‘Be not too moral,’ said Henry David Thoreau. ‘You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.’

People who really live for change, the people who really care about their fellow man, are the people we never hear from, the ones who have no need to posture about ideologies, who have no need to lecture others about ‘tolerance’.

Political correctness is the ideology which props up a dangerously false niceness. It is the marketing strategy of the power hungry, the propaganda of the bully, who wishes to whitewash his reputation. Thus we have pictures of Harvey Weinstein wearing a ‘pussy hat’ and joining female celebrities on the Women’s March last year.

The point is not the hypocrisy. Anyone with ideals is manifestly hypocritical. The point is the way virtue is used as part of a power strategy, a way of securing status and abusive control over others through the manipulation of reputation.

Reducing good morals to a set of tick boxes or making complex ethical dilemmas into matters of sloganeering, robs human life of an essential part of its evolving value. Human agency requires a confrontation with competing goods. To do good, we must live with conscience, come to understand our own sinful natures and meet face to face with the capacity for evil in each of our own souls.

Political correctness is the creed of the godless. It turns moral action into a simplistic algorithm, an automated exchange of inputs and outputs. It requires no wrestling with demons, no dark night of the soul, no solitude of contemplation. And most of all, it comes at no real cost to the moral agent who lives by such a creed.

Jesus Christ said ‘I come not abolish the law, but to fulfil it’. The shift from rule-based religious dogma into the emancipatory truths of the Christian gospel, is a shift from prescriptiveness towards the moral growth of the individual self. In other words, Christ came to teach that it is not the washing of hands or the observance of ritual propriety that makes us a good person, or which secures our place in heaven. Rather it is quality of our souls.

Good behaviour does not emerge from simple algorithms of ‘niceness’. Good behaviour emerges from a cleansing of the spirit. Good actions are the fruit of a good soul, they are not ways of buying our way into heaven.

This too was the message of Krishna to Arjuna, as he stood poised on the fatal edge of battle. How can I do good, Lord, if I am to kill my brethren? Krishna’s answer was that it is the quality of one’s soul, the cleanness of one’s consciousness that marks a truly holy man, not the simplistic dogmas of right and wrong found in worldly life.
Some may defensively say that this is a license to rudeness and power-grabbing in itself.

Like the fascist misuse of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Not so. It is merely a reminder that we do not become good, we do not find salvation, in simplistic moral prescriptions. The proof of this is to be found in the way abusive people use politically correct language to cover up the truth of their souls. Or the way vicious killers use the rhetoric of human rights to add a veneer of respectability to their murderous exploits.

ISIS understood the power of political correctness. Not only did they use hipster-quality video propaganda and publish their own glossy and attractive magazines, they also exploited the cognitive dissonance that would affect the bourgeois minds of western observers, by seeming to add PC behaviours to their barbarous tactics.

At one point, as they were executing gay men by throwing them off the rooftops of buildings – as cheering mobs slavered at the brutality below – jihadis would hug the men before hand, offering the supposed milk of human kindness as a precursor to brutal execution. This nasty fake compassion is a direct product of politically correct morality, and shows how sadistically it can be exploited.

If we were able to rise above PC prescriptiveness, we would feel no cognitive dissonance. We would not be susceptible to the confusion tactics of ISIS propaganda. It is the fact that we have reduced morality to a set of simplistic soundbites, that makes both genuine moral discourse impossible, and evil people able to market their dangerous ambitions as essential to human emancipation.

What’s so wrong about peace, love and understanding? Nothing, as long as it is not just skin deep. Very often the most moral among us, are not the best at marketing their own virtue. Anyone can talk about charity and goodwill, the real test of our humanity comes when it is not convenient for us to do so, and when talking about morality becomes irrelevant to a genuine moral outcome.