MICHAEL MULLINS’ TINY LETTER

Recently I read Peter Singer's review article 'The Empathy Trap' on the Project-Syndicate.org 'opinion page' website.

Singer is the Australian philosopher most famous for applying John Stuart Mill's 19th century utilitarianism principles to modern ethical dilemmas. My study of ethics and moral theology in 1980-81 coincided with the publication of his classic text Practical Ethics. Singer was the bête noire of my teachers and I have since regarded his thinking with both interest and suspicion.

I was captivated by the social justice advocacy and activism of the time, which also featured prominently in the secondary school religious education curriculum. I remember Wendy Poussard's school text book Walk in My Shoes, which was used to teach students empathy with the poor.

Poussard's text represented the view that there were particular values that were non-negotiable. They could not be subjected to any kind of utilitarian calculus. The argument against this is that the ethics of empathy can be extraordinarily subjective. We can put ourselves in the 'shoes' of whales, but what about other animals or human beings? As Singer argues, 'empathy makes us kinder to [beings] with whom we empathise'.

He says: 'Trump, in his campaign speeches, made use of the tragic murder of Kate Steinle by an undocumented immigrant to stoke support for his anti-immigrant policies. He did not, of course, offer any similarly vivid portrayals of undocumented immigrants who have saved the lives of strangers, although such cases have been reported.'

Singer's review article relates to the the book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, written by Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom.

He supports Bloom's argument that our ability to reason has a crucial part to play in ethical decisions, and empathy is just as likely to lead us to do the wrong thing. 'Animals with big round eyes, like baby seals, arouse more empathy than chickens, on whom we inflict vastly more suffering'.

I notice that The Conversaton has today begun a series on empathy, including the question of whether doctors and other professionals need more empathy, and when it can be counter-productive. It gets into questions of how empathy can be measured and contained, and whether it should be.

In December The Conversation had an article on Matthew Flinders' encounters with Indigenous Australians. It looked at genuine evidence for his feelings of empathy and sense of morality but concluded that they were always contained by his sense of duty, which was to explore and map the Australian coast and keep his ship's company safe.

If Flinders' empathy was relative to his sense of duty, Singer's empathy is subject to his own particular kind of rationalism. In other words, Singer's rationalism is limited in the way that economic rationalism is subject to the principles of free market economics. He can't pretend that his is the king of all rationalisms. I think that we need to agree with him about the absurdities that he points out regarding the manipulation of empathy, but use art and spirituality to supplement the dominant rationality in our society.

There has been an epidemic of people drowning in backyard pools and public swimming locations this summer. There have been almost as many water deaths as car fatalities. Governments are being challenged to spend money to encourage more people to learn to swim.

For me it brings back childhood memories of the Melbourne Herald newspaper's learn-to-swim campaign that was founded in 1929 and continued for five or six decades. Young Victorians were given their 'Herald' certificate if they could swim 25 yards (22.9 metres).

The campaign's longtime chairman was the legendary Sir Frank Beaurepaire. He the program enabled many thousands of people anually to 'hold their own in the water'. Learning to swim, he said, was 'a great step in developing self confidence, and once learned, the ability to swim is never forgotten'.

The ability to swim was an article of faith in my family, as it was in many families in regional areas. We all got our Herald certificate with no trouble at all. In fact we considered 25 yards was nothing. We could easily swim the 50 metre length of the local Olympic pool (54 yards) and would set our sights on 10 lengths.

For me the temporary stumbling block was diving. For a long time I couldn't do it, no matter how hard I tried. I remember the breakthrough happening as an eight year old in 1968 when my uncle visited from New Zealand. Somehow he instilled in me the necessary confidence.

But confidence comes and goes. I remember adult authority figures affirming me as a slow but strong swimmer. That was enough to encourage me to train to become faster so that I might compete. However that quickly came to an end when I went to boarding school in the city and one of the teachers joked that I swam like a whale. While nobody unlearns how to swim, this destroyed my confidence and any ambition I had to do swimming as a competitive sport.

Sometimes I think of the Herald learn-to-swim campaign as quaint and belonging to another era. I'm not sure when or why it ended but am curious. Sadly nothing has replaced it.

I imagine that it was considered lacking in coolness. Last year's ABC TV miniseries on the Christos Tsiolkas novel Barracuda might have changed this, but it was too fleeting and made for the wrong audience. Probably it would take a reality TV event to make learning to swim a must for young people.

I also think about the nature of campaigns run by media organisations. They used to be about public service, but now it's more ideology. Perhaps the Herald learn-to-swim campaign ended around 1987 when Rupert Murdoch purchased the paper. For in recent years, his papers have campaigned against public safety for young people, on ideological grounds, with their opposition to the government Safe Schools anti homophobic bullying program. No doubt that is a sign of the times.

I recall attending a late afternoon history lecture in one of the large theatres at Melbourne University. It was 1983 and the lecturer Dr Donna Merwick interrupted her delivery and glared at a student sitting in one of the tiered rows towards the back of the room.

He was indiscreetly holding up and reading the afternoon broadsheet newspaper The Herald while listening to her lecture in the background. She asked him for his undivided attention and quickly got it.

In 2010 I was doing sessional teaching at Sydney University and faced a similar, but by then impossible, battle for the undivided attention of my students.

Most of them had their laptops open, ostensibly taking notes. But it was obvious that they were listening to me in the background while focusing on whatever online activities they would be engaged in if they were somewhere other than in this room attending a compulsory class.

Short of having mirrors installed on the wall behind them, there was not a lot that I could do about it. And in any case, it was the age of multitasking, and it had become normal for anybody - not just students - to focus their attention on several activities at any given time. What was regarded as insolence in 1983 had become de rigeur by 2010.

I am thinking about divided attention in the context of hyperlinks on web pages. Earlier this week I wrote a piece that referred to an online article in The Guardian. I linked to that article in my first paragraph. One of my readers told me that he didn't get beyond my first paragraph because he clicked on the link and read the Guardian article instead.

The next day - yesterday - I also referred to an article online. But I didn't link to it, instead including enough information about it to make it easy to Google. The reader suggested that I should have provided a link to the article, but I was unmoved. 

In fact I will isolate myself from the flow of information around the web if I don't provide links. This is because Google rewards links with higher rankings in search results with its increasingly sophisticated search algorithms. This has led to the fragmentation of our attention on an industrial scale. Back in 1983, the idea of linking was more or less confined to footnotes in academic articles. Even with footnotes, it was necessary to go to the trouble of consulting the card or microfiche catalogue in the library before your attention was diverted.

Lack of focus is a major explanation for why governments can no longer do anything substantial. With the release of Keating era Cabinet papers at New Year, we were reminded of Paul Keating's ability to command attention and how this made him able to achieve significant economic and other reform.

Certainly Keating's magnetic personality had a lot to do with it, but the real reason it could be done then and not now is that 1992 was several years before widespread use of the Internet arrived and changed everything.

When I was in my first year of secondary school, my mother was unimpressed with the quality of the education I was getting from the Christian Brothers.

She wasn't alone. Other parents were pulling their sons out of that school and sending them to one of the government high schools, where the education was believed to be better. She went further, and sent me to the city to boarding school. To the Catholic school with the best reputation for academic excellence.

She didn't like it that almost all schools in regional areas had given up teaching the structure and rules of English Grammar. She wanted me to be taught English Grammar. In addition, there would be Latin, and - if I ended up in the top stream - Ancient Greek. It was a matter of pride that my school was one of two schools in the state that still taught Ancient Greek.

I remember learning the rules of English Grammar in Year 8, in a very methodical manner from a teacher named Mr Harrison. He taught us how to write and structure the Queen's English but definitely not how to speak it. Behind his back we mimicked him giving us the instruction 'Get out your Pendlebury' in his very broad Australian accent. Our 'Pendlebury' was the class text, A Grammar School English Course by B.J. Pendlebury.

I never completely understood why some schools taught English Grammar and others didn't, until the other day when I read an article in The Conversation titled 'Things you were taught at school that are wrong'.

It's quite a good article, more balanced than the clickbait title suggests. It talks about the prescriptivists, who wrote rules prescribing how sentences must be structured, and the descriptivists who compiled guides describing how English was used by different people for various purposes.

Now I know that, in 1972, my mother was taking me out of the hands of the descriptivists and entrusting me to the prescriptivists.

The writer Misty Adoniou makes the not entirely tongue in cheek suggestion that the prescriptivists made up rules to ensure that literacy stayed out of reach of the working classes.

This is beyond the scope of the article, but it seems to me that the teaching and enforcing of language rules and exclusions has proved to one of the most effective tools of social engineering. In particular the assimilation of indigenous and migrant populations into the dominant culture.

But I can't agree with Adoniou's easy dismissal of the prescriptivists, and, in the end, I think the article is misleading and wrong. That is because teaching grammar has a lot to do with educating us to think logically and argue rationally. I know that this would have been my mother's motivation. She was definitely not a class snob.

I remember being taught not to begin a sentence with 'and', 'but', 'or' or 'for'. Now I do not hesitate to do that if it adds to the effect of what I'm writing.

Aside from its help in faciliating clear thinking and rational argument, I'm pleased that I was taught the rules of grammar so that I can pick and choose which ones to accept and ignore. It's a lot like being taught religious doctrine using a catechism. Or studying comparative religion. You're equipped to make informed and rationally argued choices.

I woke up early this morning with plans to write about the rules of English Grammar. But I looked at the home page of The Guardian and was affected by a beautiful article on summertime loneliness and depression in inner city Sydney.

It was written by a Sri Lankan Australian - Gary Paramanathan - and what he describes is familiar. 'There is a non urgency to summer, everyone slows down, everyone is having a good time. Everyone it seems but me.'

Except I don't want to have a good time, if you're talking about the kind of thing they have at Christmas parties and on New Year's Eve. I don't think I went to any Christmas parties, and I was very happy to be in bed by ten o'clock on New Year's Eve.

I haven't been lonely. I have company. But that's not entirely the reason for my contentment. Rather, it seems that my heightened sense perception on the hot sticky days and nights we've been having, combined with the current quietness of my neighbourhood, has made me more than usually present to myself.

It's almost as if this part of my summer has spontaneously turned into a spiritual retreat and my experience has been one of quiet consolation. On retreat you get away from the busyness of everyday life and open yourself to unexpected shifts of spirit. That's what has happened to me. Gary could also be on retreat and, like me until now, doesn't know it. His contentment is yet to arrive.

He's lying in bed restless, thinking: 'When you wake up, you can only hope your head is clearer.' Like mine. He's feeling desolate in the 'emotionally void streets of Sydney’s most dense and overwhelmingly white suburb'. Like I do from time to time, even without his race selfconsciousness.

I can feel to some extent at one with the other people who walk the streets of my area of Newtown, even though our steadfast gaze is mostly away from each other's eyes. But there's more, if I want it. Gary writes that he was 'spoilt' growing up in Colombo, where eye contact and richer human connection are the norm.

He finds it a challenge in Sydney. But I know it is possible because my friend John has made an artform of it. Recently I was moved as I walked with him along his Kensington street and witnessed him making not just eye contact, but exchange of words, and warm and genuinely friendly conversation, across racial and other cultural boundaries. John's human contact is not my human contact, but he shows me that the familiar faces in the streets of our neighbourhood need not remain strangers.

I remember when I was a Jesuit novice in the late 70s, that we would drive around Sydney in an orange VW Kombi van. When we needed a car parking space, two of the seven in my year believed we would find one if we said a prayer to St Gerard Majella. Two - including myself - thought that was rubbish, while the other three were somewhere in between.

We would always get a park in the end, and it remained a moot point whether we had St Gerard to thank. I was never convinced. I'm less hard line in my skepticism these days, though I believe that intercessory prayer works if it is not seen as a 'get out of jail free' card but more akin to the power of positive thought and initiative. We don't expect St Gerard to do the heavy lifting for us. He's there more to encourage us.

Oprah Winfrey said: 'The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.' She would have been referring to major life goals and not trivial matters like car parking. But, according to her doctrine, if we believe we can find a park, and look in the right places, we will. The key is that it will be a result of our own actions.

My previous rejection of intercessory prayer was probably more in line with the reformed Protestant Calvinist doctrine of predestination, which rejects intercessory prayer out of hand.

I've always found it hard to understand how predestination is any different to fatalism, which is defeatist and undermining of human possibility. It's like the Filipino bahala na 'leave it up to God' laid-back attitude that could be responsible for that country's perennially poor economic performance.

This is in contrast to that of the US, where it was the father of free enterprise Benjamin Franklin who said 'God helps those who help themselves'. The paradox is that this self-seeking attitude contradicts the selflessness that is at the heart of the message of the Christian Gospel.

My thoughts about intercessory prayer were prompted by a friend from many years ago who wrote to me on Saturday about the tough time she's had in recent years. Sadly her Catholic faith has not delivered at her time of need. She said: 'I have stopped praying as not one prayer has been answered'.

It's a time of weather extremes, with heatwave conditions in Sydney and flash flooding from summer storms in Melbourne. However one of the readers of this Tiny Letter is experiencing quite a different extreme, near the Arctic Circle in Canada's far north.

Justin - a Jesuit studying in Ottawa - is filling in for the local priest in Déline (pronounced 'day-li-neh'), an autonomous Dene First Nations community in the Northwest Territory (pictured). Thursday's lunchtime temperature was minus 27 degrees Celsius.

I was interested to read the Wikipedia article on Déline, which included an account of an unfortunate mishap that occurred in March this year. A heating fuel tanker fell part way through the ice road just a few days after the government had increased the road's maximum weight limit. It occurred close to the communities' fresh water intake, in a major fishing area. Fortunately the fuel was able to be removed quickly.

I've noticed that particular accidents and tragedies often become a rallying point - and source of legend - for individual communities, especially those that are remote or living in adverse weather conditions, and thrive on telling stories. Four years ago I visited Winnipeg at this time of the year, inspired by the hauntingly poetic 2007 film 'My Winnipeg' that I'd seen at the Sydney Film Festival.

It was about the film maker Guy Maddin's love hate relationship with his home town, which is the world's coldest 'big city' (defined as 500,000+). I remember the film's account of a racetrack fire. I think it was 1927. As depicted in the still here, the horses panicked and ran into the Red River, which was beginning to freeze for the winter. They got stuck and the set of frozen horse heads remained all winter, becoming a gathering point for the community and, according to Maddin, the subject of ghostly reappearance every winter since.

When you visit a place that has come to your attention through its representation in art or literature, you don't go expecting to see exactly what you viewed or read. I didn't see the frozen horse ghosts, but I did get to see a city living day to day in what I regard as adverse weather conditions but are the norm for them. I went there to Winnipeg to experience the cold as a novelty, as travellers go to sample what is 'other'. I recall that the temperature ranged from about minus 12 to minus 20 (a few days earlier it had got down to something like minus 30).

I remember enjoying the company of a fellow traveller, Kathy from Toronto. I'd met her on the luxury train that I'd boarded in Toronto on the evening of Christmas Day. We trudged through the snow in the streets slightly away from the CBD, appreciating the street art and the fine old public buildings including a huge historic railway station repurposed as a First Nations cultural centre. I then recall being bound for Vancouver and seeing in the spectacular glass walled departure lounge of the airport a local dressed in shorts and tshirt obviously heading for a climate with weather closer to the norm for me in Australia.

Because of the sexism of school education in the 70s, I never learned to sew to mend clothes. Since then I haven't had the confidence to teach myself, nor have I had anybody to show me properly.

Whenever my socks develop holes, I think that I would love to be able to darn them. I like the idea of darning socks as a way of resisting the wastefulness of a throwaway society. Sometimes I've attempted to darn socks or do rough repairs to other clothes. But I've mostly thrown away damaged or worn items of clothing.

I was thinking about that yesterday as I went to the Sydney CBD Icebreaker shop with my socks with a hole. I was claiming the lifetime warranty they offer on socks. I figure it's worth paying $30 for a pair of socks if they have a lifetime warranty (or, if you're lucky, $12 at the outlet during sale time).

Unfortunately they don't darn the socks for you, but instead replace your old socks with new socks. So they are probably thrown away. But earlier in the year I was pleased when they did repair my favourite Icebreaker jacket when the inside of the pocket developed a hole from constantly carrying my iPad mini. I would have mourned its loss if they'd given me a new one.

The Icebreaker range of clothing is expensive because every item is made with merino wool. For me, what makes it worth paying extra for is merino's odour resistant properties. That means the clothing needs washing infrequently - for example once a week, or even less often, for socks. If most of your clothing is merino, this can significantly reduce your clothes washing chores and power and water consumption.

It may also explain why it lasts longer and they can offer a lifetime warranty on socks. But nothing lasts forever, and I think that my sock got a hole because I'd been largely alternating two pairs of socks for about two years.

I was skeptical when a friend told me about the odour resistance. But I found it to be true. The clothing rarely needed to be washed (some bodies sweat more than others so I would guess that this is not true for everybody). For me, airing the clothing is enough to ensure the items remain fresh enough for one or even several or many weeks.

I figure that 'fresh enough' rather than 'fresh, period' is OK when you're travelling and need to make compromises because you need or want to travel light. Wearing mostly Icebreaker enabled be to travel to England for a month May with a total of 4 kilos of luggage, and to Japan for two weeks in October with 3.2. It also means you don't need to pay up to $80 extra for checked luggage when you're on a budget airline.

Icebreaker is not the only company that does merino. The others may be just as good or even better, and cheaper. But I have not bothered to check the alternatives, largely because the merino clothes are long lasting and I no longer have to buy new clothes with such regularity.

Yesterday I wrote about breath awareness. Its purpose was to overcome the 'disturbing turmoil' of mind chatter during meditation. Later in the day I was reminded of my early attempts at meditation as an 18 year old Jesuit novice at Canisius College, Pymble, in Sydney, in the late 70s.

'Disturbing turmoil' is also apt to describe my experience when I told the novice master - my spiritual director - that my attempts to meditate were not working. I said that I just couldn't quieten my mind and that I would sit there and fidget. He yelled at me and threatened to expel me from the Jesuit training I'd begun a few months earlier.

In those days it was common to use fear as a technique in teaching and training in schools and various institutions, including those in which religious 'formation' took place. This novice master had been rector of the diocesan seminary at Werribee outside Melbourne for many years, where he was responsible for the training of several generations of priests for the dioceses of Victoria and Tasmania during the Catholic Church's vocations boom of the 50s and 60s.

He had a reputation for being quite a tyrant but was supposed to have undergone a transformation after moving on from his role at the seminary in the late 60s. It was the time of the 'flower power' generation and he grew his hair long and embraced a peace loving ethos as a fiftysomething university chaplain. He also took on with gusto the spirit of Vatican II renewal and it seemed to make sense to put him in charge of training Jesuits in their first two years of formation.

But a leopard does not change its spots, and he turned out to be quite a fearsome novice master, even though the content of his teaching was solid and nuanced and he was interested in, and taught, the latest thinking in psychology, and meditation techniques from eastern religions. There was a certain incongruity in having such an authoritarian figure teaching Zen Buddhist and other eastern meditation techniques, which had been made popular at the time by the Jesuits William Johnston and Tony D'Mello.

My response to his yelling at me for not being able to meditate was to retreat from my honesty. I used my imagination to construct elaborate but believable scenarios in which I falsely claimed to have had breakthroughs in my attempts at meditation. At times he seemed most impressed with the progress he believed I was making. In hindsight, I think it was a tribute to my creativity, and I look back on it with an odd mixture of pride and shame.

I was actually very interested in spirituality at an intellectual level and would do a lot of reading and pay close attention to what he would teach my group of novices. That is why it was easy for me to construct the scenarios and to tell him what he wanted to hear. I'd learned that it was not acceptable for me to tell him what he did not want to hear, and it seemed that the truth or otherwise of what I was saying was secondary.

I survived my two years of formation in the novitiate and was approved to 'take vows' and go on to the next stage. But needless to say, the actual daily meditation that is essential to the way of life I was embarking upon did not become a part of my life. Sadly I suspect that my experience was quite common and that it accounts for many Catholic priests and religious either abandoning their vocation or remaining but not living their vocation.

The words 'peace on earth' encapsulate the message of the Christmas season. But peace on earth is looking more remote this Christmas than at any Christmas I can remember.

In thinking about what to do about world peace, I think first about politics. I inform myself. I'm convinced that Australia must decide whether to get closer to America as the power that protected us during World War II, or pursue an independent foreign policy more open to a continuing relationship with our biggest trading partner China.

It is interesting, and it matters. If we choose the US, we will probably be a target in the event of a nuclear war because of how crucial the Pine Gap facility is to American defences (that is a reality about which our media are largely keeping us in the dark). If we choose China, we will ultimately have to dance to its tune because it is so much bigger than we are and becoming more inclined to throw its weight around.

I know that there is an important link between our concern for the health and wellbeing of the world and our own health and wellbeing. I have a hunch that many people who have given up caring about world peace have also given up caring for their own physical, mental and spiritual condition.

My thoughts about politics are actually a preamble to what is really my interest at this moment, which is the importance of stillness as the lynchpin of our wellbeing and a major factor in our ability to think clearly. By stillness, I mean a stillness of the mind (not the stillness of the couch potato watching the Boxing Day Test on TV).

Yesterday a friend sent me an extract from a Christmas meditation by the spiritual writer Richard Rohr. My friend is not conventionally religious but values the message of Rohr, who urges us to wait for a quietness within ourselves so that we can see the image of our God 'reflected in [our] own clear waters'. But only if 'the disturbing turmoil of thoughts dies down'.

The chatter of the mind is what disturbs my clear waters. It can make me angry and misdirect my passions and decision making. I am working at becoming still.

I'm finding that focusing the mind on my breathing rather than thoughts is a good start. My Fitbit fitness tracker watch has guided breathing sessions that monitor my biorhythms and give feedback. They can be helpful in training my mind to focus on the pattern of my breathing.

The stillness that this breathing awareness promotes allows a peace in our hearts that can gather pace as we mature. Another friend recalled yesterday that he was previously 'fuelled with rage and despair' but has now 'matured to a point where [he] can appreciate the humanity that connects us all'. I would guess that he now has more moments of stillness in his life.