An early Christian hymn speaks of Adam's 'happy sin'. Happy, because Jesus came to set it right. A happy sin is a striking idea, but it does resonate with experience. Actions that we later regret are often turning points in our lives. They make us ask what matters in life, and remind us of the gap that exists between our ideals and the messy reality of our lives.
I recalled this recently when I recognised that I had got the facts wrong in a Eureka Street article. I had to apologise because my erroneous assertion caused avoidable hurt. But it did have some good results. It led to a good conversation that I would not otherwise have had. I was also reminded that merely to write for a magazine with high ideals does not guarantee that you live by them.
Eureka Street does have high ideals. It tries to encourage humane conversation. That implies respect for the people who participate in the conversation and for those who are the subject of conversation. But it also implies a particular approach to the issues discussed in the magazine.
Eureka Street tries to focus on the human rather than the technical dimensions of public relationships, situations and issues. Its turns its attention to the impact on human beings of policies and events, and not to the personalities of those responsible for policy, nor to the abstractions that conceal its human reality.
That is the ideal. It is difficult to realise in practice. The particular challenges facing writers arise from the fact that effective writing depends on good technique.
It is impossible to represent the full human reality of any issue or to describe the impact on all the human beings affected by it directly or indirectly. So if writers are to help people to understand an issue and come to a reasonable judgment about it, they need to simplify it. They need to group and name the innumerable aspects of the issue, and schematise the reasons for taking different approaches to it.
And if they are to catch the imagination of the readers, they need telling images and stories that encapsulate the issue.
The challenge that arises from the need to focus on the technique of writing is that it may draw the writer's attention away from the human reality of the situation that is described. If a story forms a