DELIVER US FROM COMPASSION-SPEAK

Unctuousness is principally a clerical disease - though it's highly
contagious and many others in close contact with infected clergy often
succumb. It is unfortunate that the interventions of the churches in public
policy are rarely free of high moral ground-standing. This tendency is
apparent, not so much in the areas of competence of theology, such as sin,
redemption, heaven and hell, but more often in the areas of competence of
parliaments, economists and law-enforcement agencies.

There is no harm in churches speaking dogmatically about dogma - in fact,
there's not nearly enough of it. Where the harm lies is in the galloping
omni-competence of church leaders vigorously to pronounce on anything at all
under the heading "Compassion".

Compassion rhetoric is a political trap for the churches because it involves
trading in an increasingly devalued moral currency. Having for the most part
relinquished claims to any distinctive religious insight or expertise, the
public stance of the churches is now frequently based on the grounds of
Compassion - grand moral one-upmanship of which Barchester Towers' Reverend
Mr Slope would be proud.

It is the Compassion Trap that has ensnared those church groups that
advocate or even administer injecting rooms for drug users. The circumstance
of caring for drug users provides a personal exemption from the moral
principle of not cooperating in the evil actions of another and sometimes,
or so it seems, even from the civil law. This is Compassion.

Compassion forms one of those irregular conjugations so favored by Sir
Humphrey Appleby - "I am compassionate, you are kind (though not as
well-informed as I am), he/she is an ignorant, mean-spirited reactionary."

Compassion-speak is now the rhetoric of choice of the ecclesiastical left.
To insist on the disciplined application of Christian moral principles in
the face of a well-staked-out Compassion claim is to risk categorisation as
a heartless moralist who places more importance on abstract and irrelevant
rules than on the manifest needs of real people.

The claim by clergy to have some special insight into the nature of
compassion and its practical applications is not convincing - least of all
to those of us who have seen ecclesiastical politics close up. The noses are
as hard and the knives as sharp as any ALP factional brawl that I have ever
seen. The only difference is the oiliness of the smiles.

More importantly, Compassion-speak insinuates the notion, subversive of any
political discourse, that some ideas and actions are so self-evidently
unimpeachable as to be beyond critical scrutiny. We all care about drug
users, so the argument goes, so let's be compassionate and set up supervised
injecting rooms. Only those entirely lacking in finer feeling can possibly
disagree.

No doubt there are good arguments for injecting rooms, but the Compassion
calculus becomes more complex when we factor in unexpected variables such as
facts and moral reasoning.

The experience of drug injecting rooms in other countries is at best
ambiguous. There is no reason to think they will alleviate any of the
problems associated with drug use. Most people who take fatal overdoses of
heroin do so at home. Injecting rooms will not change this pattern.
Hepatitis C has infected more and more drug users despite clean-needle
exchanges. The increased difficulty of policing drug laws around injecting
rooms will allow a legal vacuum to develop that will favor the pushers and
make the job of our police even harder and more dangerous.

The question is intricate, not least because of the nature of addiction
itself. What is the best way to show compassion to people who are fixated on
their next hit and for whom their own welfare and the welfare of those
around them is of little consequence?

There is much that is troubling in the trajectory of arguments in favor of
injecting rooms. The supervised injecting room must be seen as the first
step in a program of complete revision of our drug laws. If it is tolerable
to use heroin under some circumstances, then why should there not be a free
market in drugs, solely determined by the laws of supply and demand? Why is
there leeway in some places but not others?

Even more disquieting is the abandonment of the notion of the common good in
this discussion. The balancing of rights and responsibilities between
individuals and the community is always a delicate matter, more so when it
involves powerful and destructive addictions. Political discourse is
infantilised when the ability of individuals to make a bad personal choice
is the only perceived good.

I await with interest the reaction of the Compassion peddlers when the
libertarian logic of their arguments is applied to our economic system.