momentary decision to pull up and offer a lift to an unknown man at the side of the road.
In all the thousands of miles of hitching that I’ve done, I only had one bad experience. One afternoon in 2005, I got into the back of a white van heading south from Sheffield on the M1. There was only a mattress in the back, not seats, and the banter between the three lads in the front was heading in a direction that I didn’t like. By then, I’d been working off and on as a radio journalist for a few years, and I had sat in courtrooms as lawyers and witnesses retraced stories that started off a little like this and escalated to places no one involved had had in mind at the outset. Luckily, the traffic ground to a halt somewhere north of Nottingham. I made my excuses, got out and walked along the hard shoulder to the next junction.
A funny thing, though: the week that happened, I had just started work on an article about all the things I’d learned from hitchhiking. Well, I decided not to finish that article, and to let those who would have read it make their own decisions about getting into strangers’ cars, without any encouragement from me. And thinking back on that experience, it strikes me that you can get the message without needing to be able to explain who was on the other end of the line.
Two years ago, the anonymous author of
posted an essay called Without Saints. Given how many words have flowed under the bridge of Substack in the time since, it says something that I’m still thinking about what he wrote.It’s an essay about secularism and the closing off of religious experience. He starts with a memory of being fourteen and asking a girl at school, “Do you really believe all that stuff?” Both these teenagers were growing up in a Catholic neighbourhood, somewhere in Yorkshire, in the 1980s, and the question the essay asks is how come, given that setting, it seemed impossible for him to “comprehend how an intelligent person could have faith?” What was it that had gone missing from this culture – and quite recently – which meant not simply that other options were available, but that faith in anything beyond the human didn’t seem to be an option?
There’s a familiar, almost unexamined explanation that runs in the background of a lot of modern secular thinking: that religious faith belongs to an earlier and more childish period in human history, that modern science undermined its premises and superseded its function in explaining the world to us, and that it was only ever a tool used to exploit the downtrodden and the gullible, anyway. The limits of this default explanation are well explored in Charles Taylor’s vast and illuminating book, A Secular Age, which is one of the sources for the Flat Caps essay. Yet having considered a couple of Taylor’s alternative explanations for the rise of secularism, the author observes that they do not really fit the world of his adolescence: what made the faith of previous generations inaccessible to him was not the availability of a spectrum of alternative positions of which he was barely aware, nor was this a setting in which an individualistic “ethics of authenticity” had replaced the conditions in which traditional belief had thrived. He describes the culture shock of encountering that mindset, a few years later, when he arrived at university and found himself surrounded by people from educated middle-class backgrounds who really did think that way.
What was it, then, this threshold which had been crossed in the last generation or two, beyond which faith no longer seemed a live possibility? His answer is that what had gone were the practices and examples that might have given a sense of the difference faith might make. “My incomprehension could be summed up as a question: ‘What does all of this even do?’”
Looking back within the tradition into which he had been born, he points to the passing of the figure of the saint and the practice of devotion to saints, still common in his grandparents’ generation, but abandoned by his parents: figures who embodied something beyond the reasonable pursuit of ordinary human flourishing. I don’t want to dismiss this, exactly; apart from anything else, there does seem to be something afoot just now when it comes to saints, an eddy in the cultural atmosphere, and not only among those who advocate for a rewilded Christianity. I’m thinking of
’s In the Company of Saints, or the Welsh saints who haunt Tom Bullough’s marvellous book, Sarn Helen.But I want to make another suggestion as to the source of this modern incomprehension in the face of faith, a suggestion which takes us back to those experiences I had as a young man getting in and out of strangers’ cars.
Implicit in the core structures of modern society, there appears to be an imperative that things be ordered so as to avoid situations in which I need to throw myself on the kindness of strangers. Through the impersonal structure of the market, I can exercise my will by using money, and through the impersonal structure of the state, I can claim my rights to certain basic goods and forms of support. We all know how often these structures fall short of delivering on their promises, yet these remain the promises around which our way of living has been built. And at least for the lucky ones – the “winners” of modernity – this means that we rarely find ourselves in the situation of depending on the freely given help of people who did not have to help us.
It’s hard to argue that this is a bad thing – and harder still, if I seem to be saying that what makes it a bad thing is that it cuts us off from forms of religious faith which no longer seem conceivable to many of us, anyway. So bear with me, because this is not exactly what I want to argue. Try putting it this way, instead: it seems that the effect of these forms of security, around which modern life is organised, has been to cut us off from certain important aspects of what the world is like. If we never find ourselves in the situation of needing the kindness of strangers, then we do not learn how much kindness there is out there, nor do we get much chance to exercise our own capacity for kindness. Another word for what is freely given is “grace”, and in a life which includes some exposure to the kindness of strangers, there is an experience of grace, which may appear as a clue to something larger that lies beyond the surface of these experiences, and this in turn may lead us into the territory in which faith begins to make sense.
If all our experience of getting around involves being chauffeured by parents, buying rail tickets, and later a car of one’s own, then not only is there little exposure to the kindness of strangers, but there is also less likelihood of the kind of experience I had that one time in the van on the M1, where it is hard to shake the sense that the world is not the essentially meaningless place assumed by a modern secular worldview; that it might be in some way woven through with meaning and with messages, a few of which might even be for us. I don’t want to press interpretations onto what happened that afternoon, still less to put it in service to religious ideology, but let me just ask this: would it have been a wiser response, had I chosen to shake my rational modern head at the absurdity of thinking there might be a message in that one bad ride and gone on with writing my article? I find that hard to believe.
When I first read Without Saints, what came to mind wasn’t my hitchhiking experiences, but the people I’ve known who have fallen through the bottom of their own lives: people whose experiences with addiction have brought them to their knees, and who credit their still being around at all – and in better shape than they once believed was possible – to their involvement with one or other of the twelve-step fellowships which grew out of Alcoholics Anonymous.
The first step of the twelve is an admission of powerlessness: a surrender which becomes, paradoxically, the condition of possibility for survival and recovery. This is followed, in steps two and three, by a coming to believe in “a Power greater than ourselves” and a decision to “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him”. “They say you can get sober on the First Step alone,” writes Lewis Hyde, “but certainly not with the ease of those who find their way to the others.”
Reading that Flat Caps essay, I thought of my friends in recovery, because they are the people I know who have the most practical answer to the question of “What does all this even do?” Their understandings of God may not always fit inside the frames of religious orthodoxy, but for many, the leap of faith inscribed in those first three steps has been lifesaving. They have experienced the necessity of throwing themselves upon the kindness of strangers, themselves fellow addicts, and of being upheld by people who are not capable of holding themselves up. And this is not an alternative reality which they can choose to go and visit, like a middle-class teenager hitching lifts, but a daily practice that keeps them from drowning.
I’ve written before about how I became curious about the work of Alcoholics Anonymous, and you can read more at the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures site about the conversation Vanessa Andreotti, Felix Marquardt and I have had over time about what an “AA for Humanity” would look like. At the heart of this conversation is our shared sense that modernity itself resembles a form of addiction – and that what is called for, if we take seriously the depth of the trouble around and ahead of us, is something akin to a twelve-step programme on the scale of a whole culture.
There is no easy way to translate the lessons of twelve-step to a wider culture, nor is it straightforward to apply its processes to self-destructive patterns which are not an obstacle to normal participation in the life of society, but integral to the norms of how our societies work. All the same, I was intrigued earlier this year when I received an email from a man called Bhav Patel who had heard me talk about these things, and who drew my attention to the origins of AA within an earlier movement which addressed itself to everyone and not only those who were suffering from the personal disease of addiction.
I’d heard a little about The Oxford Group, but I didn’t know about its later history, in which it went under the name of Moral & Spiritual Rearmament, and more recently, Initiatives of Change. It’s a complex story – if I were Jon Ronson, I’d make a whole podcast series about it – but having read Bhav’s essay, When Will We Give Up Hope?, and after a couple of conversations, I wanted to invite him to join me and share something of his own journey with Initiatives of Change and the history of these organisations which have sought to bring the same kind of transformation that addicts find in recovery, but on the scale of national and international conflicts.
So join us, if you will, this Sunday for an “overheard conversation” in which we’ll talk about the origins and ongoing relevance of AA to the wider predicament of modern culture.
This live session will be open to anyone with a paid subscription to my Substack. You’ll find the Zoom details below the paywall on this post. A recording of the first forty minutes will be shared publicly here and on YouTube, while the full recording is available to paid subscribers, alongside the archive from the rest of the Sunday Sessions. Thanks to all of you whose support makes it possible for me to write these essays and letters, and to host conversations like this.
Zoom details for Sunday Sessions #8 with Bhav Patel
The call lasts an hour and starts at 8pm CEST which is 7pm BST, 2pm EDT or 11am PDT. Use the Zoom link below to join the call: