Most people aren't awful but our goodwill is under threat: Hugh Mackay

He's just published his 24th book - most likely his last work of non-fiction - and is unsurprised that everywhere he goes to talk about it, he appears to be preaching to the converted.

"I assume there are people who throw the book across the room in disgust, but I haven't met any," he says.

"The people who come to events are either familiar with my work and they broadly agree with my perspective, I suppose, or they're just genuinely interested in discussing these sort of issues, so they're open, and not aggressive or combative in their approach."

The psychologist, social researcher and novelist is speaking to me from his car en route to another stop on his book tour, a process you'd imagine would be tiring. But even despite a nasty bout of COVID the week before, his voice is the same measured, thoughtful one we've grown so accustomed to hearing over the years.

Those words, so calming and reasonable, his pronouncements so clear and unassailable. We need neighbours, and community. We need to communicate, and to make eye contact. We live in a lucky, lucky country, and should stop complaining. But all in a very non-judgemental tone.

And yet, The Way We Are - such a bold title, thought up by someone with every right to make such a determination - is probably the most definitive and stern book he's ever written.

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It draws on thousands of interviews over a lifetime of research and listening; Mackay is as qualified as anyone to be able to create a compelling portrait of Australia - and its people - today.

There's plenty to celebrate - our march towards gender equality, the kindness of strangers - and ponder over: our obsession with opinions and "fake wisdom", the complex legacy of the Baby Boomers, society's withdrawal from religious faith.

And, plenty to be, if not angry, then very annoyed about.

"I notice our friends and readers in general have been remarkably quiet on the subject of tax cuts and private schools," he says. These are two subjects that, he says, do get his blood boiling, although only in his trademark measured way.

While he has indeed reached the age of equanimity - five grown children, a long and successful career behind him, the ability to write and engage and continue doing what he loves - he wrote this book from a place of sadness about Australia's refusal to learn from the recent past.

"Australia was handed, by nature, an opportunity to relearn some fundamental lessons about what it means to be human from the experience of COVID," he says.

"We learned to look out for people who were at risk of social isolation. We made little sacrifices for the common good. We were more kind and helpful and regenerated local neighbourhoods.

"But you know, it's almost evaporated again, even though COVID hasn't even really left us. But people have been saying, 'Let's get back to normal', by which I fear they meant, let's get back to being more self-interested, more self-centred, more obsessed with our own identity and less concerned with our common humanity.

"And I found that very disappointing and sad, and part of the motivation for writing the book is to say, for goodness sake, let's not let all that go.

"Let's remember that we above all - and I mean above all - we are human, and that's more important than whether we're male, female, binary, transgender, indigenous, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, all of those things are vital to our sense of self, but they all recede to a point of almost insignificance compared with the fact that we're human."

Actually, it's this last fact that keeps him going.

"What keeps me afloat, in terms of emotional buoyancy and just general optimism, is the knowledge that we are human, that we do have a human nature that's embedded in our DNA," he says.

He hopes to live long enough to see the pendulum swing back, and make us good again, the way it did with television - the thing we thought would destroy society, that we couldn't stop talking about, that is now as commonplace as a fridge.

"The background to all this, which we need to remind ourselves about, is that most people are not awful," he says.

"I mean, most people are doing their best, and most people mean to be kind, will offer a hand.

"We're in a funny period where all of that natural goodwill that comes from what Abraham Lincoln described as 'the better angels of our nature', has been put under threat because of these massive changes in the way we've been living."

Words of wisdom indeed, and from a lifetime of listening.

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